Genre - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 21

People Sims

Flight Sims

Future
Driving

Beat 'em up

Battle
Driving

Simulation

Management

Turn
Based Sci-fi FPS

FPS RPG Platform Sports

Driving RTS

Horror FPS

War FPS

MMO RPG

Racing Puzzle

Action
Adventure

MUDs/MOOs

Point
& Click

Text
Adventure

Survival
Horror

Sneak 'em up

Figure 2.2 Genre map for games.

Looking at Figure 2.2 we might question the difference between horror- FPS
and survival- horror. The latter is a recognized subgenre of action adventure but the
former is an invention. Similarly, we could ask, are the two genres war- FPS and
future- FPS from the map of game genres at all? We came to the conclusion that
these were more like fi lm genres and were just instances of FPS in general. So what
is the difference?
Film genres are all to do with the type of story the fi lm is based around and
along with such stories come ideas about the style of lighting, camerawork, and a
host of other things. Game genres are all concerned with activity: what does the
player actually do in order to progress the game? This is why future- FPS and
war- FPS are not actually game genres because the gameplay would be almost
identical, and exactly what you would do in an FPS in general.
Here is an easy way to focus in on game genres. Pick a game genre or three—
preferably ones closely related to one another as on one of the genre maps above—
and try to write down a few verbs (six or so) which appear to capture the main
activities which characterize the genre. In particular write down “doing words,”
present participles, that attempt to characterize what you can expect to be doing at
any one moment in a game of a given genre. This seems to break the rule we stated
earlier that genres are easy to recognize but hard to defi ne. Well, the idea here is not
to defi ne computer game genres precisely—we'll do that in the next chapter—but
rather to build a model that gives us some insights into the nature of these genres
and thus, perhaps, the nature of computer games themselves.
Table 2.2 lists a range of game genres and the present participles associated
with them. Basically, we have put forward a theory that activity characterizes game
genres. Not all of the “ings” are action words; some are thought and emotion type