Video game genre

Early attempts at creating taxological categories for video games were primarily for organizing catalogs and books. A 1981 catalog for the Atari VCS used 8 headings: Skill Gallery, Space Station, Classics Corner, Adventure Territory, Race Track, Sports Arena, Combat Zone, and Learning Center.[5] ("Classics", in this case, refers to chess and checkers.) In Tom Hirschfeld's 1981 book How to Master the Video Games, he divided the games into broad categories in the table of contents: Space Invaders-type, Asteroids-type, maze, reflex, and miscellaneous.[6] The first two of these correspond to the still-used genres of fixed shooter and multidirectional shooter.

Chris Crawford attempted to classify video games in his 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design. Crawford primarily focused on the player's experience and activities required for gameplay.[7] He wrote, "the state of computer game design is changing quickly. We would therefore expect the taxonomy presented [in this book] to become obsolete or inadequate in a short time."[8]

Following the 1983 video game crash, Nintendo required approval of all games for its Nintendo Entertainment System, a trend which continued with console systems in the future. While games for computers still allowed for experimental gameplay, console developers were more inclined to produce games with similar gameplay concepts to games already licensed by Nintendo or other console manufactures, creating groups of games within the same genre.[2] Retailers displayed games grouped by genres, and market research firms found that players had preferences for certain types over others, based on region, and developers could plan out future strategies through this.[2]

With the industry expanding in the 1990s, large publishers like Electronic Arts began to form to handle the marketing and publication of games, both for consles and personal computers. Targeting high-value video game genres were key for some publishers, and small and independent developers were typically forced to compete by abandoning more experimental gameplay and settling into the same genres used by larger publishers.[2]

As hardware capabilities have increased, new genres have become possible, with examples being increased memory, the move from 2D to 3D, new peripherals, online functionalities, and location-based mechanics. With the rise of indie game development in the 2010s aided by independent distribution, a revival of experimental gameplay had emerged, and several new genres have emerged since then.[2]

The use of "Doom clone" (red) versus "first-person shooter" (blue) over time

Due to "direct and active participation" of the player, video game genres differ from literary and film genres.[7] Though one could state that Space Invaders is a science fiction video game, author Mark J.P. Wolf wrote that such a classification "ignores the fundamental differences and similarities which are to be found in the player's experience of the game."[7] In contrast to the visual aesthetics of games, which can vary greatly, it is argued that it is interactivity characteristics that are common to all games.[1]

Like film genres, the names of video game genres have come about generally as a common understanding between the audience and the producers.[7] Descriptive names of genres take into account the goals of the game, the protagonist and even the perspective offered to the player. For example, a first-person shooter is a game that is played from a first-person perspective and involves the practice of shooting.[9] Whereas "shooter game" is a genre name, "first-person shooter" and "third-person shooter" are common subgenres of the shooter genre.[10] Other examples of such prefixes are real-time, turn based, top-down and side-scrolling.

Genre names are not fixed and may change over time because of the nature of audience-producer agreement on genre naming. The platform game genre started off as "climbing games", based on Steve Bloom's 1982 book Video Invaders, as they were inspired by games like Donkey Kong that featured ladders and jumping.[11] The same term was used by the US and UK press in 1983, including magazines Electronic Games and TV Gamer.[12][13] First-person shooters were originally known as "Doom clones" in the years following 1993's Doom, while the term "first-person shooters" became more common by around 2000.[14][15]

The target audience, underlying theme or purpose of a game are sometimes used as a genre identifier, such as with "Christian game" and "serious game" respectively. However, because these terms do not indicate anything about the gameplay of a video game, these are not considered genres.[2]

Video game genres vary in specificity, with popular video game reviews using genre names varying from "action" to "baseball". In this practice, basic themes and more fundamental characteristics are used alongside each other.[16]

A game may combine aspects of multiple genres in such a way that it becomes hard to classify under existing genres. For example, because Grand Theft Auto III combined shooting, driving and roleplaying in an unusual way, it was hard to classify using existing terms. The term Grand Theft Auto clone has been used to describe games mechanically similar to Grand Theft Auto III.[9] Similarly, the term roguelike has been developed for games that share similarities with Rogue.[17]

Elements of the role-playing genre, which focuses on storytelling and character growth, have been implemented in many different genres of video games. This is because the addition of a story and character enhancement to an action, strategy or puzzle video game does not take away from its core gameplay, but adds an incentive other than survival to the experience.[18]

In addition to gameplay elements, some games may be categorized by other schemes, those these are typically not used as genres:[1]

• By platform: generally to the nature of the computer hardware that the game is played on and not the specific branding. This would include game genres like mobile games for smartphone, tablet computers, or other similar portable devices; and browser games that can be played in a web browser. Identification of the type of hardware a game is played on implied certain limits to the type of gameplay that is available; a mobile game will typically lack as much action compared to a game playable on a home console or computer due to limitations on player input.
• By mode: referring to whether a game is single player, multiplayer, or variations on that, including massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, cooperative games, player versus environment (PvE) or player versus player (PvP) games, and so forth.
• By narrative: Classifying video games by their narrative style, such as science fiction or fantasy, is typically not used within the field, with the key exception of horror games, which broadly cover any game dealing with elements of horror fiction.

According to some analysts, the percentage of each broad genre in the best-selling physical games worldwide is broken down as follows.[19][20][21]