Today my old friend David Hyman launched Chosen, a very compelling new talent contest app where you can be both the talent and the judge.
Players upload your own best performance videos or make one with Chosen's pretty great video karaoke tool that's a barrel of laughs in its own right. But the game isn't designed just for those who have the guts to record suburban bedroom raps or ukulele pixie dream girl ballads. There are also multiple judging games, like one where you try to predict which of three short performance clips is the crowd favorite and another in which you judge the other judges who can rise to in-app stardom themselves. It's all quite multi-layered, meta, and very clever. Indeed, Hyman and team designed Chosen's game mechanics in collaboration with cross-platform gaming vet Cormac Russell whose previous credits include Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers and Uncivilized: The Goblin Game. Chosen is an addictive amateur hour for short attention spans and micro-celebrities. As Nick Philip once said, "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 megabytes." From David's launch post on Medium:
We're attempting to free performance competition from the confines of linear-based television and traditional media. The most interactivity we see via TV shows has been the concept of text voting. And when smart phones came out, these shows essentially did nothing more than take text voting, stick it in an app and proclaim, "We have an app now!"
Chosen turns the genre on its head, where not just performers compete, but the 99% of us, who are fairly talentless as performers, compete to prove our expertise as judges. We can't all perform, but we all have taste (well, at least we think we do).
Chosen (Chosen.fm)
