Tag: Interactive Emmy

Fourth Wall Studios’ “Dirty Work” Wins 2012 Interactive Emmy

Tonight, the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards held its annual awards, where the Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Original Interactive Television Programming was awarded to Fourth Wall Studios for their interactive program Dirty Work. The Emmy-winning show is a dark comedy featuring an LA-area clean-up crew as they go about their grisly business, featuring guest appearances from everyone from Metta World Peace to Kid Creole. Dirty Work is built off Fourth Wall Studios’ RIDES platform that integrates telephone calls, text messages, and user input to add a layer of depth to the viewing experience of the episodic web series.

Also nominated for the award was USA Network’s Hashtag Killer, and What’s Trending with Shira Lazar. Hashtag Killer is an online murder mystery built around USA Networks show Psych that allows players to virtually chat along with Shawn Spencer, Burton Guster, and the rest of the cast of the show while hunting down a serial killer who methodically stalked down and killed the top-scoring players in the Hashtag Killer experience. The game was built on the SocialSamba platform and linked to fans’ Club Psych accounts. What’s Trending with Shira Lazar combines online news articles and video broadcasts to provide a direct feed into what’s popular on the internet. The show recently accepted a grant from YouTube’s Next Lab,  bringing more live and interactive content to the show.

The Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Fiction category has historically been friendly to alternate reality games, with the Fallen alternate reality game winning in 2007, the Heroes Digital Experience winning in 2008, and The Dharma Initiative winning in 2009. In 2010, Star Wars Uncut was the final winner for the category, before the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories were combined in 2011. This year, the Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media award was split into two new categories: original interactive television programming, and enhancement to a television program or series. Team Coco’s sync app won the program enhancement award.

Congratulations to Fourth Wall Studios for their win, and head on over to RIDES.tv to check out Dirty Work and the other interactive programs the team has developed.

Dharma Wants You Wins Primetime Creative Arts Emmy

emmyABC, the producers of LOST, and Australian digital entertainment company Hoodlum walked away from last night’s Emmy Awards with the award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Fiction for their work on the alternate reality game Dharma Wants You. ABC secured a win from its NBC competition, beating out both The 30 Rock Digital Experience and The Office Digital Experience for the award.

The game, centering around the now-defunct website DharmaWantsYou.com, subjected participants to a series of tests administered by Octagon Global Recruiting on behalf of the Dharma Initiative. Each test included a cheat function, allowing savvy players to achieve higher scores. Participants taking advantage of the cheats were eventually sorted into the Black Swan groups, while those who played “fairly” were placed into the White Swan Group.

According to Hoodlum, Dharma Wants You utilized a “variety of media platforms ranging from websites, exclusive video, interactive games, Bluetooth, mobile, TV, VOIP, social networks, and complex real-world events involving hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide.” Spanning the gap between the fourth and fifth seasons of LOST, Dharma Wants You is ABC’s third alternate reality game for the show. 

The show’s first alternate reality game, The Lost Experience, captured a dedicated global audience, while the show’s second ARG, Find 815, secured a nomination for a Primetime Emmy in 2008.  LOST is currently promoting the release of the season five DVDs with Lost University, an in-depth look at the show’s mythology. Enrollment at the university is slated to commence tomorrow.

Click Here for our previous coverage of Dharma Wants You.

Two More Awards for ReGenesis Extended Reality

It’s been a crazy month for the guys at Xenophile media. It started off back in March at the 10th Annual SXSW Interactive Awards when Occular Effect (The Fallen Alternate Reality Game) won the award in the Experimental category. But it was not about to stop there. The nominations were just beginning to roll in. Fallen was nominated for a Banff World Television Award and Regenesis was nominated for both an Interactive Emmy (pdf) and a CNMA Award. The CNMA and Banff World Television awards will be announced in the next few months, but last night the Interactive Emmy went to(pdf)… Xenophile Media for Regenesis Extended Reality Game!

Clearly, they’re going to need to build themselves a bigger trophy case. But the real question is, how are they ever going to get any work done with all this celebrating? We want more!