My Big Brother

This article is about the game. For the episode of Scrubs, see My Big Brother (Scrubs)

My Big Brother is a mobile game that emulates the Big Brother Brasil TV show in a cell phone using Java technology. It is the first game known (2005) to provide real time interaction between a mobile phone and a television show.

The game

My Big Brother

My Big Brother (Meu Big Brother) was the first mobile game in Latin America to use GPRS connection to exchange data in a client-server scheme. The game turned out as a mobile content platform conceived to port the TV show’s events, moods and concepts to cellular phones, while allowing users to interact with the broadcast during polls, voting, popularity ratings etc.

Faced with the task of creating a mobile game to follow Brazilian's Big Brother TV series, the designer envisioned a game where the user had to select one of the actual houseguests as a 'pet' in the cellphone. The game connected to central servers and the pet actually performed, in real time, as the real houseguest in the show, thanks to a 24 hour content team that fed the servers with correlated behaviour. Everything that happened with the selected character in the TV show, live, happened to the representation in the mobile. Users could also interact with the show using the phone and changing the show’s outcome, as voting for evictions, leaders, and so on within the game environment. Picture it as a live tamagotchi, tied to real life events, in a mobile phone.

Designed to reproduce most of the reality show's drives and mechanics, the game links the user to a participant emulating the emotional tie found on the relation between television and public. Through that participant, the user reaches a unique view angle from the happenings inside the house and stay informed about everything concerning the show, in real-time. Since the game could be carried around in the user’s pocket to every place, 24 hours a day, it can be seen as the first ‘anytime, anywhere’ interactive television example from a technological standpoint. The user virtually carried the show with him wherever he went.

It is known that ‘My Big Brother’ was released in Australia following the series in that country, but the Australian version was not capable of connecting to central servers. Rather, it just kept the ‘tamagotchi’ aspect of the game, thus not a real example of media convergence as the original one deployed in Brazil in 2005.

See also

• Globo - the Media Group / Broadcast company responsible for the game.
• Big Brother Brasil - the Brazilian edition of Big Brother.
• Herois e vampiros - an online game with media convergence aspects produced by Globo.
• Henrique Olifiers - lead game designer of 'My Big Brother'.