The Term Collectathon is Terrible

Let's talk about something light. Something that is entirely within my own wheelhouse of video game inside baseball. Have you heard the term "collectathon"? If you care about old 3D platformers you will and what better place to get up on a soapbox and just say, please stop using this term.

Okay that's contextless. What's a collectathon? Honestly it's kind of hard to say. Many kinds of 3D platformers have been tarred with this brush. To the best of my knowledge it would be "any platforming game where the method of denoting completion is by percentage of collected items." You may note that sounds incredibly broad, and that's because anything that isn't strictly story based objectives uses that format. Most often the term is used for any game patterned from the mold of Super Mario 64, a game where the player was set into a level and given 6 main objectives to reach, marking completion of an objective by awarding the player a star. Here is the start of my distaste for the term collectathon, it's a reversal of purpose. The star exists to mark the objective as completed, the number of objectives completed is used to mark progress before the gates blocking the player from other levels lift. Incentivize completing designed tasks to move player through a series of tasks is as common a structure as exists. This is a very basic gameplay loop. 

So that's kind of the skeleton of what a collecathon is, you play until you get told by the game you did it right, you get enough proofs you did it right you move on. It's a very good structure for allowing the player to decide what objectives are too troublesome or confusing, it allows for the kind of exploration that later birthed games like Grand Theft Auto (why yes you better believe I'll back that up in a later post). That said, collectathon isn't a term you would use for games you actually like. It's a term that has its origins in deriding 3D platformers. Why play these you just run around and collect things. Certainly there are games that inverted these purposes, Donkey Kong 64 is a notable culprit, but what was once a term of derision is often now used in dicussions of this kind of game essentially uncritically. Games that really have very little collection element are called collectathons. To go back to the archetype, there are two kinds of common objectives in Mario 64 that could be considered "collection", they would be red coin stars, and 100 coin stars. Red coin stars are typically meant to do one of two things, force the player to carefully navigate a limited area of the level and incentivize tight jumps, or force the player to check the entire level and scour its every inch to better understand how it fits together. Collection is again a marker. Thus only 100 coin stars are truly collectathons, collection for its own sake.

So what birthed this derisive term. Well mostly Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. These Rareware N64 Platformers were heavily influenced by Mario 64 but both had some issues with this. For one of them I'm fairly convinced many of the issues were accidental, for the other the term collectathon is honestly probably too kind. Let's look at the accident though. Banjo-Kazooie has 100 musical notes in each level and 100 Jiggies, 10 in each level. Collect musical notes to unlock doors in the game's hub world, collect jiggies to open levels. This is a reasonable structure but the actual requirements to finish the game are very stringent. Out of 900 musical notes in the game you need to have collected 810 minimum to finish, and out of 100 jiggies you must collect at least 92. Essentially you must have finished over 90% of what the game cares about as completion to reach its ending. Let's contrast this to Mario 64, out of 120 stars you need 70 to reach an ending. That's a little over 58% of them, this wasn't an accident it was designed to give the player choice over what they wanted to bother with. Don't like this level? You can potentially ignore it. Don't like 100 coin stars? Ignore them. With Banjo-Kazooie's structure though you can't have that kind of leeway. I'm not convinced the game was necessarily meant to ship like this for a few reasons though. For one, there are obviously and known cut levels from the game, but for another the way jiggies are used suggests as much as well. For those unfamiliar, when you gain a star in Mario 64 it's yours, many doors may be locked behind a certain number of stars but once that number is achieved you are free to go through all of them. Contrast Banjo-Kazooie where to enter levels you have to spend jiggies, inserting them into puzzles from which they cannot be retrieved. The rub is that of course you can't spend all of them because that'd make it required to get literally all of them. Instead when you get to endgame you have a bonus puzzle you can place them in, when you place them there you got a boost to your health to make the final fight easier. Unsatisfyingly this puzzle takes 6 jiggies. So in the end a player who does every jiggy will be left with 2 just sitting there. My personal assumption is that perhaps at some point in development bonuses meant to take up more extra jiggies that would eventually take the player to a round 0 at the end were supposed to exist. Overall though this commitment to forcing near total completion contributed to the game's reputation that it was a game about checking boxes.

Donkey Kong 64 unfortunately has less excuse though I feel like I can read a cascade of design decisions for why it is the game it is. For those blissfully unaware, DK64 had 5 playable characters each of which had a semi-unique moveset, each character had 5 Gold Bananas per level and 100 regular bananas per level. Each of them was the only one able to collect their gold bananas and a specific color of regular banans. I can claim no special knowledge here but as an outsider I feel like this decision was likely made top down. Have 5 characters to make it clear this is the biggest game Rare has ever made since audiences even then responded well to the implication of expansive areas and content. How do you incentivize using 5 characters? Give them each unique moves so they can each do different objectives, 5 goals per level each sounds fair. The problem is that in this kind of platformer there just aren't that many abilities to go around, so there's tons of overlap with their abilities, so you have to incentivize harder by keying every Kong to specific gold and regular bananas. That said if their abilities are too disparate they won't all be able to navigate the base level, so all of them have to be broadly similar and the levels themselves have to compliment this, making them structurally mostly flat with small branch offs that require specific abilities keyed to an individual Kong to reach. By designing around these problems all of the issues people take with game are accounted for in the game's final design. Everything is keyed to one character, to 100 percent a level each character will have to wander around the majority of its spaces to collect the things keyed only to them, thus the act of collection is no longer a marker of exploration it's now just a thing you have to do. Thus a collectathon is born.

That long story on the origin of the term out of the way, I want to look a bit at the inkstain of how this affected games almost immediately. We'll start with games that get this brush often derisively to this day, they're also by Rare. Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Neither of these games has a significant collection element, probably at least in part in response to the icy response to DK64. Tooie reduced the number of collectable notes in a level from 100 to 17 (16 markers worth 5 each and a single marker worth 20). This is to the point where they almost feel vestigial. Jiggies are also no longer paid in entering new levels and the final boss can be accessed with about 77% of all Jiggies (this game also feels like it got some hardcore cuts and ending with a mere 90 jiggies feels like one of them). Tooie does run up against another problem with this structure though, in that more complex objectives can't really give better rewards so objectives that require interference in multiple levels can be unrewarding feeling, but that's a different problem for a different day. Conker's Bad Fur Day meanwhile has no collection element to speak of, Conker ends most levels by finding some cash but the game's strictly linear, it's almost a joke that he's just collecting something of fairly obvious value for little if any other reason than greed. Nevertheless the two games are treated as being broadly structurally similar and derided the same way.

That's really the crux of my issue all told though, collectathon is not a neutral term in the same way that calling an MMO a grind treadmill isn't a neutral term. It is a deliberate and specific choice to emphasize the worst associations of a genre and tar them all together. When this term entered the lexicon in the 00s it was not a term of neutral value, it existed as an explicit insult to this entire structure and genre. This is why I take much more particular issue with this term than many other colloquialisms to refer to opaque genres (such as the term Metroidvania, an eternal lightning rod for debate on genre naming conventions). The explicit and overt intention with the term was to insult and it has often stunted discussion about how these games are actually designed and structured, what separates a good and bad instance of the genre subsumed in the fact that any discussion of the genre in enthusiast circles is often stunted by "oh a collectathon". It's just frustrating to want to discuss this kind of thing and find that the terms defined around it have already worked to preclude much of the interesting discussion.

Overall this doesn't mean much, I find the term personally aggrieving and I tried to make that an overarching point while I embarked on a short form version of the kind of design analysis I actually want for this genre, but it does bother me. This is a sub-genre with many differences in style and execution and many of them deserve more examination than is belied by this derisive 00s era nickname. The terms around something can heavily shape how much and how charitably it is examined, Let's not even get started on charged terms like Walking Simulator or Visual Novel (I will totally do some writing on those later). I don't have a better term than "objective based 3D platformer" but I still prefer it to collectathon.