How to Make a Game Show

Decide on question categories for each episode. All quiz games, from the weekly trivia game at your local bar to Jeopardy, divide their questions into themed categories.

• Categories can be as broad or specific as you like, but have a good mixture of the two.
• Examples of broad categories might include: science, history, music, or politics.
• Examples of more specific categories might include: endangered species, World War II, punk music, or U.S. presidents.
• Although you can repeat categories from time to time, vary them as much as possible between episodes. You don’t want contestants to be able to predict what types of questions you’re going to ask, and you don’t want your audience to get bored.

Follow a strict research routine. A successful quiz show relies on the consistent production of high quality questions. It’s important that you have a large bank of questions to draw from, and that you do all the research necessary for the show ahead of time, so you don’t get caught unprepared.

• Develop more questions than you need. You can always save some questions for the future. This strategy also gives you to option to choose the best, most interesting questions from a larger pool rather than making do with the first handful of questions that came to mind.
• Work ahead of time. Don’t put off research for the last second, as you may run into a time crunch
• Organize a team of researchers. Draw on the strengths of each individual researcher and delegate specific categories to them. For example, researchers with scientific backgrounds should develop science-themed questions, which researchers with English backgrounds should develop literature-themed questions.
• Follow a research schedule. Don’t allow yourself to get off track during the week if you plan a weekly show. After delegating responsibility to your research team (or simply concretizing the categories for yourself), set deadlines for when questions will be due.
• For example, if you have a team, you might set a mid-week deadline for a pool of questions three times the size of what you need for the episode. Two days before the episode, you must winnow that pool down to the questions you will actually use that week.

Avoid question banks. Although you can find websites where trivia-type questions are provided fairly easily, you should only use them as a last resort, because everyone has access to that same bank of generic questions. Audiences and contestants will be far more engaged with interesting, challenging questions that can’t be found in a generic trivia bank, but which you or your team found through thoughtful research.

Pique the audience’s interest. When developing your questions, keep your audience in mind. Steer clear of topics that might bore them; for example, an entire category devoted to the periodic table of elements might get tiresome.

• Consider who you’re writing this show for. Depending on your demographic, you’ll need to develop different strategies to attract viewer interest.
• If the show is geared toward teenagers, you can develop questions about pop music, movies, or young adult novels.
• If the show meant for people who wish to watch academically rigorous competition, focus on the types of subjects taught in university classes: philosophy, political science, etc.
• Questions about topical events and stories currently in the news can also make your viewers perk up.

Don’t be too obscure. If the questions are consistently too difficult for your contestants to answer, you might see a decrease in potential contestants. Furthermore, the audience will likely grow bored with the show if contestants are consistently unable to field the questions.

• While it’s good to have challenging questions from time to time — ones that are designed to stump everyone — the majority of your questions should skirt the fine line between challenging and obscure.
• You can rank the questions within each category by difficulty, beginning with easier questions and building up to more difficult ones.

Create a variety of challenges. Although the talent of your contestants is the real selling point in this genre of game show, you also want to vary the challenges enough to both keep them on their heels and keep your audience engaged. Before you even begin filming your pilot episode, plan out the challenges you want your contestants to complete for the entire season of your show.

Have your contestants perform classical feats. Many performance competition game shows focus on skills that have a revered tradition with well-loved classics. If your game show falls into this category, the people who watch your show might respond well to watching modern-day contestants pay homage to the tradition of their art.

• For a cooking game show, have contestants recreate classical dishes with a long tradition, such as chicken cordon bleu or a croquembouche.^[12]
• For a singing game show, have contestants sing old standards that demonstrate their ability to step into a song imbued with someone else’s legacy — Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” or Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” for example.

Ask your contestants to reinvent classics with a new twist. While it takes a great deal of skill to execute a classical standard, asking your contestants to bring their own personality and point of view to a well-loved classic presents an interesting challenge.

• For a dancing game show, you might ask competitors to create new choreography for a song that has a beloved performance already associated with it — Gene Kelly’s performance of “Singing in the Rain,” for example.^[13]

Challenge your contestants to prove their technical skill. While you want to design many of your challenges to highlight your contestants’ creativity and innovation, showcasing their technical skills can also enthrall viewers.

• For a dancing game show, see how many pirouette turns dancers can do without losing their balance, for example.

Present timed challenges to your contestants. Sometimes, it’s hard to challenge a skilled batch of contestants. A good way to put pressure on them when challenging their technical abilities is to place a time restriction on their task.

• For a cooking game show, for example, you might see which contestant can Brunoise dice a pile of vegetables most quickly with an even cut.

Allow the contestants to demonstrate their personality. Though some of the challenges can be about technical proficiency, design other challenges to set contestants up in a way that allows them to showcase their personalities.

• On a cooking game show, you might ask contestants to cook a dish that speaks to them from their childhood.
• On a singing game show, you might challenge the contestants to compose their own songs rather than simply perform those of others.

Push your contestants to innovate in their field. In some fields, such as singing and dancing, it may be more difficult to demonstrate innovation because the performers are not necessarily the ones composing or choreographing the pieces. However, if your show showcases a field where your contestants can push the envelope in their industry, design challenges that lead them toward innovation.

• For a fashion design game show, ask contestants to create an evening look geared toward women ten years from now.
• For a cooking show, ask contestants to deconstruct a simple dish or simplify a complex dish.

Force your contestants to work in a wide variety of styles. Although you want your contestants to be able to demonstrate their own personalities and styles, you also want to see how they can adapt to a wide variety of constraints.

• For a dancing game show, have them work in styles from ballet to hip hop to classical Indian folk dance.
• Have cooking game show contestants cook vegan dishes one week, then break down and butcher sides of beef for their own steak dishes the next.

Challenge your contestants to outdo each other in strength competitions. There are a number of different ways you can test contestants’ strength in that are more entertaining than simply having them lift weights in a gym. Some examples might include:

• Putting them through a classic childhood exercise like a wheelbarrow race; not only do the contestants have to prove their arm strength over a long distance, but the audience can enjoy laughing along with grown contestants engaging in childish games.^[14]
• Recreate a fun state fair environment by having contestants throw balls at targets for prizes; however, the balls should be heavy medicine balls, and the targets should be far away.
• Use your imagination — there are any number of ways to have fun while challenging muscle strength.

See how fast your contestants are. You can have them compete head on in simple racing heats, or you can make it a little more interesting by asking them to complete unrelated tasks during their race. For example, contestants sprint for 50 yards (45.7 m), solve a riddle that’s taped to a card at the 50 yard (45.7 m) point, sprint back to the starting point, solve a math problem, sprint up a deck of stadium stairs, recite the alphabet backwards, then sprint back to the starting point. Again, you can jazz up the contest however you want, but you want to showcase your contestants’ speed.

Test their coordination. This skill set might have the most potential for entertainment value in a game show setting. You might have contestants engage in an old fashioned pie toss, a dunk tank, or an overgrown, amped up game of dodgeball. A bonus round challenge might be to award extra points to whichever contestant can hit a full-court basketball shot first.

Put contestants through an obstacle course. Obstacle courses raise the stakes by forcing contestants out of their comfort zone. You might set up a military-style outdoor obstacle course, with climbing walls, balance beams, lift-and-carry exercises, and dead sprints.^[15] You might aim instead for a funnier tone, booby-trapping contestants with water balloons or flour bombs at points throughout the obstacle course.

• The benefit of an obstacle course is that it tests many elements of your contestants’ fitness at the same time, rather than isolating strength from speed from coordination.
• Make sure your contestants are safe at all times. Use rubber pads on any hard walls or objects contestants might run into, and don’t aim projectiles at them that could inflict injury if it made contact.

Organize a production team. Whether you’re trying to sell your game show to a major network or local broadcast television, or even just filming it to upload on Youtube, you will need help from a team of people to make your game show a reality. You will need, at minimum:

• Camera operators — you need enough camera angles to show the host and all of the contestants. If you have individual contestants, you might just need two camera operators — one for the host and one for all of the contestants. However, if you have multiple teams, you might need a camera operator dedicated to each team.
• A production editor — someone who is familiar with video production software like Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut.
• A sound technician — someone who can ensure that the sound quality of all the dialogue on the show is picked up clearly.
• A charismatic host — the host you choose will set the tone for your show. Whether you pay someone, ask a friend to help you out, or go for it yourself, you need to make sure that the host brings a high level of energy to the proceedings

Present the contestants. The host should introduce each contestant by name, asking them to share a little about themselves. This biographical information can be cut and dry (“My name is Amy, and I’m an accountant for the city of Austin”) or more whimsical (“My name is Amy, and I have a cat who likes to go hiking with me on a leash every weekend”).

Introduce the show. Even if your show has been running for a while, you may have new viewers on a given week who are unfamiliar with it. It’s a good practice to introduce the show by briefly explaining the rules and format of the game at the top of each to make sure everyone knows what’s going on.

• Create a set script for the introductory rule explanation. This will both ensure that the rules are clearly stated every episode and create a comfortable, familiar segue into the episode for returning viewers.

Take breaks between rounds. If this is a televised show, there will be consistent breaks for commercials — but even if your show is online, it’s a good idea to allow resting spots every once in a while, ideally between rounds.

• When a round ends, the host should recap the scores at that point in the game.
• This is a good time for the host to comment on how the game is going so far, or to ask the contestants how they’re feeling about their performance.
• These little breaks will give both the audience and the contestants time to reset for the next round of competition.

Explain the rules and format for each new round. If your show has a format that changes from round to round, make sure your host explains the new rules at the beginning of each round. You might have a stable format for each different round, like Jeopardy or Chopped, or you might have completely different challenges in each round from week to week, like Project Runway or Top Chef.

Show comfortable interactions between the host and contestants. The audience wants to like the people they’re watching, especially the host who remains a constant from episode to episode. Make sure the host is personable throughout, joking with contestants, complimenting them when they do something well, and allowing them to display their personalities.