Mr. Robot writer Kor Adana’s in-season schedule seems tough. In addition to some pivotal plot-making in the writers’ room, Adana does appearances on the The Verge’s Digital After Show, conducts regular post-episode Q&As with The Hollywood Reporter, and famously leads the charge on the show’s obsession with technical detail. Each bit of screen real-estate that appears in an episode—URLs, code, IP addresses, etc.—has to pass through Adana and the team. But throughout all of that, one constant Mr. Robot quest stays in the back of the mind.

“Whenever an opportunity presents itself to do some form of PR for the show, the first thing we go to is, ‘What can we incorporate from the ARG?’” Adana tells Ars. “Can we hide a puzzle? Can we do a cipher code? Our conversations always seem to start with, ‘I have a really weird idea I want to run by you,’ but somehow we’re able to pull it off. And it’s been kinda crazy in S3.”

As S3 wraps up, Mr. Robot’s ARG—alternate reality game, essentially a transmedia narrative that complements the main story and is told through clues and puzzles hidden within anything show-related—has become as obsessed over as the show itself. Adana finds himself often dropping hints in plain sight: within appearances on that aftershow, inside answers he gives THR, in show listserv emails, at Comic-Con pop-ups that mimic show restaurants, even on commercials the show produced and aired within USA’s normal ad blocks. It’s a pet project of sorts for the writer, something that started in very, very small doses in S1 but grew exponentially last year after Adana and his team noticed fans’ appetite for it (back in S1, staff saw community members analyzing radiator pops and hisses for Morse code the team hadn’t even thought to place).

“I’ve always wanted a really compelling hacker show with characters I care about and empathize with, and with tech that’s realistic, and that I can kind of interact with,” Adana told us in an extended podcast interview during S2. “I love the notion that if I had nothing to do with the show at all and I was watching something with real IP addresses and URLs, and went down that rabbit hole, I would find some new information that added to the story. I think that’s awesome; I love that idea.”

For an example of some of the ARG puzzles that have been solved by the folks in the show subreddits (/r/MrRobot and /r/ARGSociety) or on chat platform Discord, take the commercial above. Viewers had to watch the show live to notice Mr. Robot’s Red Wheelbarrow restaurant suddenly had a genuine commercial airing during USA’s ad breaks. Within the jingle, there’s a snippet where the vocals are sung backwards, and sleuths could find a clue by noticing it and then manipulating the audio, easy enough. However, the show’s ARG team laid a second, less-obvious clue in there. Scattered throughout those 30 seconds are five stray images all in different orientations. ARG players needed to spot the stills, place them together, properly orient them, and then run the image through a specific app in order to find an audio file embedded.

“That’s the one where I thought we went too far, it’s too arcane, and we asked too much,” says Jeffrey Kaufman, senior vice president of digital for USA Network (he leads the team that builds all these sites and videos hidden on the Web waiting for fans to discover). “I thought that’s the one they won’t figure out… and it took maybe a day for it to be cracked. So you never know what’s going to happen until it’s out in the world.”

Red herrings and Red Wheelbarrows of S3

If that sounds intense both to produce and to dissect, it is. The show has an army of dedicated fans at this point searching and working together to solve the ARG, so the show itself has assembled its own super team in response. In addition to Adana and Kaufman’s USA Digital group, they’ve partnered with a digital agency called Ralph (which partnered with Netflix on some Black Mirror campaigns) and the legendary Curious Codes team responsible for the annual badge challenge at Def Con. The group has even started trying to incorporate outside companies that appear on the show into the ARG. When Mr. Robot searched Shodan early in S3, for instance, observant fans could type the same query into the real Shodan search engine, find the precise screen the character analyzed, and eventually discover a hidden IP address. The ARG team had simply reached out to Shodan in advance knowing fans would try this, and the search company happily placed a results page for the show.

As Kaufman put it, these days any detail could mean something, but not every detail does. And as the Mr. Robot ARG team continues to push the boundaries on the where and what of their puzzles, the community has become conditioned to look everywhere—including places where there may be nothing. This year on the show, a fast-food restaurant called Red Wheelbarrow played a vital role on-screen as a front for one of the show’s hacker collectives. Naturally, since it appeared on-screen, fans knew they’d be able to find a working website: https://www.red-wheelbarrow.com/. The site includes a kids’ section with back-of-menu style puzzles and games, leading the community to focus on a “spot the differences” puzzle with potential meta puzzles within.

“Well somewhere in this puzzle are these puddles on the ground. There are a lot of things within this image that are puzzles—but the puddles are just part of the drawing,” Kaufman says. “Folks on Reddit were really, really analyzing these puddles: the number of them, the position, the circumference—really deep analysis into it. Eventually, one of the players pointed this out in Discord: ‘Somewhere Kor Adana is laughing at us about the discourse over these puddles.’ And that became a meme—now when fans go down a rabbit hole and think they’re getting into tinfoil hat territory, they post this picture with Kor.”

“Honestly, when we started I never thought I’d turn into a meme,” Adana adds. “Now I think of it as a badge of honor.”

(ARG-player CarnageIncarnate reached out to add one of the early season trailers helped inspire the puddles meme, as players on Discord analyzed puddles outside of Red Wheelbarrow during a shot of Irving.)

The S3 ARG continues to play out, though Kaufman and Adana revealed that everything from S2 had finally been found (they admittedly lurk sometimes in subreddits and chats to stay up to date). For players who discovered the final clues, the ARG team hid their online tags in various on-screen locations throughout S3, knowing these subtle hat-tips would be found (and they were). Given everything remains in progress for this season, Adana and Kaufman hesitated to give any hints about undiscovered clues. So, know for certain this article doesn’t have any—but the same can’t necessarily be said for all those Adana post-episode recaps.

Listing image by Michael Parmelee/USA Network

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1234521