Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Genre
Computer game publishers, game magazines, game review sites on the web, any
text that discusses games, and millions of players around the world all love to put
games in genres. You come across genre labeling all the time: games are shelved in
shops by genres, and magazines label games in this way throughout their pages. It
seems as if games have to belong to a genre.
It might seem that genres are the idiosyncratic manufacture of game reviewers
and the marketing departments of publishers. This of course does happen on a
regular basis and we found 389 genre names in current use, either frequently or
spasmodically, by professional online game reviewers alone. But for a genre to
become established as part of popular game culture it needs to go through a process
of cultural acceptance so that all participants in a particular subculture—the players
and industry professionals in this case—reach a collective agreement.
This collective conventionalization of genres is part of the general cultural and
social construction of meaning systems; systems which allow us to understand and
create within complex and often abstract communications systems that humans
constantly invent and update. Computer games are just one example of such systems.
So to better understand computer games, and for a number of other reasons which
will become apparent as this chapter develops, genres are very interesting to study.
But the foremost reason for starting our investigation into games with a discussion
of game genres is the clear relationship genres have to the game development and
publishing industry itself. We start where it starts; or rather, we start where the
industry has gotten itself so far.
If you are a fi rst - person shooter (FPS) fan then you will most likely be happy
to play a new game loosely classifi ed within that genre. You will fi nd that the controls
for the new game will be much the same as for other games of that type. You will
use the same keyboard keys; WSAD to move and left mouse button to fi re on the
PC, for example, and similar control pad buttons to pick up and discard objects, and
if there are differences they will be slight and easy to work out for players adept in
the genre.
 
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