Genre - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 20

• Vehicle simulations
• Construction and management games
• Adventure games
• Artifi cial life, puzzle games, and other genres
• Online games
The games “press” as a whole seem to recognize a lot more genres than these two
writers on games. Why should this be so? The main reason is that the press is largely
concerned with the way games are marketed and sold. Most games are designed to
be in a particular genre because that is a major part of the way they will be reviewed
and thus feed sales through to the major, mostly online, retailers. On the other hand,
the game writers are trying to make some sense out of all these genres and whittle
them down to a small, manageable set that seem coherent for the purposes of discus-
sion and capture something of the nature of games. Is there a way we can make
some useful sense out of all this?
A THEORY OF COMPUTER GAME GENRES
We already noted an apparent difference between TV fi lm genres and game genres.
People were able to watch any number of fi lm genres but were only adept at playing
a few, typically six or seven, game genres. It is easy to see that this is because of
the investment in knowledge and in particular skills that is required in order to
become adept at a particular game. Very often being such an adept makes it fairly
easy to play other games in the same genre. You will recognize the underlying logic
of the game, how to progress and win. The interface will most likely be very similar,
even down to the keyboard or game pad controls, and so on. Game genres are dif-
ferent from fi lm genres.
The kind of map we saw for TV fi lm genres, Figure 2.1, did not appear to exist
for games. Trying to build such maps begins to make the difference between game
and fi lm genres clearer. In Clive's Games Futures classes building a genre map for
games was one of the initial tasks for students. Figure 2.2 is a synthesis of some of
the maps built by students and uses some of the genres they suggested. This one is
much simplifi ed but does exhibit some of the general ideas and some of the main
problems encountered.
We should emphasizes that there is no correct genre map for computer games,
but that certainly doesn't mean that trying to make one isn't interesting and useful
because it certainly is.
You will fi nd many of the genres in this map used by the games press,
but student maps typically included far more genres than even the games press
commonly uses. One of the reasons for this is that Clive did not require the students
who constructed these genre maps to restrict themselves just to genres cited in pub-
lished media. They created genres of their own to best refl ect the way they catego-
rized computer games. This led to much discussion concerning whether or not some
of the entries in their maps were actually genres at all.