Episodic gaming

Clive Thompson is taken with the idea that we’re about to witness the dawn of “episodic gaming”:

A good TV series is a well-honed machine. This is particularly true of a mystery or action series like 24 or Lost: Each week you get fiendish plot twists, Elizabethan character conspiracies, hinted-at clues — then an agonizing cliffhanger. No wonder we wind up planning our schedules around these shows, plunking down on the couch to get our weekly fix.

What if video games worked that way too?

[…] developers are crafting titles that function more like a TV series. Valve recently released the first “episode” of a Half-Life trilogy that will span the next year. Another game company, Ritual Entertainment, is crafting a series from its SiN franchise. Like TV shows, each installment will be a bite-sized chunk — a mere four or five hours of play — that collectively builds into a big story arc. If they’re successful, the future of gaming will look less like Casablanca and more like The X-Files. […]

It’s an interesting concept, to be sure. I do see one difference between a serial computer game and a written serial. (I know the excerpt quoted above draws a comparison with serials on TV, but further on in the article Thompson waxes lyrical about the opportunities for developing in-depth characterisation the serial format offered the likes of Dickens; many of the techniques used in great serial TV shows were borrowed from novelists, after all.) It’s easy to see how someone who jumps on board a serial game with the first episode could get hooked and find themselves buying the next half dozen stories as the characters face new challenges and the world in which they operate expands. However, presumably if a serial game is released across a number of years the software’s authors will ideally want to update their game’s engine to take advantage of improvements in technology and perhaps to revamp the controls in the light of experience. That makes for a problem that doesn’t apply to written serials.

With a series of novels that were conceived as such from the outset it’s comparatively straightforward (in theory) for the publishers to welcome readers who jump on board with the fourth episode by keeping the earlier instalments in print - there are no differences in the technology involved as far as the end user is concerned, so notwithstanding changes in the author’s style the whole story will flow across several episodes whether you dive in with the first episode or the last. With a serial computer game that is sufficiently popular to justify several releases over a period of two or three years or so, won’t a compilation of all the episodes look and feel a bit strange what with the earlier instalments looking and possibly playing significantly differently to the latest ones? Will players be bothered when they pick up an earlier instalment only to find that it looks rather old-fashioned and doesn’t play as well as the latest?

How could the publishers solve this? Freezing the game engine and controls at episode one could leave the third or fourth or fifth episode of the game looking a bit primitive compared to contemporary releases, but then it may not be worthwhile going back and retrofitting improvements to earlier instalments for the sake of keeping up with the latest trends and technology. One answer would be a twofold strategy: keep the entire span of a story to, say, eighteen months or so, and release instalments much more frequently. The question is whether such a short lifespan for a serial will hinder the aim of getting players hooked on the game’s characters. Time will tell, no doubt.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to see someone trying something a bit different in the gaming market.