Alternate Reality Games in Popular Music
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) “provide unique elements …through so-called real world media such as email, fax, SMS, and websites” (Dena 42) in storytelling. Today, there are numerous ARGs online but the most popular ones are usually promotional campaigns for other media. ARGs specific to music campaigns illuminate how artists can emphasize the thematic content of their work by engaging with fans on various platforms. Year Zero and Poppy’s YouTube channel, for instance, are examples of ARGs that are tied to musical acts: Nine Inch Nails and Poppy (Moriah Pereira). These artists use ARGs to demonstrate that creative vision can overcome some of the challenges that occur with the commercial nature of the music industry.
Nine Inch Nail’s frontman, Trent Reznor, wanted Year Zero to be a concept album, but this was a challenge since music had gone digital. Reznor contracted 42 Entertainment to design a promotional campaign for his album that created “an experience to parallel the world created through sound and lyrics in the CD” (Kim). The Year Zero ARG created a dystopian narrative of a future in which a fundamentalist American government causes the end of the world. A resistance group, the Solutions Backwards Initiative, sends information into the past to Nine Inch Nails fans (participants) in an attempt to prevent their doom in the future. A motif in the campaign’s story is “The Presence”, a supernatural force, personified by ghostly hands that reach down to the earth from the sky. Fans figured out unique website addresses, images, and codes from content that the band released. Most notably, fans who attended Nine Inch Nails events, like a staged protest and concerts, were given information that significantly advanced the game. The campaign began with USB drives placed at Nine Inch Nail concerts around the world; they contained “leaked” Nine Inch Nails songs that contained clips of static sound at the end. Fans converted the sound to spectrograms that rendered images of The Presence that characters in the ARG discuss.
Much after the Year Zero album release, fans continued to interact with the ARG by making artwork from its narrative and remixing a song, “My Violent Heart”, from the album (the multitrack for it was distributed by USB too). But, most of the webpages that were essential to piecing the narrative are no longer accessible, only images of them remain on The Way Back Machine web archive. The temporality of ARGs, like Year Zero, makes them more consistent with the time sensitive theme of Year Zero, humanity’s urgent need for social change and resistance to corrupted government values. Further, the “ephemeral nature of ARG means players cannot repeat that experience…the key to an ARG’s artistic energy is therefore the audience participation” (Janes 190). There was not a strict time limit on Year Zero’s ARG, but fans were still inclined to quickly decode the dispersed puzzles and share the information with each other online to spread the narrative. This immersed all kinds of ARG player participants: puzzle players who skillfully find “text hidden in webpages or servers…text, image, and sound files”, story players interested in “poetic discourse, plot, and characters”, and real world players who accept challenges requiring them to visit real locations (Dena 46). Year Zero is notable because the dynamics of its gameplay resonate with its thematic objective, collaboration.
Poppy began as Titanic Sinclair’s (Corey Mixter) artistic project to satirize the social impacts of technology and the pop idol. He started a YouTube channel, regularly uploading videos in which Poppy (Moriah Pereira) mysteriously says strange phrases related to the internet and fame. This is just among some of the strange behaviors she exhibits in the videos. Plenty of discussion took place on forums as viewers tried to figure out the meaning behind the bizarre content. They eventually figured out that Poppy was an AI pop star created by Titanic Sinclair, her handler in the story and the designer of the ARG.
A major shift occurred in the Poppy ARG when Poppy was actually signed to Island Records. Poppy’s fanbase had facilitated her stardom; the project’s following was 2.1 million Youtube subscribers as of August 2018. Most importantly, Poppy no longer just acted like a lifeless artist online, she became one. This allowed for more content that commented on pop idolatry and the challenges that come with it, even for an AI pop artist. Poppy has since changed music labels multiple times, but her YouTube channel is still regularly updated with videos that derive from Sinclair’s original artistic vision. Despite Poppy’s real music career, the ARG continues because of Sinclair’s commitment to reflect on the music business. This is likely because Poppy has to behave as a pop artist in real life.
Poppy cannot fully satirize consumption while making music, but Sinclair’s ARG preserves the heart of the Poppy project that she cannot on her own as a represented artist. In February 2018, the “Church” feature was added to Poppy.Church; fans can make an account and play a cult-like game where they are awarded points based on their loyalty to Poppy. The transmedia storytelling that Poppy adheres to asserts that “affective investment in an ARG is not simply a conduit to a purchasing decision. It provides a sense of empowerment entirely separate from these issues.” (Janes 193). Were it not for the ARG, fans might feel Poppy’s music brand to be dishonest. But, by engaging with the ARG and consuming Poppy’s music brand, fans feel like they are in on Sinclair’s parody of the pop industry.
Reznor’s Year Zero and Sinclair’s Poppy ARG channel skillfully engage the fanbases of these artists outside of the limited scope of digital music. Despite these limitations, Reznor’s Year Zero ARG allowed him to immerse his audience in the full aesthetic experience he envisioned for his album. This required a convergence of the digital worlds (sound files, websites) and the physical (live events). Year Zero ultimately pushed the sensibilities of resistance and inquiry its characters possess onto real fans as they tried to figure out the narrative. Titanic Sinclair’s Poppy channel also blurs the lines between the real — the music industry — and the digital — Poppy’s fictional online persona, critical of the music industry. The ARG built a fanbase around Poppy’s performance of artificial stardom. When Poppy became a signed musician, Titanic Sinclair continued producing Poppy’s videos as a means of keeping Poppy a satire of pop and media, even when Poppy herself became a commercialized pop media icon in real life. Because of ARGs, creators in music are able to maintain strong fan engagement with the intended themes of their work. This is something the business of their industry might not be able to accomplish as it often limits the narrative of their work to one digital platform.
Works Cited
Kim, Jeffrey, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, & Caroline Dombrowski. “Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001–2009.” First Monday [Online], 14.6 (2009): Web.
Christy Dena, “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games,” Convergence 14.1 (February 2008): 41–58
Janes, Stephanie. “Promotional Alternate Reality Games — More than “just” Marketing.” Arts Marketing 5.2 (2015): 183–96. ProQuest. Web. 22 Dec. 2018
