Police procedural Tatort is one of Germany’s oldest TV shows and an institution – albeit mostly with the over-50s. In an effort to win over a younger fans, it has turned to AI.
“The Tatort team came to us and basically said: ‘Help. Young people don’t watch us,’” said Daniel Stolz, who is Senior Innovation Manager 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 answer that Stolz and his colleague Jasmin Käßer came up with to bringing Gen Z into the Tatort universe, was an AI-driven game.
It has escape room and role-playing elements and pitches players into the action as a rookie cop. They interact with AI-generated characters as they try and solve a homicide. These AI characters dish out clues and players interact with them, writing free responses that generate individual chatbot-powered responses as the case unfolds.
Tatort scriptwriters ensured the characters in the game properly resembled the ones from the show. Respeak was behind the chatbot tech.
Now in its third iteration, cases in the game build upon episodes of the broadcast show. The reality is players, who are thought to number in hundreds of thousands, will not finish and game and immediately switch on an episode of the TV drama. The benefit of getting younger demos engaged is more nuanced.
“They pay for public broadcasting, too, so we need to create experiences that find them where they are, rather than trying to change their media consumption behaviour,” Stolz said.
