afterworld, an episodic game
This is an apocalyptic, post technology, dramatically de-populated vision of an Internet game/show (not gameshow): afterworld, by Electric Farm. It is inspired by something like Lost. (It reminds me of conversations I used to have with my guitar player Ward Spring back a long time ago. Imagining that all things man made disappeared in an instant. Imagine the surprise of the airline passengers, right?) That same demographic is what the creators of afterworld are after. This is something a bit like lonlygirl15 in that it uses the Internet to tell a story, with places for fan fiction to inform the story line. This looks like it will be the port wine of movies, i.e. boiled all the way down. You can both play and watch episodes, and it’s time based, so click quickly.
There are lots of places built in for interactivity and there is a lot of depth built in via ancillary story lines, and some of the characters who are not main characters will actually have their own stories developed as further ancillary content.
The big deal is that they’re developing this all over the world, tweaked for local needs, and it’s a tremendously inexpensive way to develop intellectual content and develop a franchise from the beginning. They turned down a lot of opportunities to turn it into a tv show already, since it hasn’t been exposed yet and it’s impossible to value it yet.One thing I love about this is the potential for having this work for International audiences. There is the potential for heroes to emerge in other parts of the world and to have the threads connect. I think that’s cool.
Another thing that is cool about this is that often Hollywood operates on the precedent (Jeff Sherwood says: The mark of mediocrity is searching for the precedent.) Sony jumped in, however. I think this will be interesting to follow.
BTW, the optimum length of time for a piece of mobile entertainment (i.e mobile phone) tested out to be 2:47. Something that is shown at that point, like an ad, is retained 100% of the time by the ‘key demographic’ which I didn’t catch, but which is, I suppose, desirable.