As the videogame industry has struggled to remain profitable in recent years, a television-centric approach to doing business has grown more appealing. After years of experimentation at the margins, episodic gaming is becoming a credible alternative to the old business model of selling a single boxed game in a store.

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“ It's a brutal time to be in console development.

“ Service providers are less interested in creating self-contained works.

“ They will be the last victims.

Most of these changes have little to do with improving the player's experience and are instead corporate reactions to changes in the market that have made their games suddenly seem less worthwhile in comparison to all the alternatives. But the rise of serialized gaming is a way of postponing change, not embracing it. Halo 4's Spartan Ops mode is the most dramatic advance into a serialized television model. The mode tells a separate story from the single-player game, and is meant to be played in cooperative groups, supplanting Halo: Reach's Firefight mode. 343 has stated that Halo 4 starts a new trilogy for Master Chief, so the addition of still another story-based mode in between the acts of a larger series is a bizarre kind of excess -- almost an acknowledgement of how the game's stories have become near meaningless explanations that always end with players back where they started, advancing through a series of laser gladiator arenas.It is the most insidious form of content creation, thinking of a work not as a self-complete whole, but as an open-ended hub whose primary concern is keeping the audience from leaving.The first season of Spartan Ops is available for free and will last for 10 weeks, giving players 50 new missions to play through, which is an entire game's worth of new content. Neither Microsoft nor 343 have specified how subsequent seasons will be handled, but it seems obvious that they will be sold, either episode by episode or as an inclusive season pass.It's a peculiar strategy and one that many large publishers have pursued lately, leaving open pipelines for downloadable additions meant to keep players from selling their game discs to GameStop and adding to the churn of used game sales. The prospective model is that fewer people will grow tired of the game if there's a regular stream of new content to play, and thus used game stores will have fewer copies to sell."The theory was, let consumers know there's a reason to hold onto your games because the bulk of the impact of used game sales on front line sales is in the first six weeks," Take Two's Strauss Zelnick said at a ThinkEquity Conference in New York . "So if we can get people to hold onto their game for the first six weeks, the titles aren't in stores in the used game section, which means people have to buy the front line title from us."Approaching game development in this way comes with the added bonus of being able to repackage the downloadable content into a deluxe re-release a year or so later, keeping the game's branding fresh in consumers' imaginations while the studio busies itself with the heavy lifting of making a full sequel, and the publisher gets a little more money out of the deal.There is a danger in internalizing these changes as necessary business measures for publishers to stay profitable because it obscures the fact that there is almost no servicing of a player's desire in these models. There is a nominal effort to create extra content that will appeal to players, but the core motivation is monetary and not creative.It's a brutal time to be in console development. This generation has seen the dissolution or diminution of a great number of once-admired studios, including Pandemic, Free Radical, Bizarre Creations, Eurocom, Silicon Knights, Radical, 38 Studios, Ensemble, a significant percentage of SEGA's studios, THQ San Diego, Kaos, and many more. Increasing development costs are harder to recoup at standard retail prices, while a flourishing number of cheap or free competitors on mobile phones, tablets, and in browsers make the time investment of console game design less enticing than in previous years."We're no longer competing with traditional console companies, but our competitive landscape includes the likes of Google, the likes of Amazon, it includes obviously the likes of Apple," Phil Harrison, the newly appointed head of Microsoft Game Studios, said at the London Games Conference . He went on to describe the studio as a "devices and services" company and not one focused on retail products.The safest gambit in this environment is to transform from content distributors to service providers -- to stop inventing new kinds of games and focus on repackaging old ways of playing into more appealing products. Service providers are less interested in creating self-contained works and more interested in creating permanently unresolved play spaces consumers pay to access, like gym fees made more persuasive by the promise of new machinery every month. Even Nintendo, the long-time antagonist of online add-ons, has started selling level packs for Mario.Over the years, studios and publishers replicate and refine these elementally powerful experiences and in the process make the once spectacular seem familiar and predictable -- they tame it, transforming "spectacle" into "service." One can't sell the familiar and predictable as if it were epic grandeur. As the technical trickery behind Call of Duty's once overwhelming war traumas and Halo's once sublime alien landscapes become more obvious, the value of trying the newest version thins.It's hard to see this effect at the very top of the industry because brands like Halo, Mario, and Call of Duty were among the first and most recognizable in brands of their various categories, and they come with the deepest financial guarantees of those who distribute them. They will be the last victims. But the first to pay the price for the creeping boredom of the market are, instead, all those poor souls sent to create variations on Halo, Mario, or Call of Duty, trawling for excess consumers. Kaos, Free Radical, Eurocom, Bizarre, Pandemic, et al.Serialization had been well-established before TVs turned into a consumer sensation in the 1950s. Newspapers and magazines serialized fiction to keep their readers interested, with everything from Madame Bovary to The Pickwick Papers. In the early 20th century, radio broadcasts picked up on the value of the serial as well, and even movie theaters ran looping reels of short serials in the morning and early afternoon hours to draw in kids and idlers before the evening's main feature. In every case, these were marketing gimmicks, companies that had space to fill, distributors of content who realized they had no content, and so they scrambled to invent it and stretch it out as long as could be.Even in television one can see just how warped the form can become, when we internalize the logic of corporations as our own. In its original form television was intended to be a kind of ur-internet, connecting distant places and people to one another by recording sounds and images in one place, translating them into a signal, and sending them to a receiver in another location.This has very little to do with what we mean when we talk about television today. The word has come to encapsulate a very specific approach to an open-ended piece of technology, largely defined by the ways corporations use that technology to make money for themselves. Twenty-two minutes of a "sit-com," 42 minutes of drama, commercials every five to eight minutes, cliff-hangers in every which direction. We are so defeated by the aesthetic of business that we have defined an entire medium by it.Serialized or season-based games work well on platforms without any upfront purchase, or which can be played on devices with productive uses like cell phones and tablets, where one expects periodic intrusions in the experience with incoming messages or calls, where an advertisement or a nominal fee are acceptable compromises for a few minutes time out of mind.Yet, there is still a very real and culturally vital role for dedicated video game consoles in the home, just as there is still a place for movie theaters. There is an enduring value in having a place formally and conceptually separate from every other distraction in your life, where you can go and not repeatedly bound up against the artificial time-limit of this episode's sponsor, a place where a person can luxuriate in an experience that is broad and consuming and without precedent. In structural terms, whenever something goes episodic it is a sign that the whole was not novel enough to sell on its own, and so it required sponsorship and the lightly diminished expectations of a serial audience.Players with $300 and $400 boxes connected to their televisions want the unknown pleasures of newness, the spectacle of unpredictability, and the thrill of not knowing how the formula will work itself out in advance. Movie theaters don't sell audiences a ticket to a show and then invite them to come back for a 20 minute viewing of a side story every week for the next 10 weeks. Serialized content is added value and certainly wonderfully creative things can be done at any length and in any format, but no one ever hears about the wonderfully creative idea that could only be accomplished in a 10 minute cooperative mission. It's always the other way around. "We need five new, 10-minute cooperative missions. Someone think up something."This is institutionalizing the absence of ideas, and selling it back to the audience as if it were something new. If, as Harrison suggests, there is no longer a market for consoles and self-contained game experiences, it won't be because the audience wasn't there. It will be because there was nothing more interesting to play than Mario, Halo, and Call of Duty, and after a while that stopped being good enough.

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. He only watches reality television. Follow him on Twitter @mike_thomsen