Discussion: Video games and genre
Video games have a strange system of classification. Not strange as in hard-to-understand (once you realize what makes up a first person shooter, a role playing, or a real-time strategy game, it’s pretty easy to spot another), but strange in that it is unique to the art form.
Rather than film or novels, where genre depends on a sort of emotional tenor (horror is about inspiring fear, westerns are typically about adventure or heroism in the Old West, etc.), the genres of video games are almost always based on mechanics. Role playing games feature player levels that are gained by collecting experience points, sandbox games feature an open world for you to explore and interact with and shooters involve, well, shooting things.
The limitations of game genre was discussed in an episode of the online show “Extra Credits” a few weeks ago and touched on this point. It’s a great episode, and the gist of it is that the current genre-naming conventions are harming game design because they focus on mechanics and not emotional content.
It’s a good point, but it misses one of the more important uses for genre: marketing.
Not marketing in the conventional sense, but rather that marketing labels commonly attributed to games are what will lead audiences to other games. If, for example, a new player discovers he or she likes RPGs, then he or she will seek out other games labeled as RPGs.
In fact, a lot of different media use genre in this way, using the obvious formal elements to indicate what the prospective consumer should expect. For example, if you pick up a hip-hop album, you’ll probably be disappointed if it prominently featured elements of polka.
Keeping in mind that this video is meant to explore game design concepts, it makes sense that the crew at “Extra Credits” chose to focus on theory rather than on something as cynical as marketing, but it’s important to consider how people end up playing games, not just what they’re made up of.
But what do you think? Does labeling a game based on how it should be marketed seem problematic for game design? Should we adopt a more theme-based system for categorizing games?