I’ve been unable to attend to all classes as I’ve been having the flu the last couple weeks. Therfore I have to catch up on lectures and reading. Why not do a little bit of both in this blog-post?

As the title suggests, I’ll explore the different genres games have to offer. Genres are not necessary to simply enjoy a game, but they can be helpful when it comes to studying them.

The first thing needed is a definition of the term. According to Understanding Video Games, a genre is «a category based on certain shared characteristics.» Four different genres were presented during lecture: Action games, adventure games, strategy games and process-oriented games. According to the definition of a genre, each category have the same characteristics.

Action games are intense and involve physical drama. They require mot-sill and hand-eye coordination. A few examples of action games would be Pac-Man and Red Dead Redemption. Both of those games are in many ways different, but they still share the same characteristics.

Adventure games require deep thinking and great patience; involve mysteries and puzzles. In my opinion, terms like «deep» and «great» are vague and can me interpreted differently. Regardless, a decent defintion. Examples would be Maniac Mansion and Dreamfall: the Longest Journey.

Strategy games are like a game of war, but the player resembles the General; conflict on a map (resembling classic board games). There’s an important to distinguish between an RTS (real-time strategy) and a TBS (turn-based strategy). In an RTS the fighting happens in real-time, such as in Warcraft and Age of Empires. The most popular TBS would be chess. Each player got as much time as they want to plan their next move (unless you play speed chess). An example would be Civilization and Heroes: Might of Magic 3.

Process-oriented games is the last category. In those, the player plays with a system. It could fit the definition of a toy to play with; the games lack consistent criterion for success. World of Warcraft is an example of a game like this. There is no specific goal. You do quest after quest, dungeon after dungeon, raid after raid. You grind.

Those were the genres we were introduced to during lecture. I’m quite familiar with those terms as a gamer myself. Seperating games into four genres isn’t much, but it might help someone to do the studying needed. How you categorize something might depend on what research you’re about to do.

When I play games on my computer, I mostly use Steam. Steam is a platform that distributes games online. As of today, I have 234 games in my Steam library. The reason I’m mentioning Steam is that I like how they categorize their games. They don’t only have 4 genres, but way more. I’ll show the main genres below.

Here are action, adventure and strategy games once again. World of Warcraft would go into the definition of RPG, Massively Multiplayer and arguably action and strategy.

Steam don’t just operate with these few genres. As stated in the beginning of this post, a genre is just certain shared characteristics. A genre can be pretty much anything. Below are some more of the genres Steam uses. Those are certainly not all of the genres, but just a few. It might be a bit hard to navigate through all of those, but it can definitely be beneficial to operate with this many categories. If I think females are not represented enough in video games, I can click the «female protagonist» category and play more female oriented games. It’s a quite specific category, but they can be very helpful if I want to play a specific kind of game.

Just because some of these categories are quite specific and narrow, doesn’t mean a game only can be put in a single category.

Let’s take a look at Elder Scrolls: Online, which is a game quite similar to World of Warcraft.

This game is considered as an RPG, open world, MMORPG, fantasy and an action game. If I click the + sign, I can see even more characteristics this game has. It’s worth to mention that all of those categories are defined by its users. I’d say all of those categories applies to World of Warcraft as well. It’s not just a process-oriented game.

My point with this post is that genres aren’t set in stone. A genre is just certain characteristics some games share. A category can be wide, but also quite narrow and specific. What genres you’d use depends on your kind of research as a student, or what kind of game you’d want to play as a gamer.

 

On the 6th week of Netnarr we continued learning about games, and the topic of game genres were brought up. I zoned out debating what my favorite genres are, and realize I enjoy a mix of genres. For example, I love platform games that also are adventure games, like Trine 1 and 2, which has beautiful visuals and a great story, and every character in it is fun to play as (Although Amadeus is my favorite). I also enjoy terraria and starbound, which also are platformers and adventure games. In the past I’ve played World of Warcraft a lot, which is a process-oriented game according to our lecture on Tuesday, and that is certainly not a platformer. Writing about this makes me realize that I might currently prefer games I see as adventure games over shooter games/auction games overall, but I’ve been addicted to a big variety of games within different genres.. I’ll include a picture of my most played games on steam at the moment, where you can see an example of this, and also see how many hours / «timer» I have on the games.

This list doesn’t include games outside of steam, like minecraft (which I’m addicted to recently, especially modded minecraft, and if minecraft had a way of recording how many hours you’ve spent in the game, I believe my hours would be in the thousands) and Overwatch, which I have over 600 hours on.

It’s a bit scary looking at the numbers above, although these are hours I’ve built up over a long time, many years, and a lot of gamers have more hours than I do (it’s because I’m addicted to Overwatch!!!!!!!! help) I also have the habit of playing the same games over and over without trying new games, which is a bit sad because I have a lot of unplayed games in my library. Y U NO TRY THE GAMES?

I do not enjoy FPS games at all (exluding Overwatch of course, though it’s not a pure fps game), and although I’ve played games like tomb raider (which I loved, but I was rly frustrated sometimes because I had to shoot people and I cant aim LMAO) I don’t think I’d enjoy a shooter game that’s also an online game. I’m fine with it as long as it’s just me alone and I can die and respawn and try again, but being shot my people online, who’s got a lot more experience than me, is just something I don’t want to do, and don’t really enjoy.