WARNING: The following article contains spoilers regarding various elements of the Your World On Fire ARG.  If you have not yet completed the ARG, you may wish to do so before reading this article, which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding the clues, going so far as to reveal what they actually are.

I’ve Got My Propaganda: Developing the YWOF Alternate Reality Game

An article by Justin D. Hurkman, developer

The idea for the “teaser trailer” actually started on my ride home from the Kansas City show.  I used my camera to film a very rough version of my idea which I actually posted to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_PktXglAIg.  This was created very roughly using a hand-drawn sketch of the “Wave Ship”.  I had to carefully attempt to key out the white background on the sketch pad and track out the areas around the sketch pad.  The final composite wasn’t the best quality and of course it was made long before we decided upon using “Your World On Fire” as the title.  The quality was somewhat better than I’d hoped for but you can still tell that it’s VERY rough.

It was however the origin of the concept of the “Wave Ship” and the general idea of doing something in a similar vein to the Year Zero teaser trailer-a video which even after repeated viewings still somehow manages to send shivers down my spine when The Presence pops up.

The idea to do an Alternate Reality game tying in to our project actually started with the announcement of the Kansas City screening of Another Version of the Truth.  We weren’t sure at the time when we’d be finished with the Nine Inch Nails portion of the show and thought we might do some kind of exclusive preview and promotion of our project at the event.  The plan was to have special buttons, stickers, and various items that would have a “hidden code” on them.

The code is a bunch of random numbers which later became the “password” to get past the Bureau of Morality blocking page.  The login was planned to be revealed through some other means, possibly Twitter, along with the address to the website itself.  Around mid-March, our editor informed us that he was nearly finished with the Nine Inch Nails portion of the show-this lead me to consider an alternate route to go with the “delivery method” for the ARG, something that would be directly available to everyone and not just attendees of the AVOTT screening event.

I remembered my first attempt at a teaser trailer and the idea occurred to me to create a new teaser trailer with slightly higher production values as well as a tie-in to the ARG.  The actual “background plate” was captured using FRAPs and the “Street View” feature in Google Earth, since I don’t live in Kansas City this was the only way for me to “film there” on such short notice (our co-producer actually lives in Kansas City, but release was fairly imminent so it probably wouldn’t taken to long to contact him about filming and then actually trying to ensure that he films it the right way without actually being there to direct him).  I then imported this video into Poser 8
and created the “Wave Ship” as a primitive two-dimensional prop using a texture based on the actual Wave Goodbye logo.  I then tried my best to match the ship’s movements to my mouse-guided “camera movements” from Google Earth.  A motion blur effect was added during the export process to make it a bit more realistic and also make the shape a little vaguer.  It also had the side effect of blurring out the Google Earth logo in the corner. lol

The video was done in two drafts, the first had a five-frame “glitch sequence” with the hidden code and was in “standard” format.  I hadn’t realized (although I really should have) that at 30 frames-per-second a five frame animation is going to go by EXTREMELY fast and be insanely difficult to freeze frame and look at directly.  So I went back and did a 33 frame animation using 11 distinct “glitch patterns”.   Here is one of them, directly from the Photoshop source and only resized a little:

Both the password and login were hidden in the frames but after uploading the video to YouTube I discovered that the login was nearly impossible to make out or even SEE at any of the resolutions available.  So I decided to also hide the login name, jsmith (based on one of  Doctor Who’s aliases, I’d recently gotten into the revived series) on the Bureau page itself as well.

The actual login system was something I discovered after a long period of searching.  At one point, I’d considered using an actual password-protected forum with a BoM-styled skin but once I discovered this system to make a login-based page, that was no longer necessary.   The actual script which I’ll finally credit here, is Password Protect 2.13, which can be found @ http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/. The original script included a credit and link to the site, but I removed that due to the fact that it basically “broke the fourth wall” in terms of the reality of the ARG scenario.  You can actually bypass the password system entirely by just typing in the link to the forums, but I figured given the unofficial nature of  the ARG there wouldn’t be any major NIN sites giving away all the “secrets” to the game-besides of course now our own. lol

The graphics lift a lot of elements directly from the Year Zero ARG, in-particular all of the glitch patterns are lifted from the backgrounds of one page or another, using various layer blending options to integrate them into the teaser video and of course the web pages themselves.  The forums actually use the coding from the Another Version of the Truth website-with text and graphics of course altered to fit with this new scenario.  Amongst the three threads are three different “digital goodies”-a wallpaper pack, a really compressed and iPod-formatted clip of “The Way Out is Through” as a preview of our DVD, and an audio file that could originally be downloaded from our site (before I had to reinstall the CMS-long story) of the “Kick Out the Jams” cover performed by Street Sweeper Social Club and featuring Trent Reznor.  A fourth “bonus” was a photo I’d created early on showing the “Wave Ship” itself, which might be considered some kind of alternate manifestation of The Presence or perhaps something else that’s somehow related to it.

I wanted to add a “second site” to the mix and decided that I should use the “banned materials” concept-adding excerpts from movies/books/etc. into the web page’s background images, as a means to hint at the address for a second sub-domain site.  I’ve been a big fan of John Carpenter’s They Live since I watched it on AMC during one of their Halloween holiday movie marathons and was slightly surprised that it wasn’t part of the “banned materials” in the Year Zero ARG given the fact that it shares many themes with the Year Zero concept.  I decided to “remedy” this by including it in our own mini-ARG.  Particularly prominent were the words They Live, We Sleep-which would lead people hopefully to http://theylivewesleep.yourworldonfire.net. I was uncertain of the sort of content that would be there and for awhile I was thinking it could be reserved for some future tie-in with for instance the screening event.  However, I had the clever idea to use it as an unofficial “announcement” of the release of our first DVD.  I created a super-glitched recreation of our website.  I started with a saved copy of our news page and used html to create a “fake news post” which I then screen captured to convert into an image which I then applied glitchy effects to.  The release was actually ready around the time the ARG launched on Wednesday and it was delayed until the weekend just so people could enjoy the ARG and discover the release date through there.  I was also careful to more-or-less recreate the same announcement on the day of release although inevitably certain things had to be changed anyway. lol

The ARG project was admittedly a bit rushed.  Although I had started work on it a week or two before its launch, I hadn’t expected that I’d need to put it out as soon as I had to, so there was something of a “mad rush” to finish it.  I don’t think it particularly suffered for that in terms of quality, but I would’ve liked to have given it some kind of “testing phase” where I could run a few people through the thing in secret to get some feedback before making the thing public.  Ultimately, I used some feedback I got through Twitter after the launch to construct a “walkthrough” to help people who might get stuck at various points of the ARG-never actually revealing the solutions, but pointing people with growing specificity to where they can find them.  Of course ideally at least some people would be able to make it all the way through on their own, but I have to admit I may have gotten slightly carried away with how I hid the clues. lol

As for the future of the Your World On Fire Alternate Reality Game, I’m not really sure.  I think it would be a good idea to try and do something for the next two releases, and of course learn from some of the “mistakes” made on this one and try to make it a bit better.  However, I currently don’t have any real ideas for how it would work out and the current mini-ARG basically covers about everything I’ve managed to come up with so far.  I’m fairly satisfied with what presently exists in the game so I don’t know if there’s anything I could reasonably add to it.  In any case, only time will tell.