Yeah, apparently one post wasn’t enough to exercise this idea out of my head, so I wrote a little bit more on how The West Wing as a Telltale game could work. Specifically, on something broadcast television shows do in between their important direction altering plot-based episodes. Some weeks the episode is an easy watching piece of relative fluff where nothing much happens that would effect the overall plot of the show. A problem of the week episode as it were, but with less stakes.
Honestly, I figure this must be what a game designer’s napkins must look like in the pre-production phase of a game. A note jotted here, an idea scribbled there with a few references listed in other media so the idea can be easily referenced once the pizza and long hours have worn off.
Some of what I’m talking about could exist somewhere. It already does in one form, sort of. While writing it, I thought to myself, ‘yeah, kind of like Kentucky Route Zero did.’ Limits and Demonstrations and The Entertainment both have that in between effect by changing the pacing and stakes, while keeping the overall work consistent.
Go ahead and read my blathering thoughts on the type of thing I think video games generally won’t do over at PopMatters.
The one-off, non-plot-advancing episodes that are prominent in shows like The West Wing are partially a product of the way TV shows are ordered and aired in the US, typically with ~20-24 episodes per season and a mid-season break. The budget is usually per season, so it is typically distributed unevenly toward high-viewership episodes. This is very different than, for example, most major British shows which tend to favor ~6 episode seasons and more irregular airing schedules. It’s perhaps not surprising then that games have tended to mirror the British paradigm, since the longer, more irregular development schedule is closer to that one.
I don’t disagree, though in American television, and we do see some of this in The Walking Dead, the structure is well known and competent writers know to string along various “breather episodes” with connecting elements. We are very used to two types of TV shows in America: serialized and episodic. Serialized is your The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones. Each episode matters and is a chapter in a whole work. Episodic are shows with a something of the week, either monster like X-Files, mystery like Law & Order etc. Then there is The West Wing, which is sort of both. Most of each episode is concerned with a problem/circumstance of the week, but then they have elements, minor scenes or B-plots that string several episodes together into an arc. Sometimes these will leave lasting implications for later arcs.
My point is that there isn’t a variety in the content of these episodes. The hypertension works for The Walking Dead and probably Game of Thrones, but like I said last week I would like to see some branching out if they get material that can support it. In my mind all these musings are related to what a The West Wing Telltale game would look like.
So I hope it isn’t so much a development cycle constraining their thinking to the possibility, but just they haven’t licensed a property that such a possibility could be used in, yet. The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are self-explanatory as to why a slower, less intense pace wouldn’t be appropriate. The Wolf Among Us takes its cues from comic book serialization that usually eschews such material due to a publication schedule. Maybe with Tales from the Borderlands. Depends where they take that.