The Game Stash: A Question of Genre

[More Fun To Compute]

I'm saying that if Portal needed to be content driven to force people to play the game then it might as well have been a cookie cutter FPS. People might even have preferred it that way since they wouldn't have had to learn any new concepts. It might be that some or most game players are like that but for me it certainly isn't true that games where the gameplay comes before content are bad.

If valve started with the premise that someone was trapped inside a research facility run by a mad AI then asked themselves what sort of game would enable that then they might have thought along different lines. Well, System Shock did that but that sort of sim level gameplay isn't our thing so an FPS with some light adventure elements might do it. We need some new tech or gameplay element to make the concept more exciting so, what about a gun that reprograms gun turrets! That fits in with whole rogue AI thing.

So I'm saying that leading with gameplay decisions can lead to more interesting places than leading with content ideas. Because my gameplay idea for Portal sucked.

 

[Steve Butts]

Fair enough. I still have to ask, what genre is Portal? Did it benefit from a pre-conceived notion of genre?

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I think that Portal did benefit from association with the whole "first person immersive sim" and "physics puzzle" thing that Valve were already associated with. I suspect that any more than one or two good new ideas in a game is too much and real time portal creation was a good idea.

 

[Steve Butts]

Yeha, with all the genre-blends we're seeing these days, I'm still waiting for my MMORPGFPSRTSNBA game. It's coming.

 

[Dhatz]

the question is: is it worth my time? Examples:GearsOW,COD,WOW, blur, split/second,[insert melee combat game] are not. Deus Ex, Soldier of Fortune 2 double helix, GTA 3 through IV, NFS 5 through MW, GRID, Mass Effects, Mirrors Edge, Portal(s), AC2, mafia 2: definitely, because they push the shit out of boundaries, those boundaries that are REQUIRED to be pushed.

 

[12th_milkshake]

Yeha, with all the genre-blends we're seeing these days, I'm still waiting for my MMORPGFPSRTSNBA game. It's coming.

I think the really problem might be the grass is greener. The millions of pounds being produced by wow is a dream for a developer but instead of reinventing they copy hoping to hit the same mark.

So mircosoft say 'i want a RPG like this' and hire in or buy up a team to do it. Look at what they did to halo. Anyone old enough to remember what the bungie game looked like before the buyout. It was very very different and maybe a lot more innovative based around team work much like tom clancy franchise not a lone wolf character. And again it proves the story changed to fit the limited xbox rather than the expanse of the PCs mechanics.


Interesting enough it's not just professionals doing this look at freeware development/help needed over at www.gamedev.com - MMO is the biggest thing people want to make... and it's sad but there you have it. Cash is king after all and there are lots of sticky little fingers wanting to cash in on this.

And i'd put portal squarely in the physics puzzle genre, the factor it is First person is visual not really a game mechanic. The 'shooter' element is missing no matter how it's sugar coated it you never effectively shoot anything. Do you define a book by it's narrative style?

 

[Chirez]

I think it's necessary to remember that games, unlike any other media, are strongly influenced by the manner in which we interact with them. Mechanics are not incidental, or simply there to frame a narrative, they are in all instances an integral part of the experience.

Playing any game is a multi-layered experience, we appreciate the narrative with our higher functions while at the same time enjoying the sense-response interaction of the game's mechanics.

Something like Tetris or Pong has the latter without the former, but narrative without interaction is not a game, it's a movie. So, mechanics are the more fundamental aspect of any game experience. In much the same way that poetry is less about semantic content than about structure and rhythm, a good game is less about the story being told than the manner in which it is told.

I think what you're identifying here is analogous to the development over time of formulae in books or films. In any movie there must be a romantic sub plot, it is decreed by the conventions which have grown up around the medium. These conventions often outweigh any kind of sense or meaning and this is why so many films have nonsensical structures bent around the expectations of the audience.

The same is true of games, but instead of narrative cliches (which are still carried over from the older media traditions) we get mechanical ones, born of the expectations of the players. You could have a shooter where the weapons were not loosely categorised into pistol, shotgun, machine gun, explosive, but those distinctions are so ingrained that it would seem almost nonsensical.

The difficulty in all creative media is emerging from the tangle of cliche and tradition which grows around each over time, and doing something original. It rarely happens in any of the older media, most films are formulaic and cliche ridden, as are most books. The few seminal exceptions define the upper reaches of the medium.

I lack the knowledge to frame any kind of explanation of all this, but it seems to me that the few truly great games in my experience are less about their narrative. What I remember from a good game is how it feels to play, not who the characters were or what they were doing.

The truly great games, Portal being the prime example, do both. Without the mechanics, the story would have been limp. Without the story, the mechanics would have been pointless. The great advantage of games is the ability to engage us on every level, from the frontal lobes right down to the brain stem.

P.S. - Bonus points for correct use of the phrase 'begging the question'. Jolly good show.

 

[beefpelican]

Fantastic first article. I agree that the genre system needs some reform... but I think one of the problems is that even though there might be a war RTS and a war FPS, but filing them both under "war games" could be bad because the FPS player may not necessarily enjoy the mechanics of an RTS and vice-versa. It's important to remember that games are different from novels, film, and other forms of passive media.

I agree completely. If I am bad at or just don't enjoy a certain type of game, it doesn't matter how much I might enjoy the story, because I will never see it. Perhaps what is needed is subcategories, such as 'an FPS about mushroom farmers in the 1920's' or something like that.

 

[wonkify]

"As soon as a game creator says "I'm going to make an MMOG," for instance, more than half the design is locked down purely by the expectations that label carries in the market."

The last word in that sentence, market, really seems to be the operative one to me.

Isn't marketing much more to blame for this emphasis? Isn't that what drives the mania to be able to stick everything in it's proper box, strata, phylum?

Isn't that why brilliant games like PSYCHONAUTS or NO ONE LIVES FOREVER gets hurt in sales because of the resistance of those genre defying works being rammed into a square hole?

Do all of us out here really care about those tags beyond some sort of starting place shorthand to get an idea of the major mechanic at work? And isn't the next question just what you say it should be...is it good and what's it about?

Let big name studios try to dispense with this staightjacket and see if marketing lets them.

 

[commasplice]

Great article. This reminds me of an ongoing conversation I've been having with my mother about the definition of an RPG. She's heard me use the term plenty, I'm sure, and one day, during a chat about the vidya, she (clearly unsure of what the genre specifically encompasses) implied that Zelda is a series of RPGs.

She's actually said this a couple of times, with each of them resulting in me NERDRAEG-ing, her asking what the phrase means and me going, "Er, well, uhm..." See, while she was growing up, people were playing D&D, MUDs and not much else. So, even though she's more or less beaten Ocarina of Time (she couldn't get past Ganondorf), she associates Zelda games with RPGs on account of the facts that they take place in a fantasy setting and you go around in dungeons and collect items.

Eventually, after thinking about it a bit, I managed to properly explain to her that "RPG" doesn't have anything to do with the setting or plot of a game, but with the basic system of experience points and levels. It also occurred to me that, as Mr. Butts said in his post, my mother was probably more correct in her characterization of RPGs than I was, because any game that attempts some sort of narrative can be considered a "role-playing game".

 

[commasplice]

"As soon as a game creator says "I'm going to make an MMOG," for instance, more than half the design is locked down purely by the expectations that label carries in the market."

The last word in that sentence, market, really seems to be the operative one to me.

Isn't marketing much more to blame for this emphasis? Isn't that what drives the mania to be able to stick everything in it's proper box, strata, phylum?

Isn't that why brilliant games like PSYCHONAUTS or NO ONE LIVES FOREVER gets hurt in sales because of the resistance of those genre defying works being rammed into a square hole?

Do all of us out here really care about those tags beyond some sort of starting place shorthand to get an idea of the major mechanic at work? And isn't the next question just what you say it should be...is it good and what's it about?

Let big name studios try to dispense with this staightjacket and see if marketing lets them.

Amen, brother (or sister). This article claims that you know you've made a good game when you can say that it's "like X, but has this one awesome thing!" I disagree wholeheartedly. That's how you know you'll sell a game. That does not mean you have made a gem.

Personally, I think the indie market is holding the heart and future of the industry, at least from a "video games as art" or even just a "video games that break the mold" standpoint. Look at Yume Nikki, for example. I have no idea how to classify the gameplay aside from "exploration" and I can't think of anything to compare it to, yet it's probably had a more profound effect on me than any other game I've played since Ico (which I played after SotC, so I can't technically name that one).

I can't think of one other big budget game that I've played since Ico that actually made me feel like I was experiencing something relatively new. Hell, neither Mass Effect nor Bioshock had impacts on me that even came close to the feeling I got while wandering around in Yume Nikki, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, if anything at all.

 

[Miumaru]

I disagree with the assertion that halo and CoD dont belong in the same genre as each other because one has a sci-fi aesthetic and the other is "realistic". I dont think the theme/narrative/fiction has or should have anything to do with classifying a game type. On the other hand, i agree that the way we try to box an entire game experience into catch words like FPS and RTS is a very heavy handed and clumsy way of doing things. The reason halo and CoD shouldn't be considered similar in anyway is (imo) the fact that they play entirely differently in terms of their mechanics. The only thing they share in that regard is the fact that you play from the same camera perspective in both, and have a great big gun in the foreground.

But the differences in the type of mechanism each uses is enough to differentiate them already, without having to resort to looking at the individual fiction and narratives that each has. Again imo.

So everyone who likes Halo should like Call of Duty then?

 

[Sahm]

Hey, Steve is writing for The Escapist now! I remember you from the Command Prompt podcast.

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

Although I quitely disagree with you because the genre division gives me a sense of variety in games (yes, I'm backwards like that), that was an excellent read and it does raies a very interesting question.
Oh, and welcome aboard the Escapist.

 

[Azagthoth666]

I disagree with this idea. What your saying is that your basic philosophy is that the story of a game is more important than the gameplay. If developers decided to make games that way then we would have a bunch of interactive movies like heavy rain instead of games. Maybe its just me considering im fond of games like TF2 which dont have a deep story but are fun as hell to play and mainly i like the multiplayer scene. On my view here are a game's priorities.

1. Mechanics. (everything from multiplayer game balancing to how fun the actual gameplay is)
2. Graphics (honestly i almost couldnt care less about a game's except for a game that just looks unbearably bad but its still slightly more important than story.
3. Story (if i want a moving story i have books, movies, or Heavy Rain (its not a game its an interactive movie) but for a game i dont need a story i need fun gameplay because thats what makes me come back to a game. Ive already clocked at least 130 hours on TF2 which has a pretty strange and hard to follow story but i dont care.

 

[GodKlown]

I have always had a problem with games that are cross-genre, such as some of the examples mentioned in the article. Take Red Dead Redemption for example: it is listed as an "action" game, but it does have a lot of role-playing aspects. But do we not all agree that "action" is entirely too broad and general of a term? Of course a game has action, otherwise you'd be watching it instead of playing it.
But role-playing, as it has been widely discussed, is such a wide avenue to traverse anymore, isn't descriptive enough anymore. A game is praised and noted as having "RPG elements" to immerse the gamer into the virtual world within which the game exists. So developers make these genres boil down into smaller elements in order to justify associating them with a classification/genre. Your game has guns? It's a shooter! You can develop your character's abilities? It's an RPG! Your game features usable vehicles? It's a driving/racing game! But what about a game that has all of these things, like Mass Effect? It gets dumped into either the RPG or Action category.
To simply lump all games under the "video game" general umbrella term isn't descriptive enough, but does certainly describe all games, correct? You can't argue that games aren't simply "games", but that doesn't quite work to differentiate each title by itself. Sadly, there will never be a simple or comprehensive answer to this problem. Really, I feel this all started when the ERSB rating system began way back when... still, I understand, a voluntary system but started boiling down the aspects of a game to put it under some sort of ratings system. If you already have to break down the core elements of a game to give it a rating, it is not a far leap in judgement to say that you could potentially do the same work to place a game into a certain category to classify it.

Simplified classification is a human condition in which we feel the need to place a label, whether right or wrong, on things to better understand them at a glance. If you slick your hair down and wear skinny jeans and paint your fingernails black and shop at Hot Topic, people will label you either as emo or goth. Does this really define you? Probably not. I listen to rap music, watch a lot of comedy central, and play a myriad of different video games, so I'm fairly cross-genred and cannot be placed into a simplified category. However, people who see me still try and place a general label on what they assume based on what they see. This does people and video games no measure of true justice, yet we cannot pull ourselves away from this familiar habit. We can argue this day after day, year after year, but I'm confident that little will actually change towards a positive end in this discussion. If we begin to apply the full and correct label to each game, the genres will vastly begin to overshadow the actual title of most games! I agree the current system does tend to barely scratch the surface of most games, but at least it is a starting point to giving you a hint as to what a game might feature in it. I suppose that is better than nothing.

 

[nmaster64]

Steve! I wondered what happened to you! I meet you at TGC and suddenly Command Prompt goes off the air and you fall of the radar.

But hey, really happy to see you pop up at Escapist, looking forward to your work here. Don't suppose you could get an Escapist audio podcast started to fill the void in my iTunes, eh? Haha, well either way glad to see you and the facial hair are doing well.

 

[JakobBloch]

I liked the article but I must say I disagree.

Seeing as games are an interactive media the way in which you interact has to be a part of the way we define genres. It can not be the only way we do so but it has to be one of them. The reason is that there are so many different games out there, some even defying easy classification, and to know which one will be one I like I need to know something about its basic game play structure. Just saying that a game is a steam-punk doesn't really tell me anything about the game. It does tell me that it is set in a steam-punk setting but I have no clue as to whether or not I might like it (unless I have some fetish with steam-punk). Had I instead said that it was a Steam-punk FPS we would be in business. In that sentence I have both determined what kind of game it is and what kind setting we are talking. Add machiavellian intrigue (Machiavellian intrigue steam-punk FPS) and we have probably the most succinct description of Bioshock without making it into a mini-series. The point to all this of course is that to know if it is a game for me chances are that I only need "steam-punk FPS".

I would like to point out that film and books also follow the same formula. The genres there does not really betray content either. It only describes the framework. Action, thriller, splatter, drama, comedy and so forth. None of these tells you anything about what kind of story we are talking but only how it will be presented. "Broken down cop tries to redeem himself for not being able to save his wife." There that is content. The problem is I have no clue as to whether or not I am going to like the movie. If it is a drama I would probably pass but if it was action or thriller I might consider it.

The remedy, as I did earlier, is of course to mix and match genre labels. but we are already doing that so I must admit I have a hard time seeing the issue.

 

[ThisNewGuy]

Great article, but I can't help but disagree.

To me, games are designed around its mechanics rather than its fiction. I feel that those types of games are always better than games that emphasize its fiction over its mechanics.

I mean, case in point, Sonic Unleashed has a much better fiction than New Super Mario Bros, but you'd have to be ridiculously imbecilic to consider Sonic a better game.

But why can't fiction and mechanics be the same thing? Look at Rez and Flower, the mechanics is the story. The experience of the game mechanics is the story its trying to tell. Same with Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, all great games because they melted the mechanics with its message, and it works.

 

[wonkify]

"As soon as a game creator says "I'm going to make an MMOG," for instance, more than half the design is locked down purely by the expectations that label carries in the market."

The last word in that sentence, market, really seems to be the operative one to me.

Isn't marketing much more to blame for this emphasis? Isn't that what drives the mania to be able to stick everything in it's proper box, strata, phylum?

Isn't that why brilliant games like PSYCHONAUTS or NO ONE LIVES FOREVER gets hurt in sales because of the resistance of those genre defying works being rammed into a square hole?

Do all of us out here really care about those tags beyond some sort of starting place shorthand to get an idea of the major mechanic at work? And isn't the next question just what you say it should be...is it good and what's it about?

Let big name studios try to dispense with this staightjacket and see if marketing lets them.

Amen, brother (or sister). This article claims that you know you've made a good game when you can say that it's "like X, but has this one awesome thing!" I disagree wholeheartedly. That's how you know you'll sell a game. That does not mean you have made a gem.

Personally, I think the indie market is holding the heart and future of the industry, at least from a "video games as art" or even just a "video games that break the mold" standpoint. Look at Yume Nikki, for example. I have no idea how to classify the gameplay aside from "exploration" and I can't think of anything to compare it to, yet it's probably had a more profound effect on me than any other game I've played since Ico (which I played after SotC, so I can't technically name that one).

I can't think of one other big budget game that I've played since Ico that actually made me feel like I was experiencing something relatively new. Hell, neither Mass Effect nor Bioshock had impacts on me that even came close to the feeling I got while wandering around in Yume Nikki, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, if anything at all.

That would be brother, and thanks. Agree just as much if not more with what you added.