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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: Ephemeral » ARG: Year Zero
[PRESS/META] What's in the News?
Moderators: BrianEnigma, chippy, konamouse, ndemeter
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labfly
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Joined: 30 Apr 2005
Posts: 717
Location: nyc or the haunted house in maine

 		news about our theorist, spacebass! .. and year zero
la times article
Quote:
Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.
Very Happy

more of the article can be found here

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-nails17apr17,1,2079028.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-entnews
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:16 pm
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ariock
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Joined: 11 Aug 2004
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Location: SF East Bay

 		After the three NY articles, I began to despair. At least the LA Times gets it.

YEA!

(and I'm not going to even link the SF Gate (chronicle) review. *shudder* Seriously, comparing this to World of Warcraft??? asses)
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 7:05 pm
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Cooldrew
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Joined: 30 Sep 2006
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 		Re: news about our theorist, spacebass! .. and year zero
la times article
labfly wrote:
Quote:
Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.
Very Happy

more of the article can be found here

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-nails17apr17,1,2079028.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-entnews


Nice job, SpaceBass Very Happy
LA Times wrote:

Writing on the ARGoriented site unfiction.com, a theorist whose pseudonym is "Spacebass" coined the term "chaotic fiction" to describe the particular art of alternative reality gaming; such a phrase also fits music that strives to create a universe while staying open-ended enough for fans to find themselves within it.

At the very least, Trent Reznor is still creating chaotic rock 'n' roll. And that's more than marketing; it's pioneering art.


PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2007 10:37 pm
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EarlyWyrm
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
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 		Nine Inch Nails Tells RIAA To F*ck Off?
Pretty sure this doesn't count as press, but yet another front page digg article:

http://digg.com/tech_news/Nine_Inch_Nails_Tells_RIAA_To_F_ck_Off
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:26 pm
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konamouseModerator
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Joined: 02 Dec 2002
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Location: My own alternate reality

 		Rolling Stone Review of Year Zero.
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 11:49 pm
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ariock
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konamouse wrote:
Rolling Stone Review of Year Zero.


Wow. They completely ignored the ARG.
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 12:16 pm
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catherwood-offline
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Rolling Stone press
ariock wrote:
Wow. They completely ignored the ARG.
In reviewing the CD, perhaps they did. But Rolling Stone has a separate 2-page article about the ARG -- it's in last month's issue, and I still haven't gotten around to posting the article here. I'm not sure i'll scan it, but maybe I can transcribe the best paragraphs.

PostPosted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 2:03 pm
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konamouseModerator
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Rolling Stone press
catherwood-offline wrote:
But Rolling Stone has a separate 2-page article about the ARG -- it's in last month's issue, and I still haven't gotten around to posting the article here. I'm not sure i'll scan it, but maybe I can transcribe the best paragraphs.


I tried to find that article online (cause I missed getting the paper issue by a week). But was unsuccessful. If anyone has it to scan/transcribe, I think it would be good to have in the archives. Thanks!
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 8:01 pm
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catherwood
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 		Rolling Stone article from April 19, 2007
Quote:
Zero's Heroes
42 Entertainment and the mystery surrounding Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero -- by David Kushner

At first it seems like any other YouTube video. Someone's pointing the camera out a car window as a desert landscape rolls by. But then thunder crashes, and what appears to be a giant hand made of black smoke reaches down from the sky.

The only clue to the clip's provenance is a road sign that flashes past so quickly you have to hit PAUSE to make it out: I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE. There's no music, no credits. Nothing to indicate that it is, in fact, a teaser for Nine Inch Nails' new album, Year Zero. The clip. And dozens of other online clues, form the latest salvo in a burgeoning new style of promo called alternate-reality gaming (ARG). Part scavenger hunt, part online game, these elaborate puzzles are created by a clandestine startup called 42 Entertainment. The goal: to blend fiction and reality in ways that engage a new generation of fans.

Just don't call it marketing. "The term 'marketing' sure is a frustrating one for me," NIN mastermind Trent Reznor recently blogged. (He and reps from 42 Entertainment declined to be interviewed.) "What you are now experiencing is 'year zero,'" Reznor wrote. "It's not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record—it is the art form… and we're just getting started."

Based in Pasadena, California, and the Bay Area, 42 Entertainment sports an all-star team of marketing and gaming vets whose experience runs from Proctor & Gamble product launches to designing rides for Disneyland. ARG, they believe, is the next frontier—and their mind-bending online campaigns for the likes of DreamWorks, Microsoft and Disney are often more compelling than the products being pushed (see below).

"The eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old demo has grown up in a marketing-saturated environment and has developed a sophisticated set of tools for avoiding the vast majority of marketing messages," Jordan Weisman, 42's co-founder, has said. "As a rule of thumb, the bigger the neon sign, the faster they'll run the other way. So the premise here is, instead of shouting, go the opposite way and whisper."

Year Zero's strange life started in February, when a fan noticed that his NIN concert shirt had the words I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE encoded on the back. A quick Googling revealed a Web site of the same name. The site warns of Parepin, a drug put into the water supply by the feds that may be causing you to see stuff like a giant hand descending from the sky (photos included). E-mail the Webmaster and you get an auto-response in which he inexplicably changes tune: "It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent. I'm drinking the water. So should you."

Cryptic new Web sites keep popping up online, elaborating on the conspiracy. There are phone numbers to dial, wiretap transcripts to decipher. At NIN concerts in Portugal and England, fans found computer memory sticks in bathroom stalls containing Year Zero songs. The clues are coming at such a rate that there's a Wikipedia entry and forums of NIN nerds teaming up to keep track.

"It engages fans to the point where they can actually feel like they are an important part of the marketing of the album," says Mike Swindley, the twenty-four-year-old administrator of the NIN fan site Echoing the Sound. "It makes me feel like I'm fifteen again."

For Reznor, a lifelong gamer, that's the idea. As a kid, he drew early inspiration from video games, once going so far as to pry off the back of an Asteroids machine just to peer inside. Since then, he composed the soundtrack for the game Quake and stopped recording The Fragile to play Halo upon its release. "It put me back a few days," he said at the time. "But what's a few days when there's something important to do?"

Some pioneers warn that ARG can get too geeky for its own good. "The most difficult thing is striking the balance between accessibility and making it too complicated," says Mike Benson, executive vice president of marketing for ABC, which ran the Lost Experience online game to promote its hit show last year.

"ARG law has always been to not let anybody know you're doing ARG," says Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of NBC's Heroes, which is currently developing a game. "I think that keeps a lot of people from playing. So we are actively trying to lower the barrier of entry [by] being open about what we're doing—to get more than the usual D&D-type guy involved."

With the Year Zero buzz growing, Reznor has proved that harnessing the power of music geeks may be victory enough.

(I found it transcribed online in another forum, w00t! I do intend to proofread it next)

This bit was in a sidebar box:
Quote:
42 ENTERTAINMENT'S GREATEST HITS

2001 The Beast
A murder-mystery promo for Steven Spielberg's A.I. that fans unraveled via Web sites, e-mails and faxes, the Beast put 42—and ARG—on the map.

2004 I Love Bees
The ARG for Halo 2 grew into a radio drama that played out over pay phones across the country; participants would record the calls, then stitch them together to hear a teaser for the game.

2006 Dead Man's Tale
The ARG for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 used Windows Live Messenger to throw players into a dialogue with the film's Billy Bones. As you IM'd, puzzles and games were unleashed.

2007 Vanishing Point
An ad on the Internet Explorer blog led nerds on a cross-country hunt and helped promote Microsoft's Vista OS. The clues appeared everywhere—from skywritten ads to the Bellagio fountains in Vegas.


(and if a mod could reduce the extra-wide URL earlier on this page, the article could be reduced in width too)

PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 1:37 am
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konamouseModerator
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 		Silly me, I thought Dead Man's Tale was to promote Window's Live Messenger (not using Window's Live Messenger to promote a movie that needs no promotion).
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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 2:20 am
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Jody Macgregor
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Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 3

 		Rave Magazine Article from May 01
Rolling Stone may not have got an interview, but I did:

Quote:
The frontman and creative force of NINE INCH NAILS talks to JODY MACGREGOR about new album Year Zero and the mysterious experience it's a part of.

Fans of Nine Inch Nails noticed something odd on this year's European tour shirt. Some of the letters stood out, and when put together they spelled 'iamtryingtobelieve'. From that, an enterprising fan found iamtryingtobelieve.com, a website describing a dystopian future in which the US government has abandoned the separation of church and state and started putting drugs in the water supply, where giant hands are seen reaching down from the sky and snipers target sporting events. Clues on that site lead to others, as did USB sticks hidden at NIN concerts, the album's liner notes and the disc itself, which shows hidden messages when heated slightly by being played. Down the rabbit hole the fans went.

This campaign surrounding Year Zero is called an 'Alternate Reality Game', like The Lost Experience that tied in to Lost's second season or the game that promoted the movie A.I. It's halfway between viral marketing scheme and consensual hallucination, a combination of puzzles, scavenger hunts and interactive fiction.

Reznor was inspired to create this Year Zero experience when he realised the album marked a change in his music, replacing his diary entries from the heart of darkness with a story about where the world is headed. He describes it as, "less about me and more about the world; that being the direct result of either, in sobriety, paying a bit more attention to what's going on outside my head or the fact that the world seems to have gotten a bit more insane recently."

Shifting his focus from the personal to the political wasn't easy, and trying to avoid the obvious pitfalls of editorialising in music has shaped the way he approached Year Zero. "I tried to come up with a way to comment on that that wasn't immediately polarising or cringe-inducing," he says.

"I'm not telling you 'Don't vote for George Bush'. I'm not telling you to do anything, but morally I feel that if a handful of people come through the experience and maybe pay a little more attention to things that are already happening in the world right now, I think that's mission accomplished. All set to a backdrop of music you can dance to."

Another pitfall he's eager to avoid is that of over-advertising. There's the potential for Alternate Reality Games to become just a shiny high-tech version of a pamphlet drop that requires the audience do half of an ad firm's work for them.

"I know that at the end of the day it will function as some form of marketing, it will make people aware of this thing. I didn't know what level it would happen at, but the minute you get a company like a record company involved I was afraid that the very first thing I'd hear is 'We need to work a way of selling ringtones to people into this thing!' Something whorish and shitty that wasn't in any way appropriate to the experience I wanted."

To that end, he didn't even approach his label to warn them that he'd be leaking mp3s off the album as part of the game, leaving them on USB sticks hidden at select concert venues. Anticipating that they might have second thoughts about that, he let the label find out after the fans did.

"There's many, many, many missed business opportunities here and the reason they're missed is because I don't want it to taint the most important thing, the experience. I want the fan to go, 'What is this thing? Holy shit!'"

One of those missed business opportunities came when the entire album was streamed on the nin.com site so that fans could hear the whole thing for free before it came out. They were treated to an album of riotous noise and distortion, from the angry fuckshitup rock of Survivalism and Capital G to the incongruously swaggering battlefield poem The Good Soldier and the foreboding fascist march of Hyperpower! (with Josh Freese's drumming providing the goosesteps).

It only added to the buzz, and helped to solidify the fact that the album can be enjoyed even by those who aren't caught up in the game. "I think that the record stands on its own, is a strong album, but if you know the backstory it becomes a richer experience, like the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist."

On the subject of a movie, Reznor says he's planning to talk with people about actually making Year Zero: The Movie after the tour, but when he was planning the album and the experience to go with it, "the idea of filming a movie seemed impossible to do in a short amount of time, and a hassle, and just writing the story and putting it out felt mechanical, it didn't feel as immersive as I wanted this to be. So I ended up doing what I did, which was making a War Of The Worlds thing. I wanted it to feel real."

War Of The Worlds is a good point of reference. With the game he has made a work of fiction that pretends to be real, like Orson Welles' panic-inspiring radio broadcast version from 1938, and with the record he has essentially made a sci-fi concept album, like the Jeff Wayne version of War Of The Worlds from 1978. The words 'sci-fi' and 'concept album' sound ominous sitting next to each other, bringing to mind prog rock, zithers and portentous narration. Reznor is aware it had the potential to alienate even his permanently alienated fans.

"I was a bit scared at the beginning because it felt like a leap for Nine Inch Nails, it felt like something I want to make sure I do the right way. It was ripe with potential to be a giant misstep. Which at the point I'm at now made it more exciting, made it something it felt more necessary to do. I think I need to risk failure, not play it safe."

Nine Inch Nails play the Brisbane Riverstage on Monday May 7, supported by Serena-Maneesh. Year Zero is out now through Universal.

Trent Reznor likes to talk, delivering passionate statements about whatever crossed his mind. We wouldn't want you to miss these words of wisdom, so to that end we present a few choice quotes that didn't make it into the interview:

Trent Reznor On…

Ringtones: Ringtones! Fuck ringtones. That whole idea is absurd to me. It cheapens music.

His Idols: Bands like the Cure and Depeche Mode, those were the bands that I aspired to be like, that have 20 albums, that are around for 20 years or more, that grow over time.

Chart-toppers Jay-Z, Britney Spears and Fall Out Boy: That shit sells today, and when it doesn't sell tomorrow there's another bunch of overstyled impostors willing to take their place.

The Recording Industry's Woes: I think a lot of their past crimes are coming up to haunt them, including the doubling of the price of music when CDs came out under the lie that it cost more to make them – it's cost less to make them.

Making Commercial Music: I think there's a balance where you can make money and you can make a good product – I hate to use that word – but you can still do it with class, you can still do it intelligently.


http://www.ravemagazine.com.au/content/view/3485/30

PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 8:21 am
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rose
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 		"
Quote:
There's many, many, many missed business opportunities here and the reason they're missed is because I don't want it to taint the most important thing, the experience. I want the fan to go, 'What is this thing? Holy shit!'"


How cool is this? I am on the Trent Reznor band wagon for good now. Smile
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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 9:10 am
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EarlyWyrm
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
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 		Yet another Digg...
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Here's a rather curious review from the Jones Report:

http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/010507_year_zero.html

Quote:
"Here Reznor marginalizes global warming, stating that if and when a real problem develops, we'll take care of it."


Um, well, no Mr. Jones. I think ya missed the point... The article does do the album and the game some justice, but misses in other areas by a mile.
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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 6:48 pm
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jenni42ld
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Joined: 20 Sep 2004
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Location: Austin, TX

 		AHAHAHAHAHA
NIN Nerds? *roflmao*

I wouldn't say nerds can't be NIN fans, or fans be nerds...I don't know that I know what the word for NIN fans is...but nerds isn't one I would pick.
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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 8:40 pm
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Jody Macgregor
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 		Funny thing is, Trent Reznor calls himself a nerd. He loves science fiction and computer games, so it's no surprise he's into ARGs.

PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2007 11:26 pm
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