Episode – Choose Your Story, created by Pocket Gems, is a game where players can immerse themselves into an interactive story experience, making choices that influence the narrative. It is played on mobile platforms, which is crucial to its business model since players can pay for game resources with a single tap. While the game can be fun for players of all ages that enjoy listening in on drama, it is intentionally marketed to children, especially young girls. As I expand upon later, young girls are a great target audience for their business model as they are eager to consume juicy plot lines and explore more mature themes in the “safe” space that Episode provides.
Episode puts players at risk for addiction by exploiting their psychological needs for sensual stimulation and relatedness. The game embeds output randomness into its narrative progression to feed this addiction, crafting a predatory cycle of anticipation and reward. While Episode poses itself like many other games that use chance or probability to empower players with meaningful choices, the game merely creates an illusion of agency. In reality, it leverages dark design patterns enabled by randomness to nudge users toward addictive spending.
By first offering numerous free but meaningless choices to hook players, then gating significant plot developments behind paywalls, Episode uses output randomness to deceive players into believing they’re shaping the narrative— making them more likely to spend money once they’re emotionally invested.
As seen in the screenshots below, when responding to my character’s jerk boyfriend, Russ, I was presented with multiple “choices” that were essentially the same text, different font. So much so that Russ’ response— “Yeah, fine. Whatever”— could have been the response for any option I chose. While this “choice” is an opportunity for me to craft my character’s personality, this opportunity is meaningless as it has no effect on the narrative.
Even when presented with more distinct options like the ones below to accept or reject a classmate’s invitation to hang out, the narrative unfolded such that I eventually accept the plans despite my initial rejection.
This demonstrates how Episode creates only an illusion of player agency. While Episode poses itself as a “space with narrative possibility,” telling players and leading them to believe they’re “choosing their own story,” the game ultimately forces its own. This connects directly to concepts from addiction design, where gambling machines use “virtual reel mapping” to present odds that appear more favorable than they actually are. As Kevin Harrigan argues, this “misrepresentation of odds” is crucial, for it works “to hoodwink the human perceptual system and encourage player persistence.” Since Episode players believe they have better chances than they actually do, they’re more likely to continue playing, priming them to eventually also spend.
After experiencing several free choices that hooked me into the storyline, I encountered a paid option that would let my character dramatically escape with their love interest on a motorcycle, rightfully humiliating her ex-boyfriend and showing up everyone at school. Unlike the previous screenshots where free options left my character silent, the dialogue accompanying paid options is intentionally written to be more enticing, making the free choices seem dull in comparison. I think there are two players in this situation:
- Players who have been led to believe they possess real agency throughout the game, and are motivated to maintain this sense of autonomy and control. For these players, Episode’s early free choices create the expectation that their decisions matter, initially satisfying their psychological need for autonomy as described by Self-Determination Theory— a core factor in game satisfaction. Thus, when the most exciting, dramatic, or socially rewarding outcomes are suddenly locked behind a paywall, this sense of agency is manipulated. These players are compelled to pay in order to preserve the feeling of control and continue shaping the narrative in meaningful ways.
- Players who recognize that their earlier choices were largely illusory, and see the paid option as the first real opportunity to exercise power and experience a more dramatic, emotionally rewarding narrative. For these players, Episode withholds true narrative impact and excitement— needs tied to power, achievement, and sensuality in Murray’s taxonomy. The paid choice is enticing because it finally promises the control, recognition, and heightened experience they’ve been seeking, even if it comes at a cost.
For both players, Episode makes free choices bland and paid choices irresistible, motivating spending. As highlighted in the psychological needs lecture from class, the “motivational pull” of games is strongest when autonomy and relatedness are at stake.
Resultantly, Episode’s use of chance is morally impermissible. The game deliberately frustrates players’ core psychological needs to monetize their desires, creating a sense of deprivation before selling the solution. Episode misuses core formal elements of games— particularly its resources like gems and tickets— not to enable meaningful play, but to manufacture scarcity and push players toward purchases. This violates the core principle that games should be “dynamic systems that support interaction for an aesthetic goal,” as the promised aesthetics of fantasy, narrative, discovery, and expression are locked behind paywalls. Compared to genre peers, Episode misses opportunities for ethical innovation. Games like Choices: Stories You Play and Life is Strange have demonstrated that interactive storytelling can offer both meaningful agency and commercial success without resorting to manipulative monetization. By contrast, Episode undermines its own promise of narrative freedom, prioritizing profit over player well-being.
This is further complicated when we consider the target audience: young girls. Young girls often experience the kinds of situations in Episode firsthand at school— crushes, desires for popularity, and early exposure to romance, relationships, and sexuality. While they’re too young to fully participate in these experiences, they remain naturally curious about them. Episode strategically positions itself as a “safe space” for this curiosity and exploration, but then exploits these natural developmental needs through predatory monetization. By gating the most emotionally resonant and “mature” content behind paywalls, the game creates a problematic dynamic where young players are more susceptible to spend money or remain frustrated in their urge to explore these themes.
