Badgeville powers gamified reality TV show Escape Routes

Gamification, the use of game-like rewards in non-game applications, is moving into reality TV. Badgeville will provide gamified achievements to the multiplatform reality TV series Ford Escape Routes, where six teams of two people compete in a road trip competition from city to city.

The series is being created by TDI and digital agency Rokkan, which are tapping Badgeville for the digital companion to the TV series.

Viewers at home will participate in real-time on EscapeRoutes.com, helping their favorite team win. The viewers can help out the teams by playing interactive challenges and games online. Badgeville provides those challenges.

“Badgeville’s technology enabled the team at Rokkan to easily deploy their strategic, creative, and technical visions around this new interactive form of entertainment,” said Jim Blackwelder, executive technical director at Rokkan. “We selected Badgeville as one of our key technology partners because of their flexible and powerful gamification platform. Working with Badgeville’s unique features, we were able to easily build a sophisticated and unique gamified user experience that couldn’t have been achieved otherwise.”

Ford Escape Routes airs Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. eastern on NBC and will also air on mun2, the leading bi-cultural cable network for young Latino Americans, Saturdays at 11 p.m. eastern.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.