Wild Card

In the past decade or so there has been a big movie by some game developers to have tried to combine television and video games. It sounds great, but also difficult. From what I have noticed it is much more difficult than you would think.

Look at Defiance. Defiance was both a tv show and an MMORPG " Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are a combination of role-playing video games and massively multiplayer online games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual world.

As in all RPGs, the player assumes the role of a character (often in a fantasy world or science-fiction world) and takes control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player online RPGs by the number of players able to interact together, and by the game's persistent world (usually hosted by the game's publisher), which continues to exist and evolve while the player is offline and away from the game." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_multiplayer_online_role-playing_game

The world of Defiance is a semi-post-apocalyptic earth where aliens have come to live with humans. It is very much a sci-fi future.

I myself found this to be very interesting and it drew me in to watch and play. I enjoyed it from the start. I had not seen a show take the sort of turns this one did but the acting was not always the best, and the plot fell a little flat towards the end of the first season. I did not really bother to keep up with the second season, but I did try the MMO. The MMO was interesting. It was set in a different city, but despite that, it was supposed to help influence the show just as the show would influence the game as time went on. It was a very interesting idea, The issue is it really was left at just that interesting. I feel this itself may have hurt the tv series.

Whether the television show was actually affected by the game or not there was the notion that it was. This would leave some gamers at least a little salty.Urban Dictionary: salty "Why would they be annoyed?" you may ask. The reason is that in most MMO's you play as different factions with different goals, so for example if you lost a major event that went on to affect the tv show, you might be angry that it was not your decision or goal that got placed within it. This also does not necessarily make for good writing for television. Allowing a game to affect your show means that you have to pick and choose what is going to happen in the show after the fact of what happens in-game instead of having a clear goal and story from the beginning.

Overall I think the idea of Defiance was interesting. The attempts to merge gaming and tv were not only available back in 2013 when Defiance came out but are becoming more prevalent today. WarGames is a new interactive tv show based on the film of the same name. however, it may end up just like Defiance and fade into nothingness. Although interactive tv may sound good, it does not necessarily make for good television.