Facebook may be the default home for many gamification experiences, but we just ran into one built directly into YouTube. It’s called Zyrtec: Parks Unleashed, and it’s a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style interactive video clip game to promote the popular allergy pills (which I have actually taken daily for years).
It feels like a throwback to the early days of FMV (full motion video) gaming — a trend in the late ’90s to build games using clips starring out-of-work actors. It didn’t really work back then, and the gameplay style hasn’t aged too gracefully, but at least the video clips are well-produced in this case.
In the Zyrtec game, there’s some sort of heist caper to the solved, and a bunch of anthropomorphic dogs are involved, which makes sense, as pet allergies are one of the things Zyrtec protects against. After clicking around on the various screens for a while, picking responses from multiple choice lists to trigger the appropriate video clip from an on-screen character, I still had no idea what was going on, plot-wise.
If you do manage to figure it out, however, you can earn a chance to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet (good thing they didn’t go with the HP TouchPad).
The most interesting aspect was seeing YouTube used as an interactive game platform, and there’s actually a lot you could do with this kind of interactive storytelling, for both artistic and commercial purposes.
Coincidentally, one of the members of the creative team behind the game is one of my former co-panelists on the cult video game history web shows Best Game Ever and Play Value, Josh Shabtai, who has also developed a few iOS games, including the very cool Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner. I first heard about the Zyrtec game from his Facebook feed.
