posted on azhdarchid.com Against 'Metroidbrania': a Landscape of Knowledge Games
Knowledge games tell you things, even if they ask you to make significant leaps of logic with the information they present – as in Animal Well, where some of the critical knowledge has to be arrived at by analogy, by seeing things in the environment and relating them to the player’s affordances.
A few other typical features of knowledge games:
- Players are asked to build an internal model of a narrative or system, rather than just internalizing discrete bits of information. For example, The Case of the Golden Idol asks players to reconstruct sequences of events.
- Knowledge is useful more than once and/or far away from the site where it's gained. In Animal Well, learning the "secret" affordances is useful throughout the game, for example; the final level in Case of the Golden Idol asks the player to understand the full story, not just the events of that single level.
- Knowledge is a central resource – in a 'pure' knowledge game, the only resource. So, for example, an immersive sim having a post-it note telling you that the password is 451 does not have the knowledge game nature.
I enjoyed Bruno's post about the broad category he describes as "knowledge games" a lot, even if he allows the concepts of "genre" and "mechanic" to remain muddier than I would prefer[1]. But my biggest takeaway was learning about the term "metroidbrania", which is so ridiculous I find it kind of fascinating. It suggests that "metroidvania" is becoming a term so divorced from any intrinsic semantics that it becomes a purely syntactic signifier.
Some of the games listed as belonging to this purported genre are almost luridly disjoint from anything that is typically implied by the (already broad to the point of near-uselessness) base term "metroidvania". I defy anyone to tell me what Her Story has in common with either Metroid or Castlevania[2] beyond the fact that it is a video game. Some of the games do involve movement through a virtual space, but that's not the same as the distinctive many-keys-that-fit-many-locks pattern that the term implies.
But the fact that the term is silly isn't as interesting as the way in which its silly. It suggests that injecting a word into "metroidvania" functions as an affix converting it into a term for a genre of video games. It works much the same as adding "-ly" to an adjective to make it an adverb, or to use an example that's much more recent, adding "-gate" to a word to make it indicate a scandal.
As such, I propose that we standardize on this. Let us no longer argue about "roguelike" or "roguelite"; these games are now "looptroidvanias". The dual meaning of puzzle games will haunt us no longer now that we can say with full clarity "metroidbrania" or "tetroidvania". JRPGs are now "statroidganias", platformers are "metroidvaniups", and racing games are "fastroidvanias". Finally, to avoid confusion, we'll rename the games that are now called "metroidvanias" to "castletroids".
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I also think the omission of Christine Love's Digital/Analog/Hate Plus trilogy from the list of database thrillers is borderline criminal. While it's true that they aren't as mechanical as many of the games that came after them, they're clearly important early examples of the same narrative loop. ↩︎
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You could, not entirely wrongly, argue that the term "metroidvania" has already passed the point where even [the canon] is closely related to the first entries in either of the namesake series. But Obra Dinn is still no closer to Hollow Knight (to pick an inarguably canonical game) than it is to Metroid. ↩︎
I enjoyed Bruno's post about the broad category he describes as "knowledge games" a lot, even if he allows the concepts of "genre" and "mechanic" to remain muddier than I would prefer[1]. But my biggest takeaway was learning about the term "metroidbrania", which is so ridiculous I find it kind of fascinating. It suggests that "metroidvania" is becoming a term so divorced from any intrinsic semantics that it becomes a purely syntactic signifier.
Some of the games listed as belonging to this purported genre are almost luridly disjoint from anything that is typically implied by the (already broad to the point of near-uselessness) base term "metroidvania". I defy anyone to tell me what Her Story has in common with either Metroid or Castlevania[2] beyond the fact that it is a video game. Some of the games do involve movement through a virtual space, but that's not the same as the distinctive many-keys-that-fit-many-locks pattern that the term implies.
But the fact that the term is silly isn't as interesting as the way in which its silly. It suggests that injecting a word into "metroidvania" functions as an affix converting it into a term for a genre of video games. It works much the same as adding "-ly" to an adjective to make it an adverb, or to use an example that's much more recent, adding "-gate" to a word to make it indicate a scandal.
As such, I propose that we standardize on this. Let us no longer argue about "roguelike" or "roguelite"; these games are now "looptroidvanias". The dual meaning of puzzle games will haunt us no longer now that we can say with full clarity "metroidbrania" or "tetroidvania". JRPGs are now "statroidganias", platformers are "metroidvaniups", and racing games are "fastroidvanias". Finally, to avoid confusion, we'll rename the games that are now called "metroidvanias" to "castletroids".
-
I also think the omission of Christine Love's Digital/Analog/Hate Plus trilogy from the list of database thrillers is borderline criminal. While it's true that they aren't as mechanical as many of the games that came after them, they're clearly important early examples of the same narrative loop. ↩︎
-
You could, not entirely wrongly, argue that the term "metroidvania" has already passed the point where even [the canon] is closely related to the first entries in either of the namesake series. But Obra Dinn is still no closer to Hollow Knight (to pick an inarguably canonical game) than it is to Metroid. ↩︎