Editor's note: Figuring out episodic content is definitely one of the industry's greatest conundrums. Stephen uses the format of older games to explain how stuttered story dissemination isn't so strange. And while I'm not sure that Square titles would work as meted content, I do agree that game makers should take a lesson from the development cycle of TV production. -James

An episode of a good television show needs to contain three things: First of all, it should tell an interesting singular story that's accessible to someone who hasn't seen the show before. Second, it should develop the concerned characters in a way that leaves room for growth in latter episodes. Third, it should reinforce the theme that the program is exploring. Many top-tier video games already follow this structure, but we still have very few truly episodic games.

In this article, I hope to show how I would chop some previously published titles into bite-sized nuggets. Also, I'd like to offer some suggestions as to how a developer can build an episodic game from the ground up.

A lot of role-playing games are already episodic in nature, but developers insist on releasing them as one giant package. If you think about any western RPG you've ever played, you'll realize that they often contain a choice as to which area of the world you would like to visit first.

For example, Mass Effect offers three different planets to visit at the outset, and you can choose the order. Each one of those planets exists as a different episode, and each one follows my first rule, since they all have the introductions, rising action, and climaxes that any interesting fiction does. Mass Effect's intro worlds observe the second rule, more or less -- though one could argue that someone who has played the other parts of the game would get more out of them. But that's true of all episodic content. All three planets follow the third rule: They each ask you to examine whether or not the ends justify the means.

Other RPGs have similar episodic structure. While the Final Fantasy games may not give you any choice as to where you should go, they still have distinct episodes that can be isolated from the whole. Due to the inherent linearity of the series, if you wanted to make Final Fantasy episodic, you would need to fill in players with a pre-roll video. Television has used this sort of technique for ages in order to allow non-regular viewers to catch up on complex stories.

The next game I would divide into episodes is BioShock. 2K Boston's (Irrational Games) masterpiece is a great example of clearly defined levels that are independent of each other. The problem with BioShock is that it violates my second rule much like Final Fantasy does. Linearity is often thought of as a negative thing in video games, and in the case of episodic gaming, that's definitely true.

More or less, the demo of BioShock contained the first "level." It demonstrated what was going on in Rapture, and it introduced the major players of the underwater city's ongoing war. The episodic version of BioShock would give away the first episode for free in order to generate interest.

The second episode would be the medical pavilion. My first rule of episodic content said that an episode should tell an interesting story on its own. Dr. Steinman's obsession with aesthetic perfection -- at any cost -- is an interesting, self-contained story with a climactic ending. This level also fulfills the third rule because it reinforces one of Bioshock's key themes. The encounter with Steinman is the first instance where you see how a progress-driven society without moral safeguards will eventually break any rule necessary in the pursuit of success and perfection.

I won't go through all of the levels in Bioshock because it's a fairly long game. But, needless to say, the game divides neatly into episodes. 2K Boston thoroughly mapped the highs and lows of each section because they understood that each section was its own story. And as whole, the individual cells weave together to create the larger epic of Bioshock.

Which brings me to my last point: In order to learn how not to create an episodic game, take a note from Valve. Valve released two thirds of the Half-Life 2 episodes to much acclaim -- but it took them three long years to do it. And it will probably end up taking them three years or more to put out the final installment. Three entries in six or seven years hardly constitutes "episodic" gaming. How did a talented studio like Valve end up in the quagmire of inconsistently delivered episodic content? Simply put, they didn't think it through.

Well-executed television shows aren't shot during the season. The writers script well in advance, studios shoot a large portion of the season, edit, and finally release it over a several-month-long period. This approach of creating a backlog and meting it slowly provides the means to make a consistent, periodical release schedule work. Valve made the mistake of promising the content before they created it. That works well for movies, but it spells death for a TV show.

In order to make episodic content work, developers need to start thinking of levels as episodes. If a developer evaluates every level in its game in terms of my three rules, they would have no problem releasing content in a consistent manner. As it stands, developers are creating shorter games with cliffhanger endings -- then calling it episodic gaming. It's simple: If game makers want to understand what an episode is, they need look no further than their television screens.