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 21st 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.
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