Activity - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 68

The genre list we used in Chapter 2, Figure 2.5, was not a very representative
or wide ranging one but the concept is right. For our more detailed analysis system,
we required a genre list that was more representative of the activities that players
perform in-game and that covered the range of genres the activity types were par-
ticular to.
Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams (2003) put forward a pretty concise and
representative list so we chose to use this as a starting point. Let's use their genres
as our fi rst attempt to identify a general set of genres, which would thus be: action ,
strategy , role playing , sports , vehicle simulation , construction and management
simulation ( CMS ), adventure , artifi cial life and puzzle , and online . Seems a good
start but one or two of these are not really genres. Online isn't a genre but a technol-
ogy, and artifi cial life really belongs in construction and management. So, we end
up with the following list: action , strategy , role playing , sports , vehicle simulation ,
construction and management game , adventure , and puzzle .
Still working from Rollings and Adams, we can be more specifi c about what
these general genres entail, as shown in Table 3.1. Many of the activities that char-
acterize these genres are stated in general terms and not specifi c activity types but
it does give us a starting point. To develop the list further, we amalgamated it with
genres commonly used by the games press, and ended up with the following twelve
defi nitions: action adventure , action shooter , adventure , beat - ' em - up , rhythm action ,
platform , puzzle , racing , RPG , simulation , sports , and strategy . We then chose ten
games from each—one hundred and twenty games in all—as a representative sample
of the vast majority of game types. To act as a description of the game, rather than
analyze the interactive media itself, we selected a number of online professional
game reviews for each game, and used these to extract a working set of AGs.
We realized early on that analyzing the actual playable game itself in terms of the

Table 3.1 Meta - Genres

Meta - Genre Activity types

Action Twitch based, hand -eye coordination, rapid response, not real

thought or conscious strategy

Strategy Building and planning, face-offs and confrontation; we need to put

our plans to the test

Role playing Advancing a story, character development, empathizing with your

character, social interaction

Sports Clearly defi ned, often complex rule set; winning and losing;

verisimilitude

Vehicle simulation Controlling, steering, driving/fl ying/sailing, time-based control maybe

with some twitch, verisimilitude

CMS Building, managing, intervening, continuing, maintaining, growing

Adventure Exploring, collecting, manipulating, puzzle solving

Puzzle Skill- or intellect-based, complete lack of verisimilitude, lack of

story, simple but logical rule set