Return of the King in Yellow Minecraft ARG

Back in November, ARGNet covered Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist, a modern reinterpretation of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow through the lens of a Minecraft Let’s Play video. This reframing of the classic horror story is particularly fitting, as the titular King in Yellow isn’t a typical eldritch horror. Instead, it’s a play capable of driving those exposed to it mad, serving as an early instance of cognitohazards.

Searching for a World That Doesn’t Exist ended with the protagonist Derek (playing under the handle d3rlord3) encountering the King in Yellow offscreen, and offering one final warning to protect Avery (TheMostMayo) from repeating his mistakes. And for a few months, that was where the series creator Wifies left things. But earlier this month, Wifies released the second part of his duology, Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist.

As with the prior installation, Wifies’ two hour long video offered a summary of a considerably longer source material – this time, a fifteen hour long upload to Avery’s YouTube channel. But while the prior video was primarily told through Derek’s perspective, the first half of Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist is told from a considerably more naive perspective.

Avery’s Perspective: Following in D3rlord3’s Footsteps

The first installment of Wifies’ King in Yellow reimagining starts with the warning, “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.” And as we finally begin to see Avery’s exploration of the world, he ignores these instructions and attempts to follow in D3rlord3’s footsteps. But when Avery crosses the threshold of the giant golden door, instead of being confronted with unseen horrors, he’s confronted by a single gold block…until turning around and finding himself in a room filled with doors.

Behind each door, Avery finds himself thrust into a different world, littered with signs of D3rlord3’s prior passage – items from his inventory appear like a trail of breadcrumbs, guiding Avery through puzzles he doesn’t quite understand. The first world he stumble across, for example, is a series of precarious mountain spires connected by wooden bridges. Upon crossing each bridge, mountains appear and disappear with no explanation. On one occasion, the only thing saving Avery from falling to his virtual death is a series of blocks previously placed by D3rlord3.

That is not to say that Avery isn’t engaging with his environment: in one world, he comes across a towering obelisk, with strange glyphs written on it, and recognizes the puzzle in place: “bro is speaking enchanting table”. And he’s right – the bricks spell out a message in Minecraft’s Galactic Alphabet, which often appears alongside the game’s enchantment table. The upper portion of the obelisk starts with – — – , the pattern used in the Galactic Alphabet for “end of sentence”. This provides a hint that the cigils need to be flipped upside down and reversed to be legible, resulting in the message “BELOW”.

Avery proceeds through many of these elaborately designed worlds and eventually finds the doorway leading to the next, guided by a trail of items. Sometimes, viewers can intuit the way forward themselves. In a world blanketed by a sea of red rolling hills, the landscape is broken up by a series of white houses. Avery focuses on the items inside the houses, missing the giant tiled arrows placed on the floor of each house, directing him where to go. Eventually it’s a crafting table in the distance that leads Avery to his next location. Only this table couldn’t have been placed by D3rlord3, since it appeared out of nowhere. There’s something else leaving a path of breadcrumbs for Avery to follow.

One particularly insidious world almost halts Avery’s journey entirely. Slightly over 2 hours into the raw footage, after navigating a series of underground canals, Avery stumbles across a cozy world occupied by a single church. A Yellow Sign often serving as harbinger of the King in Yellow hangs above the pew, and a book at the altar reassures Avery he’s safe here. And for the next twelve hours, Avery silently tends to the church. It’s only until he reads a sign left by D3rlord3 that he is broken from his reverie and proceeds onward.

That is not to say that Avery has no personal agency in progressing forward: one particularly intricate puzzle appears in the center of a lake in between six statues. Avery “solves” the puzzle by spending four minutes breaking through the netherite block that acts as the lock, before typing “stupid puzzle” into chat. Finally, around halfway through the video, Avery encounters D3rlord3. And during that conversation, he’s provided a link to the events leading up to their encounter, from Derek’s perspective, although the video has since been “deleted”.

Derek’s Perspective: Traversing Worlds and Solving the Unsolvable

After Wifies pulls up D3rlord3’s footage, viewers learn that Derek’s confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the prior chapter left him a shell of himself, incapable of looking away from his computer. And yet, he’s still capable of tackling the puzzles left in the worlds he’s exploring. Interrogating the rules of the world filled with mountainous spires, D3rlord3 figures out that the mountains operate as a variant of Conway’s Game of Life. Drawing on exhaustive knowledge of Minecraft game mechanics, D3rlord3 manipulates his game settings to reveal the intended solution to the puzzle at the center of the lake.

And after catching up with his encounter with Avery, D3rlord3 comes face to face with the physical manifestation of the King in Yellow: a pair of yellow orbs. The King in Yellow reveals his plan to enter the real world using Avery as a vessel, and discards D3rlord now that his purpose has been served. Up to this point, the puzzles were designed to be solvable. Whether by D3rlord3’s intellectual progression through the worlds or Avery’s assisted path, the King in Yellow wanted the pair to progress, so he could escape. But D3rlord3 served his purpose, and the King in Yellow transports him to a world with a closed golden door, with no intended path out.

There is no puzzle to be solved here – and yet, D3rlord3 takes advantage of esoteric details of how Minecraft works to glitch himself through the floor, where he finds a secret door that leads him to an abandoned village from a prior civilization that summoned the King in Yellow. And it’s in this village that D3rlord3 finds a book that helps him come up with a plan to prevent the King in Yellow’s influence from spreading, leading to a dramatic confrontation with a virtual manifestation of the cognitohazard.

It’s worth noting that this wasn’t fans’ first encounter with the abandoned village, nor was it their first time witnessing Wifies’ interpretation of the King in Yellow’s Minecraft manifestation. For that, we need to turn back to Minecraft Live.

Wifies Launched A King in Yellow Prequel ARG at Minecraft Live
Minecraft Live is an annual virtual event put on by Mojang Studios, offering a sneak peek at the company’s plans for the next year. For their March update, the company announced new game updates, real world activations, and even an upcoming Minecraft theme park. As part of the leadup to the main event with Mojang, Wifies recorded a brief explainer of his channel, which got interrupted by two mysterious robed figures.

Wifies went on to elaborate, “I think easily one of my favorite things about solving these mysteries is the fun of solving puzzles and working with my community to unravel these insane worlds that shouldn’t even exist. In fact, in this very segment and everything you’ve seen so far there are clues hidden for you, the viewer, to find. So if you’re curious, and you want to figure out what’s really happening, that the answer is out there. Waiting for you.” At the end of the video, a central URL for the game appeared: Wifies.net/MCLive, along with some enchanting table text leading to rules for the ARG, structured around five puzzles.

The five puzzles unlocked a series of audio logs investigating why a house appeared in their village, framed as a series of interviews conducted by someone named Epsilon. During the investigation, details begin to emerge: the town is preparing to summon the King in Yellow, using one of their own, Abel, as his vessel. One of Abel’s brothers, Ianius, begins to have misgivings about the summoning. And in the final video, we see video of him disappearing from the town and facing the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation – a giant floating eyeball.

This confrontation is inevitably why no one in the town except for Abel remembers him, and why “House 31” seemingly appeared from nowhere: it’s been there all along, they just forgot who used to live there. Ianius’ reservations also make him a likely source for the book D3rlord3 finds buried

Did Playing This ARG Qualify As A Cognitohazard?

In ARGNet’s prior article on Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist, I mentioned how Wifies’ ARG subverted the nature of how we consume media through its strategic use of the Let’s Play format. The sequel doubled down on this clever subversion: at the time of this article, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist has 25 million views, and its sequel has 15 million views. And for the bulk of that viewtime, watching the events unfold is a passive experience: follow the breadcrumbs left by Avery that were left for him by both D3rlord3 and the King in Yellow himself.

A portion of the audience didn’t stop at Wifies’ explainer videos, however. Since the full 15 hour behind the gates video was uploaded directly to AveryTheMayo’s YouTube channel instead of hidden in a Google Drive folder, for instance, we now know that people opted to explore a more unfiltered experience over 1.6 million times, implying as many as 10% of viewers went on to expose themselves to a more unfiltered version of the cognitohazard. Luckily, the choice of also sifting through D3rlord3’s footage was taken from us. On D3rlord3’s Google Drive, a PDF entitled Notice of Removal states:

The footage in the folder belonging to ‘Derek Hutchins’ has been temporarily seized for investigation by the US D.M.S.. We thank you for your patience.

The United States Department of Metaphysical Sciences (US D.M.S.) intervened during some of Wifies’ earlier coverage, and shielded the more curious from engaging with some of the King in Yellow’s more overt manifestations.

Players who engaged at this level spent a significant amount of time engaging with Wifies’ world, but the nature of that engagement still resembles Avery’s approach more than Derek’s. Luckily, time spent alone isn’t enough to drive one to madness: after all, the footage confirms that Avery spent over 12 hours hanging around a church of the Yellow Sign and was still considered an ideal vessel, while Derek’s mind was fractured beyond repair after a brief attempt to comprehend the King in Yellow.

A select audience did run the risk of a more direct attempt at comprehending the King in Yellow with the Minecraft Live alternate reality game, however. In it, Wifies directly challenged his audience to both solve his series of puzzles, and piece together why “House 31” suddenly appeared in the middle of a village of cultists worshipping the King in Yellow. Making things worse, they were encouraged to directly enter Minecraft to solve the puzzle, bringing them closer to the place where this interpretation of the King in Yellow was looking to tempt the curious with his (game)play.

Far fewer people took the extra steps capable of bringing them closer to madness, of course – the final audio log has been viewed just shy of 20,000 views, to date. It’s much more tempting to have it all explained, with Freshi’s walkthrough of the ARG receiving over 400,000 views. But their efforts left a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow, offering up more potential vessels for the King in Yellow.

This also offers up an interesting interpretation of D3rlord3’s seemingly triumphant confrontation with the King in Yellow at the end of the series. His ultimate plan involved offering up his corrupted mind as vessel for the King in Yellow, allowing for mutually assured destruction. And at first, we see that plan working, with the King in Yellow’s physical manifestation disintegrating…until Avery returns, offering up a far more attractive vessel. With his return, dozens of eyes appear, hungry for a new home.

D3rlord3 eventually takes Avery out of the equation…but even without Avery, wouldn’t one of the millions of viewers Wifies brought to the table with his video offer up a tempting vessel to help the King in Yellow (and his story) live on?

None of These Styles of Gameplay Are Wrong

It’s tempting to look at this article’s comparison of Avery and D3rlord3 and assume that one of their playstyles is better than the other – that there’s something inherently superior about being part of the vanguard unlocking (and sometimes even directing) the story for those to follow after. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’ve previously argued in favor of designing with the casual spectator in mind.

If watching a video explaining the events of an ARG is enough for you to enjoy it? That’s great, and hopefully the broader context of how it came to be helped contribute to that enjoyment. If what you see makes you curious enough to do a little digging and skim through the game to see if there’s something the summary missed? That’s great too, and hopefully you end up feeling like those efforts were rewarding. And if you start poking around at puzzles or writing guides to help others navigate the game’s complex web? You guessed it: that’s great as well.

If you’re interested in watching Wifies’ reimagining of The King in Yellow, check out part 1 and part 2. For more on the Minecraft Live ARG, Freshi’s explainer video is a great start, and the ARG’s Google Doc can help fill in the missing details.