Gaming Genres: A Guide for the Perplexed

Genre, as anyone who has ever taken (or taught) an English class knows, is a slippery concept.  We can use it to differentiate between very broad categories (such as fiction vs. nonfiction) or to make very fine distinctions (e.g. Steampunk vs. Alternate History).  Genres can be defined on the basis of form, style, intention, relationship to other texts, etc.  It can all get very literary if you let it.

In computer gaming, it’s probably enough to say that genres coalesce around certain kinds of gaming experiences.  That is, different genres of computer games involve players in different kinds of choices on different levels of scale where they do different sorts of work, which is to say, play.

But first, the broadest distinction of all:  “computer games” are not “video games.”  Video games are played on video game systems held in one’s hand or consoles connected to one’s TV.  Computer games are played on computers.  The distinction does not imply a value judgment, but there are some long-standing differences between the cultures of computers and consoles.  My experience and my interests lie entirely with the former.  Also, video gamers twitch a lot.

The genre of Adventure Games is where computers first came into their own as an entertainment platform.  The earliest, even before the advent of personal computing, were games like Zork, which 1970s computer scientists were playing when they should have been busier inventing the Internet.  The earliest adventures were text-only, aspiring almost to the status of “interactive novels,” although player inputs were usually limited to subject-verb commands like “OPEN DOOR” or “HIT GRUE.”  (See Infocom for some really admirable examples.)

Later Adventure Games embraced graphics and became more cinematic, perhaps culminating in the beautiful and boring puzzle-world of Myst.  For the most part, the Adventure Game as a distinct genre has been made obsolete as other modes of gaming have more fully developed their elements of story and narrative.

The Adventure genre’s most direct descendent is probably the Computer Role-Playing Game (or CRPG), along with its online-only sibling the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG).  Computerized translations of pen-and-paper RPG’s have been successful since the 1980s, when Lord British’s Ultima series made the first sophisticated attempt to combine complex stat-based character development with a rich and well-backstoried fantasy world.  Classics like the Baldur’s Gate series and the more recent Dragon Age have made the most of the computer’s ability to handle the bookkeeping and number-crunching that used to bring tabletop RPG’s to a blinding, beery halt.

MMORPG’s are big business.  There are entrepreneurs making entire livings out of engaging with (exploiting) the in-game economies that arise when literally hundreds of thousands of players commit to adventuring in a persistent online world.  It has been reliably estimated that, at any given moment, every man, woman, and child in South Korea is playing World of Warcraft.

If one were small-mindedly interested in dismissing games a load of flashy, mindless, time-wasting crap, one would probably already have pointed to the genre of Action Games to make the case.  Action Games are a broad category, or broad for me, since I seldom play them due to the crap factor.  The typical action game emphasizes graphics and movement, and may even feature impressively sophisticated physics.  What sets them apart from other genres (including First-Person Shooters, for instance, which are themselves highly action-oriented) is the often highly abstract or unrealistic cast to the game mechanics.  Hand-eye coordination is often a defining requirement; this is where the twitch comes from.

I don’t intend to dismiss the genre entirely, because that wouldn’t be fair.  Sports games are more realistic every year, to the point where eventually I think someone is going to get hurt.  Some very high quality examples of the Action Game genre include the Lego Star Wars (that is correct) series and Valve’s Portal.  Infamous and controversial examples include Grand Theft Auto through Grand Theft Auto IV. 

The realistic Vehicle Simulator (or “Sim,” not to be confused with The Sims) is a gaming genre that could not have existed without computers.  Flight Simulators were the first, and by 1983 Microsoft had produced a civilian flight sim that was considered realistic and accurate enough to train small-plane pilots in the intricacies of ATC directions and instrument work.  Military flight sims have been a staple of the genre and have been among the most demanding in terms of hardware performance and player workload.  The recent Digital Combat System A-10C sim, for example, models the Warthog ground-attack jet from laser-guided bomb employment to Close-Air-Support communications to the plane’s air-conditioning system, and comes with a manual close to 700 pages long.  There is no filler in this manual.

Other types of realistic sims include race-car driving, armored warfare, naval units (especially submarines), spacecraft, and even freight trains.  I have even seen sims dedicated to farming equipment and street-sweeping, but I am just not going to go there.

The First-Person Shooter (or FPS) may be the best-selling genre of computer games today.  In brief, the FPS puts the player into an action scenario with the screen point of view representing the player’s own eyes (hence “first-person”).  Sometimes, if you look down, you can see your own body, and you can nearly always see your weapon held out in front of you.  There is always a weapon:  some of the better-known games have put the player in the position of storming Omaha Beach, fighting oppressive alien invaders, beating (or being) Mafia goons, and surviving the Zombie Apocalypse.  FPS’s dedicated to washing cars and slaughtering livestock have probably been made, but I refuse to check.

Perhaps inevitably, the realistic Simulation and the First-Person Shooter have been spliced together  to produce the Soldier Sim.  These games are basically First-Person Shooters modeling highly realistic situations in impressively realistic environments with depressingly realistic ballistics.  Military scenarios are the most popular (for example, Ghost Recon or ARMA II), but police work (S.W.A.T., anyway) has also been successful.  The most obvious difference between the FPS and the Soldier Sim is what happens when the player gets shot.  In the former, the player goes to get a power-up or a health-pack; in the latter, the player gets dead.  I have yet to see a game that erases all previous saves at that point, however.

Probably the most populous category in computer gaming is Strategy Games, a genre so broad that it contains multiple sub-genres.  Listing just a few of these should serve our purposes here:

--4X Strategy, in which the four X’s are Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate.  These games involve the player in building, nurturing, and/or mismanaging a civilization, a planet, or a whole galactic empire.  Games of this sort emphasize some version of history, research of new technologies, and economics (or at least budgets). The best known example is Sid Meier’s Sid Meier’s Civilization series, by Sid Meier.

--City Builders, which might be understood as 4X Strategy shrunk to the scale of a bus schedule.  Will Wright’s SimCity established the genre, but imitations and revisions have taken the idea to ancient Rome and to bases on the Moon.  Wright’s own The Sims further tightens the focus down to a single individual’s fashion and bathroom requirements.

--Real-time Strategy usually involves building, deploying, and replacing disposable armies of soldiers, tanks, Orks, or Zergs on top-down maps that function as arenas for amassing territory, gold, Tiberium, Melange, or Foozle.  Sometimes base-building is involved.  Settings can range from science fiction planets to fantasy kingdoms to pseudo-historical Japan.

--And more.  It’s worth noting that nearly all tabletop board games, from Clue and Monopoly to Twilight Struggle and Settler of Catan, would qualify as Strategy Games.  Nearly all of these have found conversions, analogues, imitations, and shameless knockoffs in the world of computer gaming.

Closely related to Strategy, but coming out of its own culture and traditions, is the Wargaming genre.  During WW2, General Omar Bradley famously said, “Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.”  For purposes of our discussion, this might be adapted to “Casual players push tanks around; wargamers spend hours on a single turn, painstakingly calculating movement rates, supply, terrain, and attrition in games that an outside observer would easily mistake for a spreadsheet program if it weren’t for the hexes.”  (Hexes, by the way, are the six-sided movement grid components that make up most traditional wargame maps.)

Perhaps it is not as stark as all that, but the level of detail to which hardcore wargames aspire might give an actual Pentagon staffer pause.  War in the Pacific, for example, is a WW2 game played on a map of half the globe divided into 40-mile hexes.   Record-keeping extends down to the level of individual infantry squads, planes (including individual pilot skills and experience), weapons aboard ships, torpedoes, supply tonnage, factory worker employment, etc.  The game scale is one day per turn.  Given that a typical turn might take an hour or two for each player to plot out, it’s likely that two adults with families and jobs, exchanging turns via email, will need more time for their game than was required for the actual Second World War.

But wargaming is a genre dear to my heart, and I have followed it almost from the days of my first computer.  (The now-defunct developer SSI was making sophisticated computer versions of complex hex-based wargames when Action Gaming was still at the level of Ms. Pac-Man.)  While turn- and hex-based games continue to be a staple of the genre, some developers have adopted the innovations of other genres to re-imagine the shape of realistic, highly-detailed wargames.  The Combat Mission series, for example, began as a straight computer conversion of the classic (and famously complicated) tabletop wargame Advanced Squad Leader, but it has become a fully 3-D, graphically gorgeous and historically accurate battlefield simulator.  It could easily be mistaken for a Real-Time Strategy title were it not clear that the developers are more concerned with tank-round ballistics and Tables of Order and Equipment than with selling large amounts of Combat Mission.

At another time I plan to use Wargaming and Strategy Gaming to talk about some of the moral and philosophical issues involved with simulating real human conflicts.  For instance, is it a problem that War in the East gives me the choice between role-playing Hitler or Stalin?  How does a game focused on nineteenth-century politics and economics deal with the reality of slavery?  What is a player actually doing when he orders his small but accurately organized and animated pixeltruppen to their deaths?

Those are questions for a different post.  You may wish to not hold your breath.

One thing I’ve tried to suggest in all this is that these genres have roots.  There is already a tradition in computer gaming, if not really a canon, and it’s worthwhile getting to know not only the latest thing but also some of the classics.  (The Good Old Games site, www.GOG.com, has made a business out of reviving and marketing older classics at ridiculously affordable prices.)  It’s important to realize that, for all the gains in graphics and computing power we see each year, computer game design is much more a matter of art than technology.

And that’s the real point.  Computer games (video games too) are the coming art form of the 21^st century.  Moore’s law and our wired society practically guarantee it.  Games are fun, but they are also important, and where they go is important.  The technology will be here.  What remains to be seen is whether we’ll be able to provide the human artists to do justice to the possibilities.

Oh, and someday you should ask me about Dwarf Fortress.

Blog Reviews Blog Reviews

In this post I’ll introduce a few of the sites I’m found useful for keeping track of goings-on in the world of computer gaming, or at least that side of that world that I’m interested in.  It’s worth noting that this landscape is chaotic, and I’m probably ignorant of some really excellent resources.  Consider this a sample.

I am aware that this is a Geeky, perhaps even a Nerdy, thing to do.

But first, an introduction:  My gaming life goes way back.  I think I saw my first Avalon Hill wargame (it was probably PanzerBlitz) around 1977 or 1978, when I was in third grade and my friend’s older brother tried to explain to us what all those hexes and counters were for.   I became a gamer pretty rapidly after that, starting with lighter hex-based fare (e.g. Ogre) and then moving on to 1^st edition AD&D (really, who starts with Basic?) and a whole world of complex and actually rather expensive products from Squad Leader and War of the Ring to Car Wars and StarFleet Battles.  I am especially fond of large rulebooks.

Computer games paralleled these developments.  By 1980 we had a TRS-80 in the house, then an Apple II, and it was all Moore’s Law after that.  At another time I’ll attempt a personal history of computer gaming, but it’s enough here to say that the gaming genres I’ve loved on the tabletop are well-represented in pixels on screen.  In this post I’ll point out some of the sites I’ve found to be good ongoing guides to these kinds of computer games.  (Some other time, too, I’ll talk about genres.)

While large, magazine-style online gaming coverage does exist, my favorite sites for reviews and commentary are those hosted by one or just a few people given to thoughtful writing and criticism (in the evaluative sense, not the whiny one).  If I’m going to visit a review site over time, I want to get a sense of who’s writing and what their tastes and interests are.  Blogging has been a boon to reviewers; here are a few who’ve made the most of it:

I like James Allen’s reviews at his Out of Eight site.  Unlike most reviewers, he posts no screenshots and relies entirely on words.  This isn’t the easy route, and I’ve found that it sometimes produces a richer sense of a game’s virtues (if not its graphics).

Gamers with Jobs reminds me that I’m not the only grown-up in this crowd. 

Rock, Paper, Shotgun manages to combine insightful reviews with what I assume must be a youthful, British kind of humor.

Troy Goodfellow’s Flash of Steel uses a very traditional blog format for well-done commentary and a long-running podcast series.  The focus is on strategy gaming, both computer and tabletop.

Real and Simulated Wars focuses (hard) on military simulations and wargaming, with a certain amount of historical context thrown in.

Quarter to Three is an example of a blog format that has spawned a forum community with a life of its own.  That forum community is known for being kind of a rough scene, actually.  You’d be surprised how hard some people will fight about… games.

These, then, are just a few examples, all of them blog-scale and all of them doing something that really wasn’t possible before Web 2.0:  building communities of interest made up of people hundreds and even thousands of miles apart.  (New Zealanders appear to be over-represented in gaming culture.  I don’t know why.)  They’ve added hugely to what for me has been a life-long enjoyment.  They’ve built casual, non-commercial comment and review into the heart of the hobby, and they’ve managed to make playing and talking with strangers a big part of the game.

In Which I Reboot My Blog

Most blogs die after a few posts, and this one has been no different. It might be depressing to learn exactly what number of personal sites launched into the internet can actually support life, and how many drift off without power, cold and out-of-date. Perhaps the most significant quality of Web 2.0 is its power to make people very excited about new things for very short periods of time.

That said, I can also say that I’ve been looking for an excuse to reboot this blog for a long time now. I originally started it because I wanted a place to post things I write, and to have a base to which I could refer when I talked with other people about writing. I’d planned to post drafts and selections from my fiction writing here, but I learned that doing so can sometimes (in the case of short stories, anyway) be construed as “first publication.” And that’s a problem because, you know, $$$, which isn’t much in the first place with short stories. Not that I would know; rejection is free.

But still I’m drawn to the focus I set up as “writing, criticism, and light scholarship.” That covers a lot of ground, sure. It’s imprecise. It is quite possibly pretentious. But I think the main problem with it is that it establishes a one-way field: after all, what I’m really announcing is *my* writing, criticism, and light etc. It’s kind of like I’ve established a magazine full of Me. I’m not entirely sure there’s a market for that.

And, anyway, I think it would better to fashion this site as more a crossroads than a cul-de-sac. To do that, for a while I’m going to focus on other people’s web sites, ones that have been useful for me in pursuing my own interests, and especially the really enjoyable ones: science fiction, gaming, what’s funny, and, yes, even writing, criticism, and light scholarship. Heavy scholarship I will leave to the academic libraries.

So, then. Welcome! Next up, I'll begin exploring some sites that I've found usefully unusual as a writer, a gamer, and long-time denizen of the Web.  This is what the internet looks like from here.

Big Books I Have Read: The Civil War: a Narrative, Shelby Foote

It’s now the 150th anniversary of Fort Sumter, and I’ve just finished Shelby Foote’s three-volume history The Civil War. I think I went through it in real time.

I decided to read the whole trilogy about four years ago, and I was slow getting started. About the same time, I started reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson’s book is straight history: political and military but also economic and cultural; McPherson is rightly praised for giving us the best and most rigorous single-volume history of the war and its era. It’s excellent. I plowed through it in just a couple of weeks, reading in bed.

Foote takes much longer.

For some people I know, Shelby Foote is something close to scripture. This is not just because of the word count. Growing up down South—and this was the suburban 70’s and 80’s South—I knew these books were important. A set of all three, usually boxed, held honored shelf space in most of my friends’ parents’ houses, and mine too. Not an ambitious reader as a kid, I classed them as “big, important, and too long to read.” I don’t think most people who owned them read them either.

But I’ve always weirdly loved the Civil War. I know this is an odd thing to say—I’m not Gary Brecher here. I know the Civil War was a miserable time for everyone concerned. In its essence it was suffering and starvation, destruction of property, fear and burning, blisters and blindness and gangrene. These are things that can’t really be hidden by the thick oil of heroic paintings or the bug-spattered idiocy of bumper stickers.

But what’s compelling about the Civil War is the sheer narrative power of it all. That’s where Foote comes in.

When Edward Gibbon wrote his meticulously researched and objectively analyzed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he never allowed facts to get in the way of his essential pessimism. Foote does history much the same way. There’s a barely disguised Southern bias in his reporting of military and political affairs. Southern retreats are cast as the unfortunate price of war while Northern routs are delineated in loving detail. What is bold manliness in a Southern commander like Jackson or Hill (standing up under fire, leading from the front) is cast as foolhardiness when Hancock or Reynolds does it. Grant is a blunt calculator, Lee a bold strategist. The latter never appears without a tragic, stainless aura.

Of course this is history by a novelist. No pains are taken to avoid (or indicate) speculation or to separate known facts from imaginative descriptions. Moods are boldly inferred. Character and characters are depicted with authoritative, fictive certainty. Compared to most modern academic history, this is kind of refreshing, but it also makes for double-shotted partiality. History makes a good story, but stories don’t always make good history. You have to know what you’re in for.

Despite the awesome scope and impressive length of this history, there’s a lot that doesn’t make it in. This is strictly a battlefield understanding of the war. As such, it is superb—but there is no war that demands more attention to contexts and causes than this one. When events outside the fighting appear, they come in mainly for satire, but only on the Northern side. The Southern way of life is somehow cast as aristocracy and democracy simultaneously, its graciousness covering a multitude of sins. While slaves are occasionally mentioned, Slavery is not an issue.

A focus on personalities to the exclusion of other causes makes a good story but an unstable history. Jeff Davis opens and closes the whole trilogy, as if his tragedy somehow outweighs all others. (Who today thinks of Jefferson Davis at all?) At times it all comes perilously close to suggesting that secession was right because Lincoln was homely.

Most of all, one wants a sense that both sides actually believed in something. Foote’s haloed descriptions of Southern arms make it easy to picture an army of idealistic heroes fighting a horde of invading stumblebums. It should be remembered that both of these armies endured tremendous hardship. Both thought much of their purposes. Both sustained themselves by heroic verses.

So why read it?

The answer is Shelby Foote’s writing. I’m someone who works at it (though never hard enough or long enough), and for me it’s an astonishing pleasure to read such a tremendous voice sustained at such great length. While Foote’s treatment of history off the battlefield is shallow, his prose itself is never anything but deep. There’s an achievement here that is not only one of historical writing, but of Writing.

Such a comprehensive embrace of the entire scope of the war, battle by battle, makes sameness seem almost inevitable, but somehow it never arises here. Foote finds the language for each turn of moment, the right tone for each stage of the war. Never pretentious and never overreaching, he nevertheless sometimes gets whole passages that must be read again, immediately, because they are so musical. He stands well behind his subject, never forcing his own person onto the scene. (I counted three references to contemporary events, all of them relevant.) His weariness in the latter half of volume 3 is apparent, but it is a weariness of war, never a weariness of telling.

It’s impossible to think that anything less would keep a reader—this reader, anyway—going through all those three thousand pages, all those 1.2 million words. It’s compelling, it is somehow urgent, it fills four years, and it’s difficult to imagine that it will ever be achieved again.