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 Features
Why Bother With Episodic Games?
 Room to Experiment
Game critics have been bemoaning a dearth of innovation in console and PC gaming for years. But game developers -- like movie studios -- invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars into a game, so you pretty much need to be sure that what you produce will sell. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to try new things and experiment with gameplay.
Ultimately, the budget for an episodic game series could be as much, or more, than traditional shrink wrapped games, but episodic games have a built in feedback loop that a 40 or 60 hour game doesn’t, so episodic games can get better as they’re made.
In the world of television, my favorite example of this is a show like "Malcolm in the Middle." I loved the early episodes, but my wife hated them. As the show evolved, the writers and actors developed a better sense of what the show was about, what jokes made sense and what you could do with the characters. That evolution won my wife over. Episodic games have this same opportunity.
Let’s look at the first episode in the new Sam & Max series. Most reviews are very positive, but there are still aspects of the game that some players or journalists don’t like. Complaints about the gameplay duration aside (some folks just don’t "get" that it is an episode), the developers at Telltale Games can take that feedback and use it as they develop new puzzles and interaction in future installments.
More importantly, they can throw in more offbeat puzzles and gameplay, and take a risk, because the exposure in any given episode is relatively low. Even if a single game episode is a dud, as long as the quality of the series is high, the dud episode becomes a footnote. If the experiment is a success, and the audience embraces it, the experiment can have an impact on later episodes.
The improvements made to the second episode of Telltale's Sam & Max, "Situation: Comedy," could only have been implemented with the feedback loop of true episodic gaming.
Traditional game development does have a feedback loop, but with years between results. Betting the studio that the design decisions made for a sequel were the right ones can be disastrous if you were wrong.
With short iteration cycles, gameplay mechanics that an audience responds to can be used to turn a moderate performer into a hit. This model still needs to be vetted out in the video game world, but it works in every other form of media that we consume, so there’s no reason to think it won’t work for games.
As more and more episodic games are developed, a “pilot” friendly environment will likely also develop. Today, too many small studios make a pilot for an episodic game that is really just the first two hours of what was intended to be a forty hour title. That’s not a pilot. That’s a demo, and it feels like one.
TV networks have developed a good model for developing content that allows independents to be a part of the system. The networks screen or produce a ton of pilot episodes for shows, most of which never make it past the first viewing by a network exec, but the system allows content creators to try out ideas on relatively small budgets. If the idea works, you order six episodes and air them. If those six episodes get ratings, you order a season. There’s no reason that a similar model can’t be applied to the game industry with the same benefits: reduced risk for publishers and developers, and more opportunity to try out new ideas.
It is debatable whether a truly small studio can create an episodic series that achieves a quality bar that most gamers expect, but a small studio can create one really polished episode and a series of game design documents for more episodes and build out a team to create a season if it gets picked up by a publisher.
The promise of episodic is that as consumers of games, we might get more interesting games to play and we might get them more frequently.
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