Genre - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 24

that we can only fi ght people when it is appropriate to the story line. In Shenmue
this is more than reasonable as it prevents us fi ghting old ladies and other innocent
citizens who just happen to be passing while we are exploring or investigating. So
Shenmue as an action adventure mixes in elements of RPG but is also a multi-genre
game and employs genre-switching to vary the types of activity, the gameplay mode,
required of the player at particular stages in the game.
Now let 's look at the driving genre and see how identifying the activities that
characterize such games will lead us to new insights about this popular genre. Take
the two games Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions and Colin McRae Rally 2005. They
are obviously both drivers . The main activity is driving fast vehicles. But they are
quite different games. In Wreckless we play either a spy or a police offi cer attempt-
ing to bring down the head of the Yakuza in Hong Kong. As the name suggests, the
player's objective is to thwart various Yakuza bosses by wrecking their transporta-
tion using the playable vehicle. This is not its only feature; it also includes strategy
and action adventure activities in particular missions. For example, one case requires
the player to rescue a hostage from a massive dump truck, but this cannot be done
by simply ramming the vehicle. The player has to detonate explosive barrels the
truck is carrying by launching the playable vehicle off various points around the
construction site.
The verbs that describe this game are investigating, planning, and attacking, but
these belong to the RTS genre and certainly don't apply to Colin McRae Rally 2005.
This is much more of a rally simulation and requires great driving skill on all sorts
of terrains, following a codriver's routing instructions, working within time con-
straints, and all sorts of other skills that belong to rally driving.
We have two drivers that have some of the same verbs but one, Wreckless, has
some from another genre. Wreckless is a kind of strategy game, a driving- strategy
perhaps? Perhaps the driving genre is really some kind of meta-genre in which we
have the basic activity type of driving but to which can be added other activity types
to arrive at specializations of it. Think of other drivers and see what specializations
might apply to them: some are beat -' em - up - drivers , some are stealth- drivers , RPG-
drivers , and so on.
The driver genre is indeed a meta-genre. Rollings and Adams have an even
more inclusive meta-genre called vehicle - simulations which would include fl ight-
sims , boat - sims , ship - sims , train - sims and many more. Some of the games in the
retro or classic genre, Lunar Lander for instance, can also belong in this genre.
SUMMARY
Genres are helpful and confusing all at the same time. Writers on games seem to
want/need to adopt fewer, more generic genres in order to make sense of games
as a phenomenon. It may well be that there is a trend here that has something to
do with the evolution of games over time. In the beginning there were no genres.
There was only a small number of games, most of which looked very different.
As more games appeared you could perhaps begin to classify them: spaceship