New Noology Network
Read the story- Brand
- AMC
- Year
- 2019
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- AMC Networks
Objective
AMC was launching a series built around an alternate reality game — a premise nearly impossible to pitch in a trailer — so it built the real game first and let people feel it rather than be told about it. The company wanted a community of players already living inside the fiction by the time the show premiered on March 1, 2020. It also needed raw participant footage to close out the season, effectively casting its own audience.
Solution
It starts with a printed flyer for a sleep-research study, a phone number, and a sign-up at nnn.de.com — nothing on it says AMC. Players register as test subjects, get vetted through a deliberately absurd screening questionnaire, then receive their first assignment: a short trial to film alone in their own neighborhood and submit as proof. From there they tune into live "lab session" broadcasts on Twitch, voting in real time on how to stimulate a sleeping subject's brain and watching the resulting dream play out on screen. Across roughly fourteen of these broadcasts over five months the fiction escalates — the lab turns out to be a set, a white van starts moving across the country, hidden clues surface inside the actual AMC series — while players trade theories on Reddit and Discord between streams. It closes with a live hologram of the missing subject, Clara, taking audience questions for over an hour, and with players' own recorded videos airing in the show's finale.
Results
5,000 players had already registered before the show was even announced. The game drew over half a million people on Twitch alone, with 5,000 channel subscribers and peak concurrent viewership above 10,000, plus millions more engaging across Reddit, YouTube, Discord and Instagram. Participants submitted roughly 3,000 self-recorded videos, more than 100 of which were cut into the series finale.
- 1
The player encounters a printed flyer, on campus or in the street, recruiting volunteers for a sleep study that promises to record their dreams "in full color"; it lists only a phone number, a website and a Twitch channel, with no mention of AMC or the TV show.
- 2
The player calls the number to book an appointment and is answered in character by the network, then registers on its website and waits for an invitation to "the Trials."
- 3
Screening opens as an ordinary personality questionnaire whose questions quickly turn strange, such as asking whether the player likes the taste of raw meat.
- 4
The Trials continue as video assignments: the player records themself completing odd tasks, including an audio-guided tour of their own neighborhood, and sends the footage back to the network.
- 5
The player follows the network's Twitch channel, where live "lab sessions" show a sleeping test subject wired to EEG equipment while on-camera technicians talk with the chat.
- 6
The stream turns interactive: viewers vote on which region of the sleeper's brain to stimulate, and roughly every three minutes the screen shows abstract, machine-generated imagery standing in for what the dreamer sees.
- 7
The player joins the collective play in chat — naming recurring characters, inventing backstories, flooding the lab's email with job applications — and moves between the stream and the community's Reddit and Discord hubs to pool clues and piece the ongoing story together.
- 8
The fiction breaks its own fourth wall when the "lab" the player has been watching is revealed on stream to be a set built inside a game engine rather than a real facility.
- 9
From the AMC series' second episode onward, the player watches the show itself for planted clues, joining the hunt for "the Holovan" — a van with hidden cameras and hologram displays touring the country — tracking its location and posting under #FindClaraFirst.
- 10
When a live finale event is called off in March 2020, the player is told to stay home and follow the ending through the livestreams, where they get to question Clara — a hologram revealed to have been riding inside the van all along — for over an hour, before the series closes with more than 100 players' own recordings of themselves saying "I am [name], and I am you."
