The answer to the question “What is a television game?” It is interesting and easy to find. In the late 1950s, Playhouse 90 was a television series, lasting 90 minutes. From the earliest times, there were two broad categories of television programs: drama and variety shows. The ancestry of television dramas can be traced back to radio dramas. Over the years, the concept of teleplays underwent many changes and today it has come to represent a script written or adapted exclusively for the small screen. In a broader sense, a play is simply a script, a composition that will be used for the production of movies, plays, or television shows. A play has all the elements and form that will best fit the television screen and is written with descriptions, instructions, and dialogue to suit the television industry. By now you should have at least part of an answer to the question “What is a television game?”
Another part of the query, “What is a teleplay?” It has to do with its structure and conventional act format. Both are basically consistent across all episodic TV shows. The only characteristic that distinguishes a play from scripts for films and plays is the need to intersperse all dramatic writing with commercial breaks. Television has been hailed as the largest mass advertising medium for more than half a century. It is the fastest way to reach the masses, and this prominence has not been deterred even by the introduction of the Internet. The targeting ability of television advertising is due to the impact created by sound, sight and movement. Advertisers have come to depend on television to raise awareness of their products. Teleplays are structured with built-in time allotted to commercials. Writers looking to get an answer to “what is a television game” should read as many popular television scripts as possible.
Determining what a television game is and how best to entertain viewers has been the subject of controversy since the evolution of television. Man’s attention span has been estimated to last about 15 minutes at a time. Teleplay writers take this into account when planning commercial breaks. Since one page of script equals one minute of airtime, the writers ensure that after every 14-15 pages they culminate the scene, preferably in dramatic suspense. This keeps viewers glued to ongoing teleplay, without switching to another channel. The excitement draws them to discover what happened next in the story.
The puzzle of determining what a television game is will be solved when you begin to write specifications for different shows that are already on the air. Please watch these programs carefully and, if possible, read the scripts. Study the style of all the characters, how they speak, what they do, and how they act and interact. The increase in the number of channels with their individual style of broadcasting the shows has broadened the market for budding, new and talented teleplay writers.