Games vs. Drama You know when you watch a fun episode of Star Trek: TNG / Stargate:SG1 / Sliders or many other "episodic" adventure-dramas, the characters arrive in a situation, and then something bad happens.. usually with a time limit (ie. deadly meteor shower in 10 hours / one of group left behind and needs to get back to the stargate / strange phenomena). You then have the crew try several solutions to this, whilst trying to work out what is going on. Wouldn''t it be fun to play a game which gave this feeling? What stands in the way of games More like this? Remember TV and Games are VERY DIFFERENT media. Think about Star Trek, there is never any real possibility of the crew being killed. They always escape alive (most of them anyway). The solution is fixed they will always just work it out in time.. whereas what happens if you try and give the player Several Options to complete a level? In TV it is a fixed Drama, the time-limit isn''t real.. but providing a player with a time limit would make it play more tense... but how would you fix it so that if they dealt with the in game conflict well, that they could still get the right solution?

I have devoted so many thought cycles to this one you wouldn''t believe it.

One thing you need to think about is the personal element: A lot of what makes many of these episodes rich is that they impact a known character in a certain way. I haven''t seen as much of Sliders, but I seem to have watched an infinite amount of Babylon 5/DS9/TNG/Voyager, and I strongly feel that a lot of the drama would be lost if it happened to faceless tokens you didn''t care about.

In the context of a game, you''d need some threat of loss. If you couldn''t kill off characters, then you''d need to threaten with some type of unfavorable situation change: Worf''s dishonor and loss of home, citizenship, and status when he sides with the Federation at the start of the Dominion Wars; the loss of the relationship between Garibaldi and Sheridan after Garibaldi is kidnapped and brainwashed... that sort of thing.

If you''re being purely mechanistic about the challenges-- e.g., "fix this conduit" "disarm the doomsday device" etc.-- but there''s no relationship changes, you could still affect the crew with environment or world changes. For example, they could lose access to needed resources as a result of failure, or a war could break out if they fail to prevent it.

Or you could simply go with the most detestable option: When a character dies, you lose the game. (blech!)



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Just waiting for the mothership...