Episodic Gaming Changing Gamemaking?

Chris Morris, of CNN's Game Over column, talks this week about how episodic gaming may be changing the way games are made. He explores the possibility that, with the success of GTA and Half-Life 2, developers may start looking towards more of a 'Saturday Matinee' approach; shorter individual game units, but a longer story overall. From the article: "Whether Valve will continue with episodic content after "Episode Three" hasn't yet been decided. The company knew its fans would likely buy the first installment regardless. But they don't know if players will stick with the formula. 'So far the feedback has been really positive and led me to believe we'll be continuing to do this in the future,' acknowledged Newell. 'But we want to get these three out, then sit back and do a post mortem. ... We're really interested in trying this, then sitting down with some customers and asking them, Do you want a TV series or do you want movies - or a mixture of both? It's like they've had a diet of feature length experiences for a long time and this is their first chance to try something different.'"

Re:Movies

[mendaliv]

Right- episodic content does take longer to produce than an episode of a TV series. I would argue that each episode of a game is more equivalent to a full broadcast season of a TV show.

This analogy carries, in that, if a TV show has a bad episode, it might not get cancelled (think The Haunting of Deck Twelve [startrek.com] from Voyager). On the other hand, if a TV series has a particularly bad season, it might get cancelled. Likewise in gaming, we could see the death of a series if a particular "episode" is not well recieved.

An interesting concept might be to move towards making games even more episodic; say, you purchase the season of the game, and once weekly an episode is released. Sort of like how You Don't Know Jack [wikipedia.org] the Netshow worked, except you're paying something. Then, the publisher could more accurately gear changes to the game and make improvements as is necessary. It would lead to the whole week-long break in gaming, so the stories would have to be geared towards this, but this is true of adapting any story to television in the first place; it's doable for games.

Re:HL2

[Slovenian6474]

I don't think HL2 in itself had a great story line. I do find it more appealing if you followed the with HL1, opposing forces, and blue shift. Also there's a great site here http://members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/ [members.shaw.ca] that sums up just about everything. If you single out HL2's story though, it is kinda boring.

Re:HL2

[Ford Prefect]

The actual storylines of Half-Life and its sequel are practically non-existent. The worlds are brilliant, however, as is the manner in which they are presented to the player. And to be honest, I'd prefer that to a typically bloated game story with endless cutscenes and exposition getting in the way of the actual gaming; being immersed in a realistically portrayed world where everything has its place is much more interesting to me.

Re:I hate it

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I don't see how any comparison can be made to TV...last time I checked you don't pay per episode of any show.

Think of Firefly. Canceled mid-series because it wasn't earning enough revenue. Much of the time, TV series are paid for one season at a time. Think of a season as an 'episode'. One of the trickiest aspects for scriptwriters is to work with the constraint that they don't know how many 'episodes' there will be. For example, Babylon 5 was conceived as a 5 series story. But apparently, due to threats of cancelation, it was shortened to 4 seasons, and then, after the story was accelerated, extended back to 5 seasons. These are the same issues that would face episodic game writers.