Genre - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 25

games, collect -' em - ups , and so on. Perhaps the fi rst real genre was text adventure ;
but after that came the platform genre and suddenly everything before that was
retro or classic . Platform was the fi rst recognizable genre for graphics-based
games. Now, with hindsight and a little genre analysis, we can see that even
classic and retro games mostly belong to currently recognizable genres and that
platform may well be an instance of adventure constrained by the technology of
its time.
In games, gameplay activity is king! So, instead of starting with the genres the
games press use, why not start with a small number of activities and classify games
according to the patterns of activity that are important to them. We have done just
this in an informal way in this chapter but even so have come up with some interest-
ing insights into the nature of games by analyzing genres. We considered:
• Genre-linking through common gameplay activities, giving us insights into
the nature of genres themselves and the relationships between them;
• The relationships between games both current and historical despite their
having differences in gameplay modes or enhancements in technology;
• Subgenres and some rules that govern them;
• Genre-mixing to produce variations on a genre or indeed new genres
altogether;
• Multigenre games employing genre switching, such as Shemmue; and
• Meta-genres where a key activity or small set of activities identifi es a set of
games which otherwise have differing activities.
In the next chapter we are going to pick up on these ideas and develop a more
practical approach by using software to analyze gameplay activities, allowing us to
work with games and their genres in a far more rigorous manner and in far greater
numbers.
FURTHER READING AND TASKS
If you would like to follow up on genre theory and discussions of game genres
then here are a few starting points. The best introduction to genre theory I have
found is Daniel Chandler' s An Introduction to Genre Theory (1997) which is part
of his excellent “Semiotics for Beginners” site which we will be referring to again
in Part II of this topic. Good discussion of game genres, but not from a genre theo-
retic point of view, can be found in Steven Poole's excellent Trigger Happy ( 2004 ,
p. 29) and the whole of part II of Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams' excellent
topic ( 2007 ).
Here are some tasks to try for yourself:
1. An interesting exercise is to try spotting a new genre by adding an “ing”
word for gameplay activity to an existing game or genre, and then seeing
how the gameplay would change.