The BBC has announced a new series of Doctor Who Adventure games. How does this fit in with where video game and TV technology are heading?

The BBC has announced that it'll be releasing four Doctor Who Adventure Games to tie in with the latest series of the hit sci-fi show. Mac and PC owners will be able to download each episode from the Doctor Who website, starting in June.

Fans worried about the authenticity of the titles should be impressed by the involvement of senior Doctor Who staff. Steven Moffat, the head writer and executive producer on the show will also be one of the executive producers on the games, and they'll be scripted by Phil Ford (co-writer of the Waters of Mars episode) and James Moran (Severance, Torchwood Children of Earth). Plus, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan have provided full voice-overs, as have other members of the cast. The games will be developed by Sumo Digital, the Sheffield-based studio behind the likes of Outrun 2006 and F1 2009. Hmm, a Doctor Who racing game, then?

Don't be silly. Charles Cecil the founder of Revolution Software is also onboard as a producer. He created the excellent Broken Sword series of twisty, engrossing adventure games, suggesting the Doctor Who titles will work within a similar genre. It also looks as though story threads will run between the TV episodes and the games, so narrative is clearly going to play a major part of the interactive editions.

As Piers Wenger, head of drama at BBC Wales put it: "There aren't 13 episodes of Doctor Who this year. There are 17 – four of which are interactive. Everything you see and experience within the game is part of the Doctor Who universe: we'll be taking you to places you've only ever dreamed about seeing – including locations impossible to create on television."

And to further excite Timelord fanatics, the press release adds, "The exact titles of the four episodes are being kept secret for the time being, but the four original stories will take players on a journey throughout time and space, including one location from the Doctor Who series which has never been seen before on screen. Players will encounter new and original monsters, in stories which form part of the overall Doctor Who canon."

Of course, the BBC hinted in January that it would be looking at creating interactive content around its key brands, appointing ex-EA bigwig, Robert Nashak as EVP of digital entertainment. Back then, however, it seemed that it would all be about the corporation's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, investigating the revenue-generating possibilities of games based around Dr Who, Top Gear, etc. But the Doctor Who Adventures titles will be free.

Whatever the financial model, it's reasonably impressive that the BBC, usually rather conservative with such technological initiatives, has leapt in to the emerging arena of cross-platform entertainment. But it does have some catching up to do...

The concept of movies and TV shows that cross over into the online interactive space is nothing new. A growing range of digital media agencies and non-traditional development studios have been creating experiences like this for the last decade. Channel 4 is hugely active in this space, and has been since running the experimental interactive show, Dubplate Drama in 2005, which allowed viewers to vote on the outcome of each episode. Nowadays, alongside its E4 Games site, it has a dedicated cross-platform development team that commissions interactive content to accompany its TV shows.

A key example is Misfits, the teen-orientated super hero comedy, which had a major online presence orchestrated by London developer, Six To Start. "It was obvious to E4 that they should do something online," says chief creative, Adrian Hon. "It's a young audience – the Skins audience – and a genre show. If you want to engage with these people and get them excited, you have to do it online. We worked with E4 to figure out the sort of community and experience that would really get people engaged, and to get fans of the show doing more stuff.

"The core of it was a website where you could get exclusive content and play games related to that week's episode. The element that people were really interested in was the social stuff where we tweeted as the characters both during the show and between shows. Simon had a Facebook feed where he put up content – it was the first time a UK broadcaster had done that."

Channel 4 Education is also a major experimenter with interactive content. Commissioning editor, Alice Taylor, has overseen a range of fascinating projects, including the cautionary social networking adventure, Smokescreen – also by Six to Start – which has just won the Best Game award at the SXSW festival. Right now Brighton-based digital entertainment studio, Littleloud, is filming a new interactive drama for the channel entitled The Curfew – written by games journalist Kieron Gillen.

It's a genre that goes back to the groundbreaking YouTube 'reality' show, LonelyGirl15 as well as Bebo's Kate Modern and Sofia's Diary series', which placed linear narratives within the conventions of social networking and content sharing sites. And in the US, there's iCarly, a TV show in which a schoolgirl sets up her own web TV series. The accompanying website is filled with games, as well as blog posts and photos added by the characters.

But the transformation of TV shows into games, and the development of online TV-style dramas, is just the beginning. What we're also seeing is a move in the opposite direction – with games becoming more like television. This is sometimes very subtle – the use of an episodic structure in "interactive dramas" like Heavy Rain and Alan Wake for example. This is also much more obvious in episodic, digitally distributed games like Telltale's Sam & Max and Monkey Island series', and the Blue Toad Murder Files from Buzz-developer, Relentless Software.

The latter is a classic murder mystery thriller in the style of those Sunday afternoon Agatha Christie shows, and it consciously uses – and mutates – narrative devices taken from the TV format. According to producer Jade Tidy this was a complex process, "We got a few early script drafts, including one from a TV script writer and what we found out very quickly is a complicated murder mystery script might work well for TV but isn't very fun when you add interactive elements, as it becomes frustratingly difficult to follow what's really going on in the story.

"We decided early on in development that we wanted a story arc across all the episodes (rather than standalone episodes with no connecting storyline), so we outlined the plot for the whole series before concentrating on the script for each individual episode. The fact our puzzles are quite strongly connected to the storyline has proved more difficult to work with than the episodic nature of the storyline."

When Relentless started focus testing the game they made an interesting discovery – participants were adapting their viewing behaviours, merging the relaxation of watching TV with the attentiveness of games playing. "The first couple we watched play the game started off very analytical – almost how someone who hasn't been a tester before would imagine they should be like. Then after about 15mins they sat back and snuggled up to each other, just as you might with your other half watching a film! They were very engaging to watch, the girl would mimic the characters, repeating 'MURRRDER' or the 'dun, dun, duhhh' music and although they were quite supportive of each other when puzzle solving, there was still a lot of competitiveness between them."

Through experiences like these, traditional barriers between interactive and linear broadcast content are crumbling. And in the background, the delivery platforms are changing too. A growing number of TV sets now come with internet connectivity (Samsung's Internet@TV range, for example, which even have their own app store), while more and more people are using services like iPlayer to watch traditional TV on the net.

Indeed, viewers are now creating their own converged entertainment experiences by texting, messaging and tweeting during shows – and this is something TV companies are keen to tap into; "social viewing" is an emerging field, a means of employing audience chatter into the very makeup of the show. In 2008, for example, MTV in the US realised that around 40% of 20-year-olds were using the internet while watching television, and so launched Backchannel – a sort of competitive Twitter service, designed to run alongside its teen soap, The Hills. Developed by New York agency Area/Code it allowed viewers to make snarky comments about characters – the funnier the remark, the more points they scored.

"Audiences are in the most part happy to use TV as a mild anaesthetic, but there are a growing number of people who have their laptops open at the same time as watching TV," says Rik Lander, founder of cross-platform development company, You Are Here. "These people are not simply seeking to turn their brains off with TV and we believe they should be served by TV offering them participation."

Lander is veteran of the web drama genre, having worked on several examples, including the BBC's 2006 interactive soap, Wannabes. He runs a website named Vonviral, which collects and comments on web-based dramas – he also lectures on multi-platform drama at the National Film and Television School. He uses the brain-twisting phrase 360 cross-platform pervasive transmedia to describe the burgeoning combination of TV and interactive mediums and sees a future in which interactivity becomes a staple element of familiar TV staples.

"When we watch TV we are passive, when we use internet enabled devices we are active – sending messages, bidding in auctions, buying things. [Last year] We used funding from Media Sandbox to devise formats for TV shows where audiences could have a massive impact on the outcome of the show through familiar forms of interaction. We tested several types of formats. A quiz show where studio contestants can buy answers from the audience. An impro game where five actors are directed by the TV audience to create a drama over 25 minutes. A reality show and a panel show."

The latter, named Viral Spiral, is apparently with production company Leopard films who are presenting it to broadcasters.

In the very near future, Hon suspects the concepts of social viewing, interactivity and web functionality will all align to create fully synchronized multimedia assaults. "If I was the BBC I'd think it was really smart to start doing enhanced iPlayer shows, so you have your window showing video from the programme, then you've got other stuff going on around it.

"The big problem is keeping up with all this. Imagine if you're watching Lost and you have to keep up with one guy's Facebook and someone else's twitter feed – it's too much of an effort. It needs to be, push one button and it happens. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that came out of the US soon, something for young adults like MTV or Nickleodean. That would be a smart move – something truly, truly cross-media …"

So a game based on the series is a good beginning for the Doctor, but what he really needs is a converged, pervasive social transmedia experience - and he'll need more than a (obligatory Doctor Who reference coming up) sonic screwdriver to build one of those...