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A Definitive List of Gaming Genres?
An anonymous reader puts forth this challenge for the Slashdot readership: "Construct a definitive list of game genres for PC and/or console that doesn't dribble off into silly categories like 'licensed movie franchise,' or include redundancies like 'action', '3D adventure' and 'platformer.' My friend and I have been messing around with this for awhile, trying to do a better job than the game news sites, but we're finding it's harder than we thought."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_and_video_ga me_genres
It's a good place to start. If you can think of more, you can always add them.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
I don't understand this;
"or include redundancies like 'action', '3D adventure' and 'platformer."
how are these redundant and under what deffinition of redundant? The don't seem to contain useless words, nor are they no longer needed - because they refer to something specific and can be useful to know. Mario 64 was 3d adventure, New SMB was platformer. Action can be a little harder to define but I think people understand it when they hear it
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
1) Games I play
.. that wasn't too hard.
2) Games I don't play
And if you really want you can expand section 1) into:
1.1) Games I enjoy playing
1.2) Games I don't enjoy playing
Although 1.2) should really be grouped in section 2) as:
2.1) Games I didn't enjoy playing
There
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Using multiple descriptive tags for each game might make the problem easier.
For example, a game can be a "platformer" and an "adventure" game. It might even be in "3D". So perhaps "3D platformer adventure" works as a set of tags for a game rather than an atomic category.
Look at their list of games that previously were only in Japan - they span about ten different genres.
Now add their new genres of Brain Games too.
That will start you off.
Luckily, you can play all of them on the Wii and the DS.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
it's said in literature there are really only a few stories and that they are retold over and over, take for instance Shakespeares Hamlet which actually wasn't his Hamlet but based on an earlier story ur-hamlet which itself was based on legends etc etc. It's also said that they are actually only a few types of identifiable characters in fiction, e.g. The Fool or The Knight &so on, I can't remember more. The idea is that when you get down to it all characters can be boiled down into this set.
If you can disambiguate literature into its components there is no reason this cannot be applied to games. Games are another kind of story telling and so the same rule apply.
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Serious Games
1. Google or Wikipedia would have gotten you the answer faster
2. Seek professional advice not the advice of anonymous Slashdotters
3. What??? OP was swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool.
Guess which one this?
All three????
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Shooter (Title is a little misleading, sword slashing would fall in here as well)
RPG
Adventure
2D platformer
3D platformer
Fighter
Flyer (Spaceships and submarines count too.)
MMO (MUDs would probably fit in here too)
Strategy
Sports (Many sub-catagories)
Rythm (DDR, Guitar Hero)
Casual/Puzzle (Bejewled, Tetris)
Racing
Genre-defying (Katamri, The Incredible Machine)
There, I think that almost any game wil fit into one of those catagories. Many games should also only fit nicely into one category. Though there are exceptions. For instance Deus Ex is bot h RPG and Shooter while GTA is at its heart a shooter, but it has incorporated many other genres.
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To try to answer your question though, here is how I generally break down games. It is by no means efficient nor without redudency, but it is how I mentally categorize games.
Anway, that is a much bigger list than most gaming publications use, but the top categories are largely the same. I think that this sort of system works because it basically tells you what the core sort of game play is. In your example, you lumped action adventure, adventure, FPS, etc. together, but I don't think that's fair at all. For example, I love action adventure games (i.e. zelda, metroid, etc.) but I hate first person shooters. The two styles of games play differently. I find the categories useful because I have been playing games for a long time, and I know what sorts of games I do and do not enjoy. I know that if a game sounds interesting, but I find out it's a FPS, then I can completely disregard reading anything else about it. Likewise, if a game is a western style RPG, I know that I should scrutinize it a bit more before making a decision, because while I haven't disliked every western style RPG that I've played, in general I don't find them as fun to play (I would rather have a very well done and highly linnear game, ala Final Fantasy, than a poorly done limited sandbox game that pretends like you can do anything. If I'm going to play D&D I'll play the real thing thank you very much.)
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In philosophy this is called "reification." It's taking something complex and living, and turning it into a dead thing on a shelf. This usually involves chopping off inconvenient bits until you can stuff it into a box and label the box.
Morals are the reification of a particular society's living system of values, codified and placed on a pedestal marked "unquestionable and unchanging." Unions are a reification of the working man's desire for a better life, transformed into a bureacratic comittee that defines what 'better' is for him.
Instead of defining genres of video games, try breaking them up. Take them out of the box of dead things and try to find the oddball nuances that make a given game unique, and apart from any others.
- mantar
Ok, so that may be an exaggeration, but I think the point remains valid: there isn't much point in coming up with genres.
Mark J. P. Wolf in Medium of the Video Game list a bunch of genres that are fairly useless such as listing demos as their own genre.
While I'm not a fan of applying film theory to videogames, I think that Rick Altman in Film/Genre makes the most interesting use of genre by syntax and semantics. (Actually, there isn't a lot of need to read the entire book. He lays out syntax and semantics as a way of looking at genre in his article, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre" which is widely reprinted and is included as an index in the Film/Genre book).
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
1) Nethack.
2) Not Nethack.
It's impossible to master either.
- Fantasy (D&D, Runequest)
- Sci-Fi (Traveller, Shadowrun, Licensed TV/Movie Show X)
- Super-Heroes (HERO, Mutants & Masterminds, Blood of Heroes)
- Horror (Call of Cthulhu, Beyond the Supernatural)
- Thematic (Feng Shui, Deadlands, Paranoia)
I'm sure I could have broken that last one down into Hong Kong Action, Wild West, and Sci-Fi Comedy Dystopia, but there's only so much time in the day...I have observed that many of the things I like are hard to classify in terms of things that were created before. On the other hand, many of the things that bore me can easily be classified.
What might this mean? Perhaps the difficulty of classifying existing games into genres is a good indicator of the state of the game industry.
It might be an interesting exercise not to list existing genres, but to make a list of games that are hard to classify, and use it as a benchmark against any genre list.
To begin with, I will start the list with:
Hmm, that's all I can think of at the moment.
Is there a reason why this subject has popped up just when they are about to announce the beta of Savage 2?
Actually, Incredible Machine is probably the prototypical example of a 'construction game'. This is basically the genre of game where the player is given a kit of parts and they're free to build stuff with it - often with some goal in mind. Lego might fit this category if it were a video game. I wish there were more examples of this genre, there are only a handful.
-- SIGFPE
genre = "a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like"
Certainly, I haven't played every game, so there may be genres that are unknown to me.
The definition does not require that genres are not redundant (overlapping). The genre of a specific game is usually defined by the publishers.
Having said that, here is my list of genres and their basic elements:
Adventure - Roaming, looting, side questing, mini gaming
FPS - shooting, looting
RTS - building, destoying
RPG - character building, spell using
Puzzle - geometry, thinking
Driving - driving
Free roam mission based - roaming, doing missions
Classic Myst style - thinking
Stealth - sneaking
Classic arcade - button pushing
Simulation - building
Be sure to include shmups on your list.
This would be a first step in my mind. Its a BS genre invented to give credibility to a style of game that is likely funded by those guys who make wrist braces for CTL. Just because you add a sword or a magic spell or any kind of mathematical character development to a game doesn't make it a roleplaying game, and trying to pass of a hack n slash click fest as having "Roleplaying elements" is bullshit.
What makes a roleplaying game a roleplaying game isn't the system its built on, but what occurs in the game. hence why tabletop games come in such a wide variety of flavours including diceless and systemless. Trying to pass off "skill points" as a roleplaying elemental is like claiming your RV has ferrari elements because it has a door and a steering wheel.
1: Games I have
0: Games I don't have
...I wouldn't rely too much on this list. Not to descredit the entire article--most of it is pretty reliable--but there are questionable entries on that list. Even the article itself notes, "Due to a general lack of commonly agreed-upon genres or criteria for the definition of genres, classification of games are not always consistent or systematic and sometimes outright arbitrary between sources." That certainly seems the case for "Maze game", a genre noted in Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Games but really isn't applicable these days. Looking at the article entry for "Artillery games", you can see the link it refers to doesn't talk about "Artillery games" as a genre, but rather a generic type of game called Artillery. Under that classification "Snake game" should be a genre.
Depending on how you want to describe "genre", there can also be some other inaccurates. There's some entries that sound like descriptions. Is "Arcade game" genre? An arcade can be a fighting game or a first person shooter. If it is a genre, shouldn't "Console game" be a genre too? There are other entries that describe more game mechanics than "genres." For example "Stealth games," there are FPSs (see Goldeneye 007), as well a 3D person action games (see MGS), and Action Adventure games (see Beyond Good and Evil) that use a stealth mechanic as gameplay. So does that make it more a game mechanic or a genre itself?
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
There is no such thing as a definitive list. Genre is fluid, and incorporates feedback; as soon as you think of a genre someone else has thought of how to combine and/or distort that genre to create a new genre.
I offer you the following theorem:
Any genre-based categorization of computer games will either be too generic or too specific to be useful.
Same thing applies to movies, books, etc.
On the extreme side, you can say that the troops are talking to you when they say "Your orders?", "Ready, sir." or "Commander?"
Of course, if you're of the more discerning adult crowd who is PS3-bound, this list would look more like:
(It's a joke)
There's no particular end to achieve, yet it is play and it uses a computer. It's *like* a simulation, in that it does *simulate* reality (or a form of it), but it is open-ended, unlike, say, SimCity, which is a closed-end simulation.
Other than that, this is a pretty comprehensive list.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The methods below require that you already have a large list of games that you want to classify into genres.
Method 1: Pick a game from the list at random. Then look for another game in the list that is very similar in play style, and add those two games to form the first group. Then for each game in the list, either add it to an existing group that it is similar to, or find an unclassified partner and join them to start a new group.
Method 2: Pick two games from the list at random, and put them next to each other. Then pull random games from the list and try to place them next to the game that they are most similar to. When the task is complete, divide it up where there seems to be the most difference between adjacent games.
Method 3: Organize the games by family history. Find some of the oldest games, who will be the ancestors of all games. Modern games that are truly original can also become ancestors. Then order games based on which games inspired which other games, in chronological order. Base your genres on which ancestors have the thickest tree of decendents.
Method 4: For each game, think of 5-10 terms that describe the game. Look at which terms have the most games associated with them.
Method 5: Think of about 10 attributes that games can have, and assign each game a score based on this attribute. Then you can use the 10-dimensional distance formula to find the distance between any two games. Games with small distances will be similar to each other. Try to find clumps of games, and let these be your genres.
Method 6: Dewey decimal system! Find maybe 10 main genres of games. Then try to divide each genre into a sub-genre. Add games to the system, creating sub-sub-genres as needed to classify the games. As new games are released, you can place them in the existing system next to the games it is most similar to.
Also, you might consider making a website out of the project and let the masses help you. For instance, for method 2 above, you could do something like this:
1. Present the user with 2 games.
2. Give them a third game, and ask them which of the two other games it is closest to.
Most of the other methods could be done in a similar manner.
Rather than trying to pigeonhole all games into one category or another, I usually try to think of them in terms of a two- or three-dimensional continuum. One axis represents the importance of strategy, tactics, forethought, and the like, another represents the importance of speed, timing, reflexes, and so on, and a third represents the complexity or learning curve. If you really want to hurt your brain, you could add a fourth to represent the importance of atmosphere and writing.
...but is it art?
and this list will be great for what, another half a year? until the next pikmin or trauma center or something comes out? there's no good way to do genre lists, at least not if you want them to last for... a period of time.
What's wrong with the mobygames category listing?
...so I looked up their entry for The Sentinel, which I find uncategorizable. They called it "Puzzle". Hm. I don't think it fits.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
...the definitive list of music genres ...the definitive list of video genres ...the definitive list of book genres ...the definitive list of p0rn genres
I'm sorry but it doesn't work. Try reading any album reivew that goes like "draws inspiration from 60s [bar-music], but with rythm taken from the 90s [foo-music], with a local color of [region]. What about mixed games and games that have several game modes (e.g. strategy game with RTS fighting? Or an app with Japanese anime-style graphics but Western-style gameplay?
Categorizations are different views, they don't need to be mutually exlcusive. The important thing is that you manage to show each person the games he is interested in. Let's take two people A and B (which might as well be two consumer groups) and games with properties A A A A AB AB AB B B B B. The correct answer is to show A (A A A A AB AB AB) and B (AB AB AB B B B B). Overlap in itself irrelevant, except that it's somewhat redundant to a person that's interested in both A and B types. But that is information in itself - If he sees (AB AB AB) twice he'll know these have elements of both genres.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So I scratched the surface on this question last week on my blog:
PipForPresident.Org/blog
the gist of which is:
"I dream of helping to enable everyone in the world to create and play their own video games together."
so... I want to eventually write (or contribute to) tools that enable people to reconstruct or derive any possible game... assisting with:
We had to do this as part of a module on my degree course. It was fairly futile then, its still futile now.
Unlike what a lot of people have been saying I do think genres are important, they immediately allow you to narrow down what game you really want to play. However, arbitrary naming is fine. As long as you understand the terms being used people can divide the games up how they wish. Its simply not possible to have a definitive list.
The reason for this is that games are defined by too many things. E.g. FPS is a name that describes a viewpoint and an action. RTS is a name that describes the games timing and an entirely different action.
Whats more they can be crossed back and forth. There is no reason why an FPS can not be strategic and real time making it an RTS as well. (Not the most obvious example. For that youd have to look at role play which has permeated every genre out there.)
I.e. you have viewpoint, game timing, actions, setting and the constant mixing of all of them. (Most FPS can be TPS, Dungeon Keeper was top down RTS and FPS, etc, etc)
Add to this the dozens of odd ball games and the thousands of retro games that require a genre set all for themselves and you have an impossible task on your hands.
There is no definitive list, but I've always liked the way SPOnG does it. Split off point of view and dimensionality and then use a structured list of genres and apply up to three per title.
You can see their genre list on their search page as well as their POV and dimensionality lists.
-- I like the cut of your thinking, young man. - me.
An academic work "The Medium of the Video Game" edited by Mark J.P. has a discussion of genres, though I don't know how useful it would be as most of the examples used are outdated.
Games incorporate so many different elements that it is difficult to come up with hard categories that can encompass all the known games without significant exceptions, overlaps, or omissions. I think what gives games so much power and potential is their natural resistance to such pigeonholing and ability to fluidly and organically incorporate so many different elements.
So I think using a series of tags that can be freely applied where necessary can help describe and generalize games without trying to nail the outliers and hybrids and unique games into categories they don't necessarily belong. I would say it is best to apply the series of tags in a standardized order, where a game can incorporate multiple tags from their different categories if applicable: e.g. it isn't necessary to add "real time" to a game with the "1st person" and "shooter" categories since that is generally implied. However you would have to add "turn based" to such a game if necessary since that is generally not typical of 1st person shooters. The tags should be (and generally are) applied in roughly the following order:
Narrative style (if applicable):
Linear
Branching
Sandbox (open ended?)
Setting:
Sci Fi
Fantasy
Historical
Modern
Sports
Dimensions/Perspective:
3D
2D (sidescroller, static, etc.)
1st person
3rd person (implying camera anchored to player's avatar)
"god" (or "bird's eye," implying camera free roaming over a map)
Text based
Gameplay Progression (can be implied by gameplay type):
Real Time
Turn Based
Avatar(s):
Solo
Team (a.k.a. squad, or party-based)
Army
Gameplay Element(s):
Shooter
Brawler
Racer
Tournament fighter
Puzzle
Strategy
Tactics
RPG (or some other form of character ability progression)
Sim
Exploration
Beat-matching
Obviously the Gameplay Elements category has the most descriptors and is still the least complete of all the categories, but you get the idea. By taking and applying all the necessary elements above to any game you can think of you can generally paint a fairly clear picture of what type of game it is relative to other games that may be similar or different. Not all the tags are necessary, and in most cases are left off because they're either obvious or implied, but for the sake of completeness in archival purposes they can help distinguish subtle differences between very similar but fundamentally different games. The "Avatars" category is one I've never actually seen applied to any games, but I think it's useful in describing some fundamental differences between games that have the player using a single character or pawn, as opposed to commanding multiple characters or entire squads/armies in various types of games.
For example, Baldurs Gate would fall under Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real time, party-based, RPG. Whereas NeverWinter Nights I would generally categorize as Fantasy, Branching, 3rd person, real-time, solo, RPG when describing the single-player campaigns at least (although you could take on a henchman at times, this was not necessary to play through or complete the game, so I would count that as an optional tag). Final Fantasy, or other Japanese RPG's would generally fall under Fantasy, Linear, 3rd person, turn based, party-based, RPG. Oblivion would be Fantasy, Branching, 1st person, real time, solo, RPG. So here we have 4 very different games that would previously all be described simply as RPG's are now much more clearly fleshed out with this system.
Multiplayer games are a whole other beast and in many cases should probably deserve their own list of categories to describe adequately. Splinter Cell's multiplayer consists of both 3rd person and 1st person perspectives, depending on which team you're playing on. A game which is designed as a solo campaign that can become a party-based campaign wh
Action | Adventure | Driving | Puzzle | Role-Playing | Simulation | Sports | Strategy
And if you want Driving is a sport.
Basically any game can fit into one of these genres, many will fit in two (an action role playing game. An driving Simulation)
You can expand your genre list more and more but the fact is every time you have them all next year there's a new one that people are trying to make up. However it's not a "GTA" genre, at best it's a free roaming genre, but in reality it's an Action Adventure game.
There's many sub genres that can tacked on underneath it all. The only problem with games with this simplistic approach is Niche games and stuff that defies convention, you will never be able to label those because the whole point of them is that they defy conventions like genres, that's why many places have Miscellaneous, as well as "compilation" which spans all genres (aka Activision Anthology)
This is the best answer though because it's specific and precise. Most games will be one genre with a second as a sub genre (the Adventure game that has a lot of action and so on) but that's fine.
My school's Game Designer's Association attempted to do something like this, and there have been many discussions amongst small groups regarding this exact topic. In the end, trying to pin games down to simplistic genres is futile and useless. On the core, every game is of the genre "Video Game." But what does that tell you about the game? Absolutely nothing. Movie genres like "thriller" or "comedy" aren't there just so that movies can be labelled, it's because people like comedies, or they like thrillers... or perhaps what they like best is a romance-comedy. This is why genres exist, and it is why game genres should not be broken down into their bases, because it means losing sight of what a game truly is. Some people love action-rpgs but HATE turn-based rpgs. Labelling every one of these games, then, simply as "RPG" would be taking the power away from what a genre title is supposed to be, and makes the end-user have to sift through countless reviews to find the rpg games that are of the type they like.
4. Profit!
Do you see the word "movie" in a movie genre?
Do you see the word "book" in a book genre?
Why is the word "game" in the game genre: "Role Playing Game"?
My personal list of game genres (note: yours may vary).
1. bad games (majority of games fall into this genre)
2. good games