Deleted: The Game is more than just another mystery thriller web series. It’s creators at NY-based Gen247 Media call it, “an indie web TV show where you can interact with the characters through their MySpace and Facebook pages, (along with several other fictional sites) and influence how the story progresses.” Throughout this complex alternate reality game (ARG), the producers have seeded a hidden trail of clues in each episode and all over the internet setting up “a massive online treasure hunt of sorts.”
The story begins with a young woman, Tyler Mills (Charlie Miller) , who loses her memory and is looking for her boyfriend Ethan (Shawn Parsons). Sadly, her boyfriend has been “deleted”, meaning his identity has been stolen. What’s a girl to do? Teaming up with her two best friends Nicole (Elia Monte-Brown) and Zac (David Rudd) seems like a good start.
Broken down into four episode acts, the series focuses intensely on memory, identity, and time shifting, deftly combining these elements across multiple interaction points throughout the Internet. Directed by indie filmmaker Ryan Gielen, the series runs about $10,000 an episode, despite being “shot entirely with consumer grade camcorders, webcams and phonecams.”
Each episode ends with a question. Answering correctly gets registered players points. And what do you win?
Point earners get access to “Tyler’s Circles of Friendship”:
Inner Circle: Top 20 Point Earners – Tyler’s Online Phone Number.
Close Friend: Top 50-21 Point Earners – Tyler’s Online chat Address
Good Friend: Top 50% – Tyler’s Email
New Friend: Top 90% – Private Messages on Social Network
Acquaintance: Registered Players – added to Friend’s List on Social Network
For reasons of personal preference, we will avoid exploring how incredibly creepy it seems to go on a huge web scavenger hunt in order to receive some fake girl’s phone number. But, please, by all means, you go forward with it.
DTG premiered a month ago and is up to Episode 9, so there’s time to get in on the action and actually influence the outcome. Comment anywhere on the various Tyler Mills fake vlogs, MySpace and Facebook profiles and even company websites set up and you’ll receive a response. One YouTube viewer commented on the mediocre acting and was immediately hit up with a response asking, “Thanks. Which actor and how can they improve?” That’s service!
The show itself is well-shot and seethes with appropriate tension. Fans of interactive story-telling experiences like The Lost Experience, The Dark Knight promotion and Halo 2’s impressively vexing I Love Bees will find this a worthy addition to the genre. Interactive experiences like this are what the Internet was built for. (Also see newcomer ARG web series The Prisoner.) Maybe if the rewards for participation weren’t tantamount to stalking, more people will be excited by this curious puzzle.
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Comments
Thanks for the review, Sean!
For your readers – the season is still going strong with a major plot twist revealed last Fri 10/10 – come join us, have fun, be careful and don’t be DELETED!
Since launch, the show has achieved well over 1 million views on Kewego, Youtube and iTunes, over 7,000 subscribers and 700 registered players who have generated over 70 pages of independent content and discussion. We are very grateful for the engagement we receive from our audience, the person who commented on the mediocre acting in your review did come back with really useful notes which we did take in, and we hope to collaborate with this person in the future. We are committed to continuous improvement and being great in the interactive web series genre.
One small erratum, we produce at a cost of $1,000 per min, in contrast to $10,000 per min for major productions such as Gemini Division. That makes it $5,000 per episode of approximately 5 mins length (not $10,000 as in your review).
With such a small budget, we have nothing to spend on marketing so our audience has been built from grassroots efforts, indie style. Any publicity that we receive through reviews helps us get noticed alongside the enormous marketing efforts that NBC Interactive’s “Gemini Division” starring Rosario Dawson brings to bear.
We’ve submitted for the 13th Webby Awards in three categories Best Drama, Best Use of Interactive Video and Best Experimental and Weird. Hope your readers will back us if they like what we’re doing!
Deleted: The Game
http://www.deletedthegame.com
This is what I’m talking about – these dudes are all over it!
Here’s a quick question for anybody: Let’s say your marketing budget is actually zero. Don’t you think the $200 submission fee for the Webbys is comepletey gouging?
Jeebus – I meant to write “completely”. Ugh. Up too early.
“Don’t you think the $200 submission fee for the Webbys is completely gouging?”
Pretty much. I think it’s there to limit the amount of content submitted, but this is higher than many film festivals for submitting a feature.
@Marc & Sean – We did think the submission fees were a bit high, not quite “gouging”, but it did still hurt to spend that money.
We made our decision on the following basis:
(a) there are currently no substitutes for the Webbys [... maybe Tubefilter Awards in the future? ...] that could offer the exposure of being nominated.
(b) as Marc pointed out, it would hopefully act as a filter. [Standing on soap box] … although I don’t think money should be it as this could crowd out the deserving indie. Unfortunately, I do not think web content critic/review sites (of which Tubefilter is arguably the leader) aren’t quite yet the institutions as their mainstream counterparts and do not yet offer a reliable filtering system to supplant Benjamin Franklin, sigh … maybe one day.
UPDATE: Deleted: The Game is now over with the Nov 4th finale converging on Elections 2008. Thanks to Ethan and Zach election fraud on a major scale was averted and no one still really knows if Tyler was killed or still missing and waiting to be found. The title has done over 2 million views since going live Aug 15, 2008. We have the most amazing audience, thanking them for their support, these folks helped generate over 70 pages of independent comments and discussion. We are blown away!
Deleted: The Game
Delighted to see the press release on the Streamy Awards folks!
Deleted: The Game
Back again with some updates.
We were heartbroken not to be selected for the Streamys sniff sniff But congrats to the great content producers that were, well done!
On a brighter note, Deleted: The Game has been made an Official Nominee and Official Honoree for the 13th Webby Awards 2009 in the Best Experimental Film & Video category and the Best Use of Interactive Video category respectively.
We’re humbled and grateful for the support of our fans and supporters and would love if you would take some time to register and vote us for the Webby’s People’s Voice award here http://pv.webbyawards.com
Thank you!
Deleted: The Game
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