Managing email, with its dozens of unwanted promotions and hundreds of spam messages, can be a tedious task that many users put off until they accumulate thousands of emails waiting to be read, archived or deleted. With the intention of bringing a little fun to that task, and taking advantage of the Halloween celebrations, the creative studio Uncommon has launched a mobile video game that turns emails into zombies to annihilate.

In collaboration with the digital studio Resn, it has created “The Unread”, a free mobile experience for browsers that allows Internet users to connect their Gmail accounts and delete their spam from their inbox. It is an action and horror video game, type “slasher”, that turns an everyday act of digital life into a wild and, at the same time, useful pastime.

When connecting the email account, the video game automatically calculates the emails accumulated in the inbox without reading, and converts them into objectives within the dynamic. However, the tool requires a minimum of 101 unmanaged messages; and if you meet it, “The unread” invites you to “subscribe to several useless newsletters” to enjoy the experience.

Beyond providing entertainment, the intention of the entertainment is to provoke reflection on the industry’s approach to automation, usually more focused on efficiency and time savings than on emotions. The initiative is presented in a context in which an average user can accumulate thousands of unread emails, many of which are not considered important.

“Most tools designed to “fix” our digital lives remove the emotion from the experience. We wanted to do the opposite.“; commented Nils Leonard, Co-Founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, according to Little Black Book. “‘The Unread’ is deliberately visceral, crazy, cathartic and entertaining. It invites us to reflect: what if automation were not the only answer to digital overload? Perhaps play, humor, and interaction can be just as effective in motivating behavior.”.