Tyler Mills, the lead character from DELETED: The Game’s online video series was killed in yesterday’s episode 5. Needless to say, this is a big big surprise for anyone following the show and playing the game. Is this going to be a problem for GEN247 Media the Inidie creators of the show?

If you’re one of those pedantic folks who actually reads the descriptions about the videos on Youtube, like me, you can’t help but notice that the entire purpose of the show and the game seems to “revolve” around Tyler:

The show revolves around Tyler who is struggling to piece together her life after a traumatic incident left her with a memory failure condition. Tyler develops a system to cope, recording important facts she uncovers in a chain of video logs. During the show’s first season, she finds herself embroiled in a conspiracy. Finding herself overwhelmed, Tyler seeks help from her online friends. The producers have hidden a trail of clues in each episode, all over the internet and selected real locations, setting up a massive search for clues.

So just what exactly do the Puppet Masters over at GEN247 propose to do now?

The things that makes this show so special is that it incorporates a level of audience interaction that is really unusual. Dependent upon your earned points you can interact with the cast online and by telephone, as well as participate in actual live events. Indeed the ability, or to put it better, inability of the participants to find out Tyler’s phone number is the reason why Tyler was killed. In other words, the success and failure of the audience has a direct impact on the show – this is really cool stuff. But…

Crawling the forums over at the main website and at the unfiction you’ll find some seriously unhappy fans. Redshoesrock, posted a big rant about his dissatisfaction this morning. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t know…for me, this whole thing is rather counter-productive...the writing [on the show] leaves much to be desired. Unless there’s some grand reveal happening, and I’m not holding my breath, did they or did they not just kill the entire reason of the show? I was lead to believe this revolved around a girl who suffered a traumatic incident and is trying to piece her life together while a conspiracy looms around her. That’s a paraphrase of what the site says, after all. So she dies, and another supporting character we knew even less about dies. I wouldn’t mind a supporting character getting bumped off, never mind the fact none of the characters have been fully fleshed out so their deaths have no lasting emotional impact, except that we only have five characters in the whole show here. Now three.

If you’ve stopped by this blog before you’ll be aware that I am a fan of the concept. that being said, I’m neither an experienced ARG (Alternate Reality Game) player nor do I really have the time to get into this one as much as I’d like to. It’s for that reason that I’ve not gone back and reviewed the series, yet.

But there is  general problem with the show…if you’re just interested in the story and the videos, it is becoming increasingly hard to follow the storyline.And it has only been 5 episodes.

I’m got a lot of respect for the folks doing this with no studio or company backing. Furthermore, I think that the ability to get involved with the individual characters online and to even participate in live events in NYC is absolutely the future of interactive entertainment.

I just hope that they know what they are doing with the game and show, and I’d be really happy to see the show itself be self-explanatory, without the need to get into the ARG.