Police procedural Tatort is one in all Germany’s oldest TV exhibits and an establishment – albeit largely with the over-50s. In an effort to win over a youthful followers, it has turned to AI.
“The Tatort staff got here to us and principally mentioned: ‘Assist. Younger folks don’t watch us,’” mentioned Daniel Stolz, who’s Senior Innovation Supervisor at SWR X Lab, the innovation division of German broadcaster SWR, as first reported in a subscription-only piece for the European Broadcasting Union’s members.
The reply that Stolz and his colleague Jasmin Käßer got here up with to bringing Gen Z into the Tatort universe, was an AI-driven recreation.
It has escape room and role-playing components and pitches gamers into the motion as a rookie cop. They work together with AI-generated characters as they try to clear up a murder. These AI characters dish out clues and gamers work together with them, writing free responses that generate particular person chatbot-powered responses because the case unfolds.
Tatort scriptwriters ensured the characters within the recreation correctly resembled those from the present. Respeak was behind the chatbot tech.
Now in its third iteration, instances within the recreation construct upon episodes of the published present. The truth is gamers, who’re thought to quantity in lots of of 1000’s, won’t end and recreation and instantly change on an episode of the TV drama. The good thing about getting youthful demos engaged is extra nuanced.
“They pay for public broadcasting, too, so we have to create experiences that discover them the place they’re, slightly than attempting to vary their media consumption behaviour,” Stolz mentioned.
