Emma Online: Roundup

I had a great talk with Tine Deboosere last week. She was leading the online experience of a television series called Emma (we talked about this here before), together with Lode Nachtergaele. Appearantly my first reaction on my personal blog (Dutch) on this kind-of-ARG was received as being quite negative, so it was a good thing we could have a chat about it. This gave me the opportunity to hear her out on how things went as well.

You can call this a success. The latest numbers she had told us there were 7.300 players, which isn’t bad for being the pioneer project it was in Flanders/Belgium. Lode, who I ran in to on Barcamp Brussels, told me 5.000 people played the endgame. Not bad, and these players already knew the outcome of the story before it was broadcasted. I mean, they knew who the murderer of Emma’s father is (which was the big question after all), but they still had to see the show to know the exact ending of course. Actual figures tell us there were 3.000 unique endgame players and 8.500 registered players in total. The site of a href=”http://www.nvantenne.be/”>NV Antenne, one of the main sites in the game, was visited by 50.000 unique visitors, generating over 2 million pageviews. What do you do with this kind of community? One of the challenges was to get this group together and keep it that way. Fortunately for the production crew, this issue was solved for a big part by the rise of the Emma forum, started by the players themselves. The crew kept a watchful eye and communicated openly with the group.
Tine has been looking for a while to give viewers more control over fiction on television:

Ideally, the viewer could control how the story goes. But fiction costs a lot of money, so creating and shooting every possible scenario is impossible.

But with Emma Online they proved that you can get the audience involved for a lot less money. Because the budget wasn’t that big: you can compare it with what was needed if they would’ve added one more episode to the series. And that budget was enough to get a lot of reactions, even very emotional ones.

If you look at some of the comments on the blogs and the forum, you can compare it with children looking at a puppet show: they start screaming the second the wolf appears behind Little Red Riding Hood.

But how about the target audience? By following what happened online, I thought you had 2 groups, very different from each other. The one consisting of very young viewers and the other notably older, whose television set is fixed on the Flemish public broadcast channel. Tine agreed that there was a “zone” of people that don’t watch television, but that they did pick them up as well via this online game. These people are on the net and came in contact with Emma through the net and started downloading and watching the series. Because, indeed, every episode could be downloaded freely, which turned out to be a brilliant move. And this is where the VRT worked on a very unique way: the game brought extra viewers to the series, which is very different from, for example, Heroes, who plugged the “extended experience” in the series by showing an URL on a business card. Of course the series itself hinted to what was going on on the internet, like when Birsen posted a movie of Veli and Emir on her Myspace.

The game worked with two gears. With every puzzle, you had to look for it first. This gave some satisfaction for the die-hards, but on the other side you had a big group of players that wanted to take it easy. They didn’t want to spend a lot of time looking for everything, and just wanted to play the puzzles. That why, after a few days, hints were set up to make it easier for those players to find the puzzles. The crew had to do some balancing exercises here about whether stuff was to easy or to difficult. The advantage was that the balance they found worked for the players.

Tine was going to try to go on holiday now. It was going to feel like rehab to her, because the experience worked very addicting. I told her I was quite jealous of her having had the opportunity to work on such a project. I’ll never forget her response though: