The stories in mobile games are doing them a disservice

I play a lot of mobile games. In my regular lineup (as in I log in to all of these most days) I have Gardenscapes, Homescapes, Project Makeover, and Game Of Vampires. Filling out the ranks with less frequent log ins I have Pokemon GO and Gubbins. Gubbins will be ignored here, because it has no storyline, and I’ll probably not mention Pokemon GO much because Pokemon is a huge franchise and I don’t think I need to touch on it much. I’ve tried a whole lot of other games as well. I played Lily’s Garden for a few years, and tried another spin off by the same company. I’ve also tried Magicabin, Merge Mansion, Candy Crush and a whole lot of others.

In most cases, the thing that puts me off continuing a game is a sense of “it’s impossible to win this without spending money”. But sometimes, a game will annoy me so much with its frame story that I will cease to play just because every time I see a dialogue box I get annoyed.

I’ll explain from the beginning, because I know not everybody is as deep in this genre as I am. A lot of match 3 games have a frame story that goes like this: A building or garden is dilapidated, and you have moved in. Your job is to clean up, by earning tokens that are exchanged for progress on the renovation. Game of Vampires isn’t a match 3 game, but fundamentally the story works similarly. You do various things in minigames to power up your vampires, so that you can progress through the next section of story. A merge game is the same. You merge items until you get the correct one to unlock the next renovation or story moment.

Here’s where games run into trouble. A mobile game is endless. Candy Crush has been releasing new levels for 12 years. A garden is not endless, and neither is a story. A story, necessarily, has a beginning a middle and an end.

However, there are established story structures that can be nearly endless. That run daily or weekly for years upon years. The sitcom, and the soap opera. The problem with most of these games is that their story is a sitcom, when it would be way more fun to engage with as a soap opera. First, the differences in these story structures: A sitcom is cyclical. A problem arises, is complicated, is resolved, and life returns to “normal”. The cast of characters in a sitcom can never develop as people in a way that breaks their archetype, unless that sitcom is planning to end (this also results in a conservative story by default, but I’ll talk about that next week). In a soap opera, by contrast. you can change as much as you want. Characters can die and change and be replaced, and come back, and lose an eye, and whatever you like. Nothing is permanent. This allows the soap opera to completely refresh their cast over the course of years. Shortland Street, New Zealands premiere soap opera, for example has been running for 32 years, and has nearly 8,000 episodes.

Let’s talk about Lily’s Garden. I played this from about 2018 to 2022, nearly daily. Over the course of four years I completed about four, nearly five, locations in this game. If every garden section is a story arc, every location is a season of a tv show. The first two were compelling. A burgeoning romance between the main character and her neighbour (a metal sculptor straight out of a YA romance), complicated inheritance conditions, sneaky relatives, mob bosses, corrupt politicians, and social media drama. By the end of the second location, however, the romance has been fulfilled, and the only thing that can really be done is (ugh) break them up and get them back together again and again and again.

From then on, the game’s story becomes a compounding pile of miscommunications, and loses all steam. Villains from the first arcs are turned into whacky bit characters, and the new characters introduced are either treated as competitors to the relationship, or non competitors.

What this does is keeps the game’s tone in that YA space it starts out in. It’s largely inoffensive, skippable, and I’m sure saves the game company a lot of money in character design. And here’s the thing. We aren’t playing for the story, are we? Unlike an RPG, a match 3 game is about matching 3.

But when you get stuck on a level for a week, what brings you back to the game? It sure isn’t how relaxing it is to continuously be screwed over by the biased RNG.

I think Game of Vampires understands this, in a way Lily’s Garden doesn’t. Game of Vampires is a ludicrous game, for the record, featuring knock offs of every character from supernatural fiction you can think of, from the obvious (Dracula, Carmilla, Victor Frankenstein) to the copywrited (Edward Cullen, some guy from the Vampire Diaries, Blade Saber), to the unexpected (Gilgamesh, the Pied Piper) and the obscure (Morien, the Moorish knight of arthur’s round table). Without the story it is a waifu collector, a money sink, and a kind of funny group chat. But then you get the story. I’m about 120 “episodes” into this story, and let me tell you, I’m compelled. It’s currently unclear whether or not Victor Frankenstein and Dracula’s relationship was romantic, but it is established that Dracula “stole” Victor from his mad scientist wife by promising him a child (you, the main character are said child). Victor is dating Carmilla now, but she’s mad at him. One of the game’s few original characters, your MC’s oldest friend, was experimented on by Victor’s ex and is having a really bad time with it, and amongst all this you have to help Saber put down his ghost werewolf wife who ate her own baby while transformed. Now that’s a soap opera! Is this game good? No! Am I morbidly curious about how the current arc is going? Yeah absolutely!

I’m just saying, match 3 games. You could take a lesson from Game of Vampires. Do something weirder! Do mad science on your characters, have someone eat a baby, introduce the most complicated relationship web you can think of. Just stop feeding me minor miscommunications and calling them a plot.

Now, housekeeping!

If you’re unaware, I have returned to streaming. Tuesdays and Fridays. I post on Bluesky when I go live, or you can be notified by following me directly on twitch. At the moment we’re playing Nancy Drew and the Curse of Blackmoor Manor, and Minecraft of course.

I’m still going through some stuff health-wise, so I haven’t managed much in the ttrpg space in the past year, but I’m happy to say that barring any unexpected and brand new conditions I am now diagnosed and stable, which is an enormous improvement! In the past year I have received diagnosis for Autism, Autonomic Dysfunction, and a hypersensitised Nervous System. While none of those things have a single medication that’ll solve my problems, I do now have the tools to actually manage my symptoms, which is a huge improvement.

This newsletter is hopefully just the first in my return to writing about games - I’m starting with a series on mobile games, because I’ve had a lot of thoughts about these. Next week we’re going to talk about how a lot of mobile games are extremely conservative.

Since twitter has really died since my last newsletter, here’s the places you can find me these days:

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