Genre - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 13

Genres are also one of the ways players can demonstrate that they are part of
the computer gaming world. If you know what MMORPG 1 or RTS 2 stand for then
you're on your way. Game players themselves are pretty obsessed with genres in
other ways too. Many students in Clive's Games Futures class only played games
from a small number of, often closely related, genres by choice; but they would
recognize and be able to name games from many more. For the people who distribute
and market games this seems great. Put a game in a genre and an established body
of fans are ready and willing to try the game out just because it's in a genre they love.
Of course one of the big complaints about genres is that they constrain publish-
ers and make it diffi cult for new types of games and styles of gameplay to emerge.
There are also other problems cited for genres.
Sometimes genres don't seem to be quite as straightforward as players or the
industry would like. Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions is a driving game, right? But
Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions and Colin McRae Rally 2005 seem quite different
despite the fact that you have to drive in both of them. They are very different games
despite being in the same genre. How can that be? Maybe there is more to a driving
game than driving. We'll take a closer look at the driving genre later.
Perhaps we have become anesthetized to the notion of genre and have come to
view it as some kind of marketing-speak that in the end is not very useful. But that
does not have to be the case. There is a whole fi eld of genre theory devoted to a
wide range of communications media which attempts to understand what genres are
and therefore the media themselves. Genre theory will be the fi rst of the theories we
study and apply to computer games.

WHAT ARE GENRES?

The word “genre” comes from the French for “kind” and was used to refer to par-
ticular types of poetry, prose, and drama. Drama could then be classifi ed as comedy
or tragedy, for instance. Shakespeare referred satirically to classifi cations as “tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral - comical, historical - pastoral, tragical - historical,
tragical - comical - historical - pastoral . . . ” ( Hamlet , act 2, scene 2). The joke is well
made but it also might give us an insight into the nature of genres. Is it possible to
invent a completely new genre that doesn't draw on an existing one? Can we fi nd
an instance in the history of the feature fi lm, for instance, where a fi lm was made
which was then identifi ed as being the fi rst ever in a new genre? Or do new genres
always adapt or amalgamate existing ones? In an established medium such as fi lm,
the latter is almost certainly the case these days. In the early days of fi lm the former
might have been possible.
Maybe games are new enough as a medium that new genres can still be
invented. The rhythm action genre is perhaps the newest major genre to emerge from
the games industry; a genre that is enabled, in some cases, by peripheral technology.

1

Massively multiplayer online role playing game.

2

Real - time strategy.