Bruno Dias recently posted this (good) blog post:

Against ‘Metroidbrania’: a Landscape of Knowledge GamesWhat are knowledge games? How do we relate them to each other? What sub-genres exist – and which ones might be implied?

Which I then posted on Bluesky:

appreciate this article breaking down a taxonomy of knowledge games (also, unfortunately, known as metroidbrainias) azhdarchid.com/against-metr...

— v buckenham (@v21.bsky.social) 2025-11-13T09:17:33.763Z

which got a few replies, and inspired some thoughts from me. Rather than hashing it out on there, I thought I’d write a somewhat more coherent thing on this genre of “knowledge games”, “information games”, “database games” or – spit – “metroidbrainias”.

Why do I hate the term “metroidbrainia”? It’s not because it’s stupid, I like stupid things. A stupid joke is a-ok with me. No, it’s because I think this genre is remarkably accessible to an audience without much videogame experience, but understanding the term “metroidbrania” from zero context is at least 5 minutes of someone excitedly explaining a lot of things which you have no knowledge or interest in. And also because I personally like this genre a lot, but I don’t really care about metroidvanias. In fact, I feel like games from the metroidvania tradition are a really misleading way to think about the genre.

Instead, the place I always start is the 1982 boardgame, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. It’s a database game! What you do in the game is: you are given a case to solve. And a map, and a directory telling you where businesses and people are located. And also a newspaper. And also a booklet that you can use to look up what information can be found in any particular location on the map.

You can go anywhere you like, there are no restrictions on that. But there are enough places you could go that you can’t just guess. Instead you have to... think about the case using common sense. Read the newspaper, see if there’s anything in there about the missing jewels you’re trying to track down. Maybe a tobacconist could tell you more about this cigarette butt left at the scene of the crime? Where does his brother live? Let’s go check at the registry office - was that really when he was born?

So, the thing that feels really defining to me about this game, the thing that really excites me is: you’re driven by your curiosity. You want to know about something, and then you can know about it - there’s no mechanical challenge there. The gameplay is about forming hypotheses about what’s going on in the story and then validating or disproving those hypotheses. You can go anywhere! You can think like a normal person! Your speculation about the plot is the game, it’s not a thing that goes alongside it.

And when Sam Barlow’s Her Story came out, I was very excited, because it feels the exact same way. You watch clips from a series of police interviews. They’re presented out of order, you can look them up by entering in search terms that would be found from the transcripts. You can type in anything! But to find the answer, you need to know what things to look up. That same sense of freedom, that same sense of story curiosity driving the mechanics of the game. Turns out it’s a genre! And now it’s a videogame genre!

And that for me is the root of what I’m interested in here. In Bruno Dias’s typology, I guess these are just “Database Thrillers”. Let me try a definition:

“A database thriller is a game where progression is gated only by understanding of a particular narrative”

Let’s get into some of the parts of this definition here:

• “game”: it’s a playable experience with a goal, an end-state
• “gated only by” : if you’re gonna get really strict, this means that progression is purely about choosing what to look up, and isn’t mediated through movement through a virtual space. That’s something people could reasonably disagree about, though. What I think definitely does put it outside this definition is when progression depends upon performing certain skills
• “understanding”: like, if there’s a tricky jump you need to learn, that’s muscle memory. If there’s a system you need to understand how to manipulate, that’s a probably a kind of implicit understanding. We’re talking about explicit understanding here.
• “a particular narrative”: yeah, I think these games have to be about a story. They’re about understanding that story. What happened? Who did it? Why?

Now, despite the last paragraph or two, I’m not really a purist, and I’m not one to insist on definitions. They’re good to draw up because they offer up possibilities in how they can be broken. You can see, even within that definition there, some wavering over whether they can involve movement within a virtual space. What about a physical space? Could you make an escape room that is a database thriller? Every game is played with the body.

So, too, I’m interested in the broader space of information games. But I do think that you have to be careful not to bring every game into this definition. As A Theory Of Fun says, the core thing that makes games fun is that they are about learning. Learning explicit knowledge, learning implicit understanding of systems, and learning motor skills. Seeing yourself improve. So, saying that a game is a information game because it is about learning things is... I mean, it’s not a useful definition.

Like, to be more specific, there were people replying to me asking if Hitman or Stacklands should count, because they are about understanding the mechanics, interactions & events across a level. Reasonable to ask! But, I think, wrong.

And to double down further: I think that idea comes from the baggage that metroidbrainia carries with it. Metroidvanias are defined by unlocking new areas of the map as you gain new abilities. Metroidbrainias are, by analogy, about unlocking new areas of a map by coming to new understandings. Those understandings are much more likely to be about how to move or about how systems work than they are about the details of a particular narrative. Which, like... I’m playing a match-3 game where I am slowly understanding the interactions between the systems and their consequences in more depth. That’s not a knowledge game. It’s a match-3. Metroidbrainia is a blurry place to start, it filters everything through some established videogame assumptions and makes it harder to see what’s actually special about these games.

I don’t have it in me to find a good segue, but I would feel remiss not also linking to Tom Francis talking about information games - he was one of the first people to attempt to categorise these games.

Here’s his original vid:

and here’s one where he develops those thoughts with the benefit of time: