Case Study: the World of Year Zero By Tara Smith, Daniel Cooke and Winnie Vu

Introduction Contents The year in 2022, or Year Zero as it is known in Introduction universe. The year America is born again [1]. Description After several major terrorist attacks, including Platforms attacks on major cities like Seattle and Los Storytelling Angeles, the United States government have Audience enacted a series of measures to control, or Analysis “protect” their citizens. They dope the water to References keep the people docile and obedient with a Drug called Parepin, under the guise of protection from biological weapons attacks. People are constantly watched by the Bureau of Morality, who decide who has the right to marry or even to bear children. This is the future that Album Cover for Year Zero [source] Trent Reznor, the man behind Nine Inch Nails, envisioned when he looked upon the actions of the United States government in 2006 and begun to write his dystopian concept album Year Zero [2]. However, the problem he faced was how to convey the extra material which could have once been conveyed through a band’s liner notes and artwork to a market who no longer bought physical CDs. Description Inspired [3] by The Beast, the alternate reality game (ARG) for the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Trent Reznor and his long time art director Rob Sheridan contacted 42 Entertainment. Jason Weisman, founder of 42 Entertainment, who was the creative director who supervised The Beast and had also developed another ARG called I Love Bees to promote the release of Halo 2 [4]. The project spanned the 12 months leading up to the album’s April 2007 release, with the first clue being hidden on t-shirts from their Feburary 10th, 2007 performance in Lisbon, Portugal [5]. A series of highlighted letters revealed the website iamtryingtobelieve.com (I Am Trying To Believe is the title of one of the tracks from the album, and both the website and the song refer to the use of the drug Parepin in the water supply). This clue lead to the website Another Version of the Truth being discovered, as it was also named after a track from the album. This website is a forum where dissenters within the society discuss and link to further rabbit holes into the world of Year Zero. The first clue [source] Platforms The clues were not restricted to websites. On Feburary 19th the track My Violent Heart was leaked on a USB drive at a concert. The end of the song contained an mp3 that, when run through a spectrograph analyser, showed an image of The Presence , a great hand-like manifestation that appears in Year Zero (linked to Parepin and the drug’s “street” version Opal). The tour shirt for this concert also revealed a phone number which could be called by participants. The audience were engaged further when flyers were handed out at a concert on Feburary 22nd which told them “You have a voice, How are you going to use it?” and told

them that they “...can act!” This The Presence Spectrograph [source] lead them to discover the Art is Resistance (AIR) website. It encouraged them to go out and spread the logo of the resistance, and provided them with the tools to do so as a series of downloads.

Year Zero uses a Portmanteau transmedia approach [6], where multiple platforms contribute to a single experience. In many ways the platforms are independent except that they often cover different narrative spaces, with each alone insufficient to carry the complete story. Examples of the platform used in this particular project include around 17 websites, 3 prerecorded phone messages, USB drives left at concerts, T-Shirts, Flyers, clues that could only be found through AIR Flyer [source] spectrograph analysis and real life events. Storytelling The multiple platforms, from websites to audio to video, are only one of the narrative techniques employed within the project. The websites themselves use a variety of different viewpoints, from first to third person, to tell the story in a number of different ways. Forum style sites, like Another Version of the Truth, and prerecorded phone calls tell intimate stories of the characters within the Year Zero story. On the other hand, some websites are presented as historical documentation to provide backstory and also to foreshadow events that were yet to be revealed.

Many characters [7] were introduced on the side of the resistance, which humanised their plight. On the side of the government and the Bureau of Morality people

were not provided names, and AVOTT forums [source] appeared mostly as dark suited policemen enforcing the will of those in charge. By not ever seeing them or naming them directly, they are dehumanised and seen as more evil as we cannot feel empathy as easily toward a faceless human. Policemen in Year Zero [source] Audience Transmedia storytelling knows the attention span of audiences and invitess them to take part in the story by using their favourite platforms whether that is social media or real world experiences. In this particular case, players were lead to submit their own art to another website, Open Source Resistance (OSR), run in game by the character Neil Czerno, likely the creator of the Art is Resistance website [8]. They could also superscribe to an OSR email list, resulting in recieving an invitation to a meet up. Around 100 of those who attended were given boxes containing phones, while the others received boxes of AIR paraphernalia. Later that week, the phones rang. These players were invited to a live OSR meeting and surprise Nine Inch Nails NIN perform live at an OSR meeting [source] concert. Participants were taken to a secret location where Czerno spoke to them, telling the players to “wake up and give a shit”. However, the proceeding live performance was cut short when actors deressed as policemen burst in. These real world experiences help bring the game world into the reality that the players exist within. With this method of storytelling, audiences are able to experience the impact of the narrative in their everyday lives. Analysis So, does Year Zero actually count as a cross media experience? To know the answer to this question we have to know what cross media is. This idea of cross-media story telling is defined by Dena [9] and Jenkins [10], which he calls “transmedia”, as a multiplatform, collaboration, to give us a unique experience of connection with a story world. At the moment we know that Nine Inch Nails have covered a vast range of platforms with different ideas, while staying in the one story world, which have been dispersed and distributed. What we need to do now is connect the dots between them to reveal the whole story. As Jenkins puts it when describing The Matrix, “There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.” [10] Year Zero is no different. Dena tells us that there are three steps to make cross-media work in what she calls the “Call to action cycle” [9]. These steps are Primal, Referral, and Reward. For Year Zero, the Primal was the point where individuals were first able to begin their interaction with this story world which began with that clue on the back of a Nine Inch Nails tour shirt. The message in the t-shirt is an example of the Referral. When written down you get the phrase “I am trying to believe”. After a little bit of digging this leads you to the I Am Trying To Believe website, which is an example of the Reward. From this point on the Year Zero story world is unearthed and compels some individuals to understand the whole story through further investigation. The set up and execution of Year Zero demanded user interaction, across the before- mentioned platforms, each with its unique contribution to the story behind Year Zero, and a collaborative effort to make it work. This fits Jenkins’ requirements of a collective intelligence working to unlock the story world, unique content that adds to the unfolding story in its own way, and being dispersed systematically across multiple different channels. This all lead to their new album, Year Zero. As such, we can definitely say that Year Zero is a cross media experience through its delivery of its content across a huge range of platforms to create a compelling storytelling experience for individuals to collaboratively work together to fully comprehend the Year Zero story world. References In text: [1] http://www.anotherversionofthetruth.com/revisionism.htm [2] http://www.ninwiki.com/Year_Zero [3] http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_arg_reznor [4] http://www.argn.com/2005/04/igda_san_francisco_presents_i_love_bees_4orty2wo/ [5] http://www.ninwiki.com/I_Am_Trying_To_Believe [6] http://www.tstoryteller.com/types-of-transmedia [7] http://www.ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Individuals [8] http://www.anotherversionofthetruth.com/artist.htm [9] http://www.slideshare.net/christydena/the-who-what-when-where-why-and-how-of-crossmedia [10] http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

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