Project · 2026

Roklue – Producing Interactive Living Room Content Experiences Embedded in Streaming Software

Roklue is an interactive game built directly into the Roku operating system. It launched in March 2026 with an Awards Season edition and reached roughly 90 million households. I served as executive producer and showrunner, working with B17 Entertainment, part of Sony Pictures Television.

Here’s how it came together, from the problem it set out to solve through to a 20-episode series.

The problem space: interactive, gamified merchandising

Roku plays an amazing role in the streaming eco-system: as the biggest market-share TV OS, they are basically a master programmer that helps audiences across all of the streaming services — so they’re invested in all of the streaming businesses’ success and connecting viewers with the right content.

When a viewer spends too long scrolling (aka decision fatigue), member health drops and frustration climbs, and there was evidence that a lightweight interactive experience could pull people out of that loop and back into watching.

Roklue was designed deliberately for that moment. It’s short-form, so it’s fast. It pulls video from a range of streaming partners, so the act of playing doubles as merchandising — and it links players directly into the titles being clued. Its trivia is streaming-adjacent by design, built to get a viewer’s brain moving toward genres, titles, and moments worth watching. As Lisa Holme, Roku’s Head of Content put it, the goal is to “connect streamers to shows and movies in a way that makes discovery feel less like work and more like play.”

Living room game design for engagement and retention

Research I’ve done on interactive television repeatedly supports the theme that most people would rather play dead-simple games — far from the video games that otherwise dominate living room gaming and nothing like the intricate and elaborate games that game designers gravitate toward. The tediously hard part is building a game simple enough to play instantly (no instructions) but stimulating enough for an advanced gamer who might find themselves sucked in.

Our dead-simple design for trivia entry: each option corresponds to a direction on the d-pad and a countdown timer fills the circle in the center.

Roklue solves this with two layers. Layer one is five trivia questions that start easy and get moderately harder, with an entry mechanism anyone can use immediately (a simple d-pad!). No instructions required, no special app, just your remote. You can play layer one and be just fine.

But layer two is the twist: every answer is also a clue to a final question… what movie or show is this? That second layer is where longer-term retention comes into play. We designed layer two as a puzzle, with misdirects and wordplay aimed at advanced players. At doubles as a retention hook, giving every player a reason to stay to the end to find out if their hypothesis for today’s title is correct. A team of trivia writers, consultants, puzzle designers and researchers helped me push the boundaries and playtest our way to the best story for each episode. We’ve published 20 games but wrote hundreds more.

Cross-functional project management

One of the most satisfying parts of Roklue was bringing a 3D version of Roku City to life in the program. It required careful coordination with internal Product, Brand and Marketing teams to ensure we perfectly stewarded this iconic element of Roku’s universe.

Interactive showrunning is a different job than traditional showrunning. It requires understanding product, design, and engineering as deeply as story, because every creative decision is bounded by a technical constraints and every technical decision constrains the creative.

That meant tightly coupled communication across every function. My writer’s room had to bend around UX constraints. My sound mixers had to work in a living room and make way for user-triggered SFX that happened in the software, over their mix. Editing needed frame-level precision to stay in sync with the game layer. Clip selection had to satisfy business-partnership requirements at the same time it served the story. And because Roklue lives on the Home Screen, the graphics had to meet Roku’s brand and design standards seamlessly. None of these teams could work in isolation and a large part of my job was keeping them in that lockstep.

End-to-end development and production

I had the rare chance to bring this project the whole distance, from one-line pitch to 20-episode order. Over about 18 months, I worked from defining greenlight criteria with a cross-functional team, prototyping the game, internal playtests, audience testing, beta testing, and finally going to series. The result was 10 beta games, 20 airable episodes and more than 800 trivia questions, produced by a team of roughly 35 (editorial staff, a writers room, clip curation, and operations) and delivered to 90 million households through the Roku Home Screen.

As Variety reported in its launch exclusive, the aim was to connect viewers with things they might want to watch in a way that feels fun rather than like a chore. The first edition launched alongside awards season, with future editions planned around other major cultural moments. For more, see Roku’s official announcement.