Exploration games vs gardening games

The vast majority of videogames can be thought of as exploration/exploitation-style games – from Mario to Fallout 3. You go to a new area, you kill all the enemies, complete all the quests, take all the treasures and move on to the next place. (This makes it sound pretty colonialist, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be a puzzle game – once you solve each puzzle you’re ‘done’ and you move on to the next one.)

The writer contrasts ‘exploration’ games with ‘gardening’ games – which don’t have to involve a literal garden but do involve staying in one location and seeing it change over time. Neko Atsume (the phone game where you collect cats) is a gardening game. So is the wildly popular Animal Crossing, or the Sims.

While I absolutely love exploration games, and have always thought of them as more story-driven than gardening games, this writer disagrees:

“Stories are fundamentally about change, and you can’t witness change in anything or anyone besides yourself unless you observe that thing or person repeatedly over a period of time.”

Found at Affording Play, a game design blog.