Discussion Main / PrisonEpisode

If you ask me, if a level or stage of a game takes place in a prison (as in more than a flashback or a 5 minute sequence) then it should count as a prison episode because, within that game, it IS a prison episode. Obviously in almost all cases a game is not going to be anywhere near a TV series or Comic Book series length, so an allowance must be made for that. For instance, take Fable. At one point your character is captured by the Big Bad and thrown in his prison. You then spend a considerable amount of time escaping this prison and rescuing your mother. That, IMO, would count as a prison episode because it's a significant part of gameplat (ranging from an hour to possibly two of total gameplay). On the other hand, a game like The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay takes place ENTIRELY in a prison and thus would not be a Prison Episode. Does that help?

When I edited in the videogame section from Prison Sequences, I did a quick sorting of the examples there into those that belong in Prison, and those that belong here. I also hacked off a lot of verbiage, and fixed the wicks.

Now, I might have been wrong about one or more examples, and the videogame list can certainly need a loving editing hand (I know too little about videogames for that), but the section absolutely belongs here.

Tell you what. I`ll go to the discussion pages of each video game example's work page, mentioning the points each of you made along with my own, and see what conclusions people there come to.

There we go. Done.

Well, at least for each entry that potholed to a works page.

Well, I think.

The problem we have here though is that we can't decide if something fits the description of this trope until we decide what the trope is. So when the Trope Repair Shop opens back up again, I'll open a thread and see if we can't come to a conclusion on what this trope doeds/should mean. Bear in mind this may or may not fit in with the definition as you originally defined it in your YKTTW, particularly if we decide it really does cover prison levels of video games as well as prison episodes of series.

Well, to me it's pretty clear that "episode" must be used pretty loosely here on TV tropes (as you can see in the tropes under the Episodes index).

An episode to me is simply a reasonably well-defined part of a larger work, that has an internal structure (or whatever way we can keep it separate from Scenes. That's why I listed The Borders of Infinity from the Vorkosigan Saga here instead of prison — it is a small part of a much larger work/set of works.

So this arguably transcends Prison Episode — it concerns almost every episode trope we have. All of them potentially has this problem (which at least to me isn't a problem).

Okay now I'm confused as hell, because by your definition, Matt, the example you added today (9/22) doesn't match your criteria at all.

What do you mean @ battosaijoe11

IMO it is only necessary to do it with the relevant episode(s). Usually, there are subpages because the main page became too unwieldy with tropes.