Pikmin 4 teaches gamers the benefits of efficient time management, but maybe we’ve already been playing like that without realising it.
Look, it’s not easy playing games as a (semi-functional) adult.
When I wake up in the morning, the first things I have to do are put the kettle on, start the laundry, make coffee for my partner, and prepare lunch.
These things have to be done fast, and done in order, because only then will I have any time to sit down and play any new games.
And even so, I’ll only have an hour before I have to put away the dishes, hang the laundry, and take the pot off the stove.
So imagine my bemusement and/or exasperation when I sat down to play the newest title on my Nintendo Switch, Pikmin 4, and I’m greeted by a screen that says: “The Art of Dandori: Dandori is the art of organizing (sic) your tasks strategically and working efficiently to execute your plans. Try to practice (sic) it in everyday life!”
Dagnabbit, I play video games to escape having to plan strategically and organise things efficiently in real life!
Now instead of playing games, you’re forcing me to think about Pikmin and the art of efficient time management as applied to video games, and, oh no, I think I’ve started drafting the article in my head.
So Pikmin 4 is actually the first game I’ve played in the series, though I’ve always known the basic premise of the series.
You’re shipwrecked on a weird alien planet, and you now need to get the help of the titular Pikmin (loyal plant minions you pluck from the ground) to survive and collect things (ship parts, treasure, etc) to escape the planet.
In Pikmin 4, the twist is that you go to the weird alien planet on purpose to rescue other shipwrecked people, and this time you have a good doggo called Oatchi to help you out. Every day, you choose an area to explore, and you try to accomplish as much rescuing and scavenging as possible before the sun sets.
I’ve never actually played any of the previous titles because, well, I thought the idea sounded boring. It’s just a lot of very simple puzzles, right?
Throw fireproof Red Pikmin at fire enemies; use swimming Blue Pikmin to retrieve items in water; and tell shockproof Yellow Pikmin to demolish electric gates.
And when I started, the game really felt too easy. I took my time exploring the world (which amusingly enough is clearly Earth; it’s just that my character is tiny), solving some puzzles, and if the day was about to end, hey, no worries! I can always resume rescuing people tomorrow.
At that time, the best things I could say about Pikmin 4 were that it seemed like a good entry point for casual gamers looking for a more laid-back gaming experience and that the “tiny person exploring a world of giants” aesthetic had an endearing, whimsical, and almost fairy tale-like quality that made me smile.
Bonus points for the fact that all the “treasure” you collect is actually mundane human objects as viewed by aliens, such as a Game Boy Advance mislabelled as a “Stone of Advancement”, or a peach being called a “Mock Bottom”.
But then the timed challenges started, and that ticking clock completely changed how I felt about Pikmin 4. Oh boy, oh boy!
Dandori time!
See, while you’re exploring the various “open-world” (for lack of a better term) stages of Pikmin 4, you’ll often run across caves (mini-dungeons) that ask you to solve various challenges with limited resources.
Some of these “sub-levels” are “Dandori challenges”, where you have to collect a certain amount of treasure before time runs out using a specific assortment of Pikmin.
A good example is the “Hefty Haulway” challenge, which hands you Yellow Pikmin (needed to demolish electric obstacles), Purple Pikmin (needed to haul heavy items, but you can only get 10 of ‘em in this challenge), and Ice Pikmin (needed to freeze bodies of water so other Pikmin can haul treasure across) and only seven minutes to figure out how to haul a minimum of 200 points worth of treasure across watery pathways you need to variously freeze and unfreeze.
This suddenly transformed Pikmin 4 from a fairly chill, whimsical, light puzzle game into a micromanagement hellscape nightmare simulator, and oh my goodness, I’m all for it.
Suddenly, it absolutely mattered whether I chose to first recruit the Yellow Pikmin or the Ice Pikmin in that Hefty Haulway level.
In other levels, I had to decide whether I wanted to use my few Flying Pikmin to haul treasure past the otherwise impassable conveyor belt or push through for now so I could establish a more efficient treasure-hauling shortcut later.
Dare I say it? I started having fun – not despite, but because I had to organise my tasks strategically and work efficiently to execute my plans. The Dandori ... it’s taking hold of me!
The game plan
All this enjoyment I had with Dandori-ing got me thinking: Why do I like playing some games as efficiently as possible? How can time management feel fun in games while in real life I’d really prefer to procrastinate on all my chores?
Interestingly enough, the first Pikmin game actually placed some pretty intense time pressure on the player since you only had 30 in-game days to complete the whole game.
I suspect Nintendo moved that time limit to the optional challenges so as not to scare off newer players who might not enjoy getting stressed.
I think it’s perfectly OK to play games slowly and leisurely, but at the same time, I look at farming sims like Story Of Seasons (nee Harvest Moon) or Rune Factory, and I realise that I got a lot more enjoyment from these games playing like a hyper-efficient madman.
These games are ostensibly designed to be relaxing experiences where you enjoy a rural life, grow a farm, and build friendships over the course of years, but is that how I play them? Nope!
I’ll have binders full of crop rotation plans, seasonal festivals, and daily NPC schedules mapped out before the tutorial even finishes, so by the time the first winter rolls around, I’ll have already built a massive farming empire and wooed every bachelor, bachelorette, and (in the case of my favourite, Rune Factory 4) ancient magical wind dragon god.
At first, I thought maybe having an in-game clock or calendar and the associated in-game time pressure contributed to the fun of playing efficiently and strategically (or Dandori-ly).
Doubly interesting enough, the first Harvest Moon game for the SNES had a 2- or 2.5-year in-game time limit before the story ended, so I guess that means early video game designers really liked to make players sweat.
But then, I remembered that I also had a similar sort of fun with the crafting/logistics game, Factorio, and I aimed for efficiency despite not having any sort of time limit hanging over my head.
Optimising for itself
In Factorio, you’re an engineer stranded on an alien planet, and you need to gather materials to build a spaceship to escape. (Wait, again?) You start off by mining metal ore by hand (engineers are very strong, you see), before building automated assemblers with all that metal, which you then leverage to build complex power and signalling systems, and so on.
Within a few hours of gameplay, you’ll have a sprawling mining complex connected by elaborate networks of conveyor belts and train lines, extracting precious minerals from the earth and turning them into machines that make more machines. (And also producing an immense amount of pollution that’ll aggravate the native wildlife.)
There’s no time pressure in this game per se (just ignore the increasingly angry aliens), so you could technically just build and mine almost everything manually with very little automation.
However, the near-exponential increase in the amount of materials needed for each stage of your factory’s growth (six iron for your first rudimentary mining drill, then 23 iron + 4.5 copper for each electric drill plus the power infrastructure, etc) all but pushes you into planning and strategising for increasingly more efficient builds.
As a result, a lot of the enjoyment I get is simply from optimising my factory, squeezing out extra iron smelted per second by rearranging the delivery pathways, and troubleshooting any bottlenecks in the engine production lines.
Sometimes, optimisation for the sake of optimisation can be fun in and of itself.
I just get a feeling of satisfaction at a meta level when I sit back and admire how efficiently my mega-factory is running. At least, until my monstrous alien neighbours come by to ask why I brought a one-man Industrial Revolution to their home planet.
Time trials and triumphs
Looking back at Pikmin 4, I realised that after my Dandori revelation, I started to enjoy the “open world” levels a lot more.
The puzzles and exploration remained relatively simple, so the only thing that changed was my perspective – now instead of approaching things so leisurely, I had a self-imposed challenge to get as many people rescued as possible before the “end of day” chime started sounding.
And you know what? Maybe this Dandori thing is really something gamers can internalise.
Organising our tasks strategically and working efficiently to execute plans isn’t just a great way to get things done; it can also be really enjoyable in and of itself.
Or maybe it’s already something many task-oriented gamers like myself have already internalised a long time ago, as we’ve chased various ways to improve our in-game time management and task efficiency without realising that (or why) we’re doing it at a meta level.
I could say more about this topic, but in the spirit of efficiency, let’s leave it at that.
In the real world, I still need to put away the laundry and hang the dishes. Wait, why do I smell something burning?
PIKMIN 4
Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
