Tuesday, March 14, 2006

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that BBC Radio One were plugging some online feature about the death of a pop star called Jamie Kane. The 20 second trailers didn't go into much detail; in fact just enough to get you interested enough to visit the BBC's Jamie Kane micro-site. It worked... I clicked.

It turns out that Jamie Kane is the lead character in the BBC's first large scale alternate reality game; a game where you get to discover the truth behind the boy-band pop star's death in a helicopter crash in the North Sea. A death that turns out to be much more than a simple accident.

Now, as you might guess from the boy-band-style content, the game is really designed for late-teen girls. What got me interested was the amount of detail the Beeb has gone to to make the whole thing believable. For a start 'Jamie Kane' recorded three album's worth of (fairly poor) tracks, did interviews for Top of the Pops and Radio One and has what appears to be years of photo-shoots on his sites.



On the subject of sites, the Beeb has gone to town creating special sites for the adventure. Not only does Jamie have his own official and unofficial websites, so does his former group and several members of his family. In addition to them there must be at least a further 20 sites set up to deal with various aspects of the game during it's 14 day life-span.

You get to meet a whole host of characters involved with Jamie through Instant Messenger chats, his forums and even one or two phone conversations with other fans. Of course the other fans are all bots of one kind or another but it's surprisingly interesting stuff.

If you've got 20 minutes a day for the next two weeks it's worth checking out www.bbc.co.uk/jamiekane/

Posted by Antz at 12:06 AM | Permalink | | |

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