Roger is on the run. He pounds through Berlin. He cannot stop running, as he is being pursued by a professional bounty hunter and his every movement is being monitored on the Internet.
The manhunt began yesterday and is already front-page news in Germany. "Berlin Hunts Roger: $10,000 Bounty" screamed the Berliner Kurier. It sounds like a real-life update of the hunt for the child-murderer in Berlin in the 1931 film M. But Roger is a teacher from Amsterdam, not a criminal, and the first participant in RealityRun, Germany's latest post-Big Brother voyeuristic thrill.
His mission is to stay on the run in the city for 24 days and keep one step ahead of Israeli bounty hunter Jack Black. Black is billed as a "trained commando and sniper" and will be aided in his hunt by the "Reality Babe", a 22-year-old professional kickboxer - think Brigitte Nielsen meets Lara Croft.
But Roger's task isn't as easy as it sounds: he has been fitted with a webcam and a microphone, both of which are fed directly into the RealityRun website. Visitors to the website will be able to follow his movements and send clues to his whereabouts to the bounty hunter. If the Reality Runner manages to elude his pursuers for 24 days he will pocket $10,000.
RealityRun creator Alexander Skora says he got the idea for the game while running a marathon in 50-degree temperatures in Morocco last April. The 29-year-old lawyer from Berlin sees the game as a kind of post-modern Iron Man contest. But he is anxious to distance his venture from reality television hit Big Brother which transfixed audiences across Europe and is currently doing the same on Channel 4 with the prize of £70,000 sterling awaiting the occupant who manages to outlast all the others in popularity .
"We have set ourselves on a different level and have a much better set-up," he says. Already producers have started sniffing around for television and film rights and Skora is actively developing marketing spin-offs, from computer games to merchandise.
He is also planning to repeat the exercise in other cities, including Dublin. "The whole world is watching us," he says. If that isn't quite true just yet, it soon will be.
After the first RealityRun ends, Skora will bring the game to Vienna - echoes of Harry Lime in The Third Man - followed by cities all over Europe. Next year all the winners in cities around the world will compete in a final manhunt in New York.
RealityRun could become as big a phenomenon as Big Brother. Before the game even started the German website was logging 250,000 visits a day. It has already divided Germans into two camps, along the same lines as those for and against Big Brother.
One camp is wringing its hands over this further descent into a peep-show society, the other camp are busily organising themselves into syndicates to pool knowledge or start hunting themselves, spurred on by the lure of the $10,000 bounty.
Why anyone would want to put themselves through such an ordeal is obvious to anyone who has followed the exploits of Germany's Big Brother participants. Since the show ended they have been enjoying a very long 15 minutes of fame. No doubt Roger is hoping for the same.
At the moment all we know about him is that he is an "actively heterosexual" teacher from the Netherlands who enjoys chess. Every day visitors to the website will be drip-fed more clues and Roger will have tasks to perform that will bring him closer to being identified.
The RealityRun is happening now on the Internet at www.realityrun.com
