Activity - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 77

• Platformer
• Rhythm action/music/party (RAMP)
• RPG
• Shooter
• Simulation
• Sports
• Strategy
• Puzzle
• Fighting

(2) Select Games That Characterize Each Genre

The 20,000 games in GIL are defi ned by about 400 different genres in the games
press! Needless to say, this fi gure is far too large to enter into a dropdown list for
users to search by. We therefore group the genres under twelve recognizable but
general ones and a catch-all, Other , for those that just don't seem to fi t anywhere.
For example, “ computer role playing , ” “ fantasy online role playing , ” “ persistent
online action RPG , ” “ RPG compilation , ” and “ turn-based RPG simulation ” are all
classed as the role - playing game genre.
However, some of the genre defi nitions given by the game review websites may
not be appropriate to describe the game. For instance, a “ sci - fi adventure game ”
could easily be classed as a “ sci - fi action adventure ,” and so would be placed in the
wrong genre by our harvesting software.
For this reason, the website Wikipedia came in handy as their game genre defi -
nitions have been agreed upon, or at least not disagreed upon, by its many millions
of users.
The articles accessed included:

• “ List of fi rst - person shooters ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fi rst - person_shooters
• and “ Category: Action - adventure games ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Action - adventure_games

In total, the number of games across the twelve genres is 203, varying from 12
to 28 games per genre. Any potential diffi culty caused by the difference in fi gures
was solved by using percentage values to calculate any commonality between activ-
ity groups and genres.

(3) Record Each Activity Group That Registers
for Each Game

Using GIL, individual charts for each game or game series were created and saved.
They then could be viewed as a data set.