There are lots of ways to categorise videogames, but how do they work as an overall system?
Most media have a simple genre system. There are horror films and action movies, romance novels and history books. The genres can overlap, but they all operate on the same level.
Videogames have genres too, but they’re a lot more complicated than that. Because games have so many interlocking parts, they can be sliced into groups in dozens of ways – far more than any other medium.
It’s easy to underestimate the complexity of videogame genres when you’re familiar with all the terms. Gamers use a multitude of conflicting terms to categorise games; all of them are useful for some purpose, but the reasoning behind it all can be baffling to newcomers to the hobby.
I’m going to run through the main ways we categorise videogames, beginning with the major forms of genre and moving on to other kinds of divisions. If you’re the sort of person who frequently reads videogame websites, most of them will be familiar to you, but you may have never considered them in combination.
Core gameplay genre
The most common type of game genre is a descriptor of the most basic rule structure of the game. Examples include 2D platformer, hidden-object game, third-person shooter and turn-based strategy. These labels describes how the game works, often with reference to the visual perspective and the primary game mechanic.
This kind of genre is clear and specific, yet simplistic. It usually describes only the basic structure of the game and not what the game is like as an experience; two games within a gameplay genre can have wildly differing playing styles. For example, a third-person shooter could be oriented towards action (Gears of War), horror (Dead Space) or role-playing (Mass Effect).
Narrative/aesthetic genre
Most games have some kind of narrative, whether it’s as elaborate as a plotted, scripted, voice-acted story or as simple as a visual style; for many games, the narrative is on the surface and easy 
to spot, while for others, the only “story” is in the gameplay mechanics and can be hard to define in the language of films and novels. Jason Rohrer’s games primarily fall into the latter category, for example.
The genre labels for game stories apply only to what the story is about, not how it is conveyed. Game narrative genres are interchangeable with the book and film genres: science fiction, war, romance, historical and so on.
Experience genre
The experience genre is about the intersection of gameplay and narrative. It describes what the game is like: what the combination of gameplay and aesthetics add up to as an experience for the player. Experience genres often connote a particular set of rules and game mechanics without stating them explicitly, and so they are frequently used as though equivalent to gameplay genres; but this is misleading.
Experience genres usually imply a particular set of game mechanics, but these are not necessarily definitive. Survival horror games, for example, are usually played from a third-person perspective with ponderous movement controls, but a top-down turn-based strategy game could capture the experience of survival horror without using all of the genre’s gameplay conventions.
Examples of experience genres include survival horror and empire-building sim; I would argue role-playing game is also an experience genre, although its mechanics have been fought over so much that it is treated like a gameplay genre.
If the difference between experience genre and gameplay genre is not clear, consider how they can overlap; for example, Resident Evil 4 is both a survival horror game and a third-person shooter. The experience genre describes what you do in the fiction of the game; the gameplay genre describes how you do it.
Player base
Have you seen any of the various surveys that say the average gamer is around 35 years old, likely to be female and quite probably a parent? It doesn’t apply to the population of the Battlefield: Bad Company multiplayer servers.
We judge games by their players – most frequently, hardcore or casual. Difficulty and complexity are the hallmarks of hardcore games, and approachability and simplicity are the hallmarks of casual games.
“Art games”
Not content with arguing about whether games can be art, many gamers demand clarity on exactly which games are art and which aren’t. Needless to say, this is almost entirely subjective; but most “art games” are indie productions.
Indie vs. major
Over the past twenty years, two major trends shaped the game development industry: one, the amalgamation of many publishing companies into a handful of behemoths like EA, Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard; and two, the ever-lowering barriers to making videogames. The big publishers have all the money, but the new crop of independent videogame designers don’t need any money to make a game; game programming software is becoming ever easier to use and ever more widely available for free.
As a result, the industry has hollowed out. A divide has grown between the all-consuming behemoths and the tiny, chaotic independents, with relatively few companies operating in the middle ground. Reflecting this, the concept of “indie games” as distinct from big-budget, commercially backed “triple-A” games has become an increasingly common and important distinction in game culture.
Number of players
A simple distinction, but one of the most significant, is the difference between single-player and multiplayer games. Often a game has both a single-player and a multiplayer element, although the focus is usually on one or the other. Multiplayer can be further broken down into competitive or co-operative, symmetrical or asymmetrical and massively multiplayer or small-scale multiplayer.
Platform
Delivery platforms are uniquely important to games. Whereas a book is a book whether it’s on a page or on a screen, and a film is a film whether it’s at a cinema or on a mobile phone, games differ radically according to their hardware. Whether a game is on PC, iPhone, NES or Dreamcast 2 is an important distinction that shapes the experience of playing. The platform is often the first thing mentioned in the description of a game.
It’s also the source of intense tribalism within game culture, as fans align themselves with one platform or another and evangelise it over its competitors. Game forums are the most notorious for this behaviour, but it’s not just for trolls; many respectable gaming publications are openly aligned to a single platform, including most of the surviving print magazines and the highly-regarded website Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
National culture
Where a national culture noticeably influences its games, the country becomes a kind of game genre. The biggest divide is between Japanese games and “Western games”, although Britain and various European countries have flavours of game design that are distinct from the United States and Canada, while the Soviet bloc is also establishing a distinctive style. South Korean game design is so culturally specific that although its games often have massive popularity within South Korea, they rarely find success in the West.
Interestingly, a game does not necessarily have to be made in a country for its style to be associated with it. Japanese publishers often release “Western-style” games, and vice versa.
So…
Is this a perfect system? Hardly. It’s adequate for casual discussion – you can adequately describe a new game to a friend with reference to a few of these genre labels and some comparisons to similar games, if you know what games your friend is familiar with. But for any analysis of games that requires clear, precise terminology to categorise games, it’s cumbersome.
Academic surveys of games, for example, often struggle to justify why specific games should be included in their survey on the basis of the games’ characteristics. This can be particularly galling in media effects research, when the (often questionable) results of a study on one particular game are generalised to apply to all games or all “games with violent content” – by journalists if not by the researchers themselves – with no regard for the difference between the violence in Manhunt and Advance Wars.
In a future article, I’ll address the need for a more methodical, multifaceted system for categorising games.
What genre of games do you think we need to see more of?
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Tags: beginner's guide, classification, genre
That’s a pretty tight list – I’ve been running through examples in my head to try and find gaps in it without much luck. However, I’d argue that the indie vs. major distinction is a proxy, not the actual distinction; it’s more a two dimensional measure of traditionalist vs. non-traditionalist and focused vs. non-focused. Indie developers are often budget constrained – to succeed, they can’t overspend and, at the same time, they need to differentiate themselves from what’s out there.
In practice, that often means being more experimental and nailing one, maybe two mechanics. “Indie” is a nice shorthand for describing those characteristics (as most Indie developers do follow that model), but it isn’t exclusive – Namco and Taito have quite a few “Indie”-style games (such as Pacman CE and Space Invaders Extreme) and even Chime would be considered a great Indie game were it not released by a prominent studio.