Finishing up Old Skies today (read my article on it over on MoeGamer!) and then jumping right back into Donkey Kong Bananza, I was suddenly struck with the clearest way yet to express something I've been pondering for quite some time. And it stems from the core differences between those two games.
I put it to you, dear reader, that there are just two types of video games: ones where someone watching asks "what's it about?", and ones where someone asks "what do you have to do?"
Old Skies? "What's it about?" (Time travel, regrets, grief, making your mark on the world.) Donkey Kong Bananza? "What do you have to do?" (Find all the bananas.)
Essentially what this boils down to is the game's main priority: does the game primarily exist to tell a story, or does it exist as a form of "play"? To put it even more simply, is it a "narrative" game, or a "mechanics" game?
There's crossover, of course — narrative games can have strong mechanics, and mechanics games can have strong narratives. But pretty much every game you'll ever play will strongly skew one way or the other, to such a degree that in some cases, fans of one won't enjoy something from the other category.
Donkey Kong Bananza is a good example of this. It's a mechanics game; the narrative setup is flimsy at best, and there's not really a "story" to follow as you go through. Instead, you visit a bunch of places, meet some characters, unlock new abilities, then use all of those abilities to explore the broader world and, as noted above, find all of the bananas.
The fact that Donkey Kong Bananza doesn't really have an unfolding story is enough to put some people I know off from playing it completely. And while I maintain that those people are missing out on one of Nintendo's finest games to date, I completely understand. For the longest time, I felt like I favoured narrative games to the exclusion of all else, but as I've grown older — and, perhaps more crucially, I've developed my knowledge of how games are designed, how they work and the many different approaches developers can take when constructing an interactive experience — I have a much more balanced approach: I can (and do) enjoy both. This, of course, stands me in good stead for my day job, which involves enthusing about everything from Atari 2600 and Intellivision games up to PlayStation and NEOGEO titles.
I suspect at least part of this also stems from the fact that I grew up playing exclusively mechanics games, because the technology didn't really exist to deliver narrative games effectively. Except that's not quite true; text adventures and early graphic adventures existed pretty much from when I was old enough to use the computer, but as a child, they often felt a bit too complicated for me, even as an avid reader. So the vast majority of games I played on my first gaming systems — Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Super NES — were "what do you have to do?" games, where narrative was typically reserved for introduction and/or ending sequences, if indeed the game had any in-game storytelling at all.
Things started to change when we switched over to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for our daily driver computer. Point-and-click adventures really came to the forefront, with titles like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island proving that story-centric games could absolutely be a thing. And by the time I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I was absolutely all-in on video games as a storytelling medium, leading me to primarily focus on "what's it about?" games for the longest time.
In fact, you can see the evidence here on this blog how long this attitude lasted: a post which actually got showcased by WordPress.com, back when they actually cared about the community rather than garbage AI, highlighted my desire to play a racing game with a story. I felt that the racing game genre had been done something of a disservice by never having a game that took the Wing Commander approach of alternating narrative scenes with mechanics scenes, and on some level I think this might actually still be a fun idea… except I've played a few games where they've tried that, and the story scenes are just… not very good.
I'm not sure if it's just that the scenes weren't particularly interesting, inspiring or well-written, or if racing games really don't actually need a story to be fun — I suspect a little of both — but these days, I'm much more happy to let the racing game genre, a type of game in which "what do you have to do?" is so obvious that most people don't need to bother to ask, pootle along in the way it always has done. In fact, I've often found it quite refreshing to go back to games like the Project Gotham Racing series, where there's no open world or overcomplicated metagame to engage with, just a series of "levels" that you complete, one at a time, and gradually unlock harder challenges.
I suspect some games may even be different things to different people. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is a good example; to one person, it's a "what do you have to do?" game, where the answer is "wander around, explore, beat up monsters, find treasure", while to another, it's a "what's it about?" game, where the answer is "proving your worth in the Eight Virtues and becoming the Avatar". In other cases — The Last of Us, say — the distinction is probably pretty clear-cut.
Anyway, that was my meandering thought for the day. You're welcome to borrow my theory for your own pointless discussions with your friends if you want to. I'll let you. Or you can just leave it to rot here on this forgotten corner of the Internet as we all, gradually, bit by bit, turn to dust. Your call, really.
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