Games genres literature

Black History Month. End of Year. Martin Luther King Day. Patrick's Day. The New Year. Valentine's Day. All 'Math'. Word Problems. All 'Science'. Basic Principles. General Science. Other Science. Social Studies - History. All 'Social Studies - History'. Ancient History. Asian Studies. World History. All 'Specialty'. Career and Technical Education.

Character Education. Classroom Community. Classroom Management. Computer Science - Technology. Critical Thinking. Early Intervention. For All Subjects. Gifted and Talented. Instructional Technology. Library Skills. Life Skills. Oral Communication. Other Specialty. Physical Education. Products For TpT Sellers. School Counseling. Special Education. Speech Therapy. Test Preparation. Tools for Common Core. For All Subject Areas. Shows resources that can work for all subject areas.

Prices Free. On Sale. Resource Types Independent Work Packet. Lesson Plans Individual. Math Centers. Literacy Center Ideas. See All Resource Types. Activboard Activities. Bulletin Board Ideas. Classroom Forms. Clip Art. Cooperative Learning.

Cultural Activities. ExamView Question Banks. Examinations - Quizzes. Flash Cards. For Parents. Fun Stuff. Graphic Organizers. Guided Reading Books. Homeschool Curricula. Independent Work Packet. Interactive Notebooks. Lesson Plans Bundled. Literature Circles. Microsoft OneDrive. Movie Guides. Nonfiction Book Study. Novel Study. Original Textbooks. Scaffolded Notes. Science Centers. Study Guides. Task Cards. Teacher Manuals.

Test Prep. Thematic Unit Plans. These subjects can include biography, business, fiction, history, mystery, comedy, romance and thrillers. Subjects may also include cooking, self help, diet and fitness, religion and many many more.

Subjects and subgenres, however, can often be intermixed. Though, it can be a challenge to determine how many subgenres or subjects actually exist, as there are differing opinions on each, and new ones are created regularly. For example, young adult writing has become increasingly popular, and some would classify it as a subgenre of prose. The difference between genre and subject is often blurred by the world around us. Think of a time when you last visited a bookstore or library. Most likely, the books were divided into sections - fiction and non-fiction for sure - and further categorized based on the type of books, such as self-help, historic, science fiction and others.

Many people assume that these categorizations of subject matter are genre, and as a result, common language today has adopted a casual use of genre to mean subject.

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance.

Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. How to Write a Great Book Report. You may switch to a different genre, or search all genres simultaneously, by making a selection from the menu at the left.

Back to our game genres, the list that I cited is also problematic since individual game entries often use other generic labels, such as "Massively-Online Role-Playing Game" conspicuously absent from the listing of genres for World of Warcraft. When contacted on the subject, site editor Marc Doyle replied via email that the genre labels were simply text fields, which in other words could be freely entered as little more than tags, and were often based on the marketing claims of the game publishers.

This makes the system in practice a simpler form of GameSpot 's relatively intricate system, in which genres can be subdivided in as many sub-branches as necessary, resulting in a blunt list of categories whose diversity we may illustrate with the following excerpts:. Note that the levels or branches themselves are not named, which means there is no basis on which to compare them. One thing that these different taxonomies highlight is the fluidity and impreciseness of the concept of genre itself, and how it is used in actually describing games.

Aside from differing opinions on where should game X be placed among genre categories, there is also the question of the typologies themselves. The first determining factor of any generic typology lies in the criteria it uses. In the case of video games, we have two types of criteria: those pertaining to gameplay, and those of theme or narrative. On one hand, thematic or iconographic genres, such as Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, are either seen as little more than window-dressing by the ludological line of thinking [5] , or as narrative enablers and aesthetic or iconographic throwbacks to prior media that can guide interpretation enter the narratologists!

On the other hand, there are gameplay or interactive genres, such as Action, Adventure, Role-Playing, Strategy, and so on, that are in truth a combination - or rather a conflation - of multiple different criteria, but all linked to gameplay. Mark J. Wolf's taxonomy in "Genre and the Video Game" Wolf is one of the few that seems to blur the line between the two genre categories by including terms such as "Abstract", "Interactive Movie" and "Text Adventure" alongside "Adventure" and "Shoot'Em Up", yet the predominance of interactive genres over thematic ones is ascertained:.

While the ideas of iconography and theme may be appropriate tools for analyzing Hollywood films as well as many video games, another area, interactivity, is an essential part of every game's structure and a more appropriate way of examining and defining video game genres Wolf , p.

All these possibilities for classification coexist in games, and none are irrelevant, but we would argue that the style of gameplay on offer is of fundamental significance in Carr et al. From a more industry-centric point of view, Daniel Cook straightforwardly addresses the issue in "My Name is Daniel and I am a Genre Addict": "In the game industry a genre is a common set of game mechanics and interface standards that a group of titles share.

Unequivocally, "video game genres are determined by gameplay: what challenges face the player and what actions he takes to overcome those challenges. All these examples clearly show that genre is being used in a similar manner across popular, industrial and academic taxonomies: as a way of breaking down the vast continent of video games into more manageable provinces, with the same credo applied across the board: "gameplay comes first".

The real question then does not concern the choice of criteria -as I demonstrated, everyone seems to think likewise - but rather, as the quote from Carr and Burn shows, and as Thomas Apperley rightfully points out in his piece "Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game genres", what comes after and around gameplay; for even once recognized sovereign, gameplay can still be broken down into a myriad components such as type of player skill involved, avatar abilities, progression structures, point of view, temporal unfolding, etc.

Apperley , p. As we have seen with the few earlier examples of generic taxonomies, one man's genre can be another's sub-genre, simple flavor or salad dressing, and presumably another's media I have yet to encounter a study detailing how different video game genres constitute unique media positions, but the thought appears reasonable enough that I wouldn't be surprised to find one.

The problem of genre is not so much that it is practiced with different criteria, but that these criteria are of different levels, and often a different nature. The more we gaze, the deeper the abyss reveals itself. We could always go look for greener pastures elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to video games, but as I would argue, it is a staple of the concept of genre itself. For some twenty-five centuries, it has been treated and mistreated in poetics, then aesthetics and literature, and linguistics and film studies have also taken a few jabs at it in the 20 th century.

All those disciplines have struggled with the issue that we could name "genre leveling". Literary genre theory, especially, has been desperately swatting the air with nets in the hope of capturing something for as long as one can remember [6].

As film scholar Rick Altman puts it after a short review of the question of literary genres:. A few relatively recent attempts at sorting out the levels of genre, among many others, are those of Lauri Honko and Martine Roberge. Though 35 years apart, their systems are very similar.

The Finnish folklorist claims that folk tale genres can be based on content, form, style, structure, context, function, frequency, distribution, and origin Honko , p. The Canadian ethnologist sees six levels of genre criteria for narratives: enunciation, reception, semantics, syntax, function, and context Roberge , p. In literary theory, Jean-Marie Schaeffer has similarly identified five levels Schaeffer , p. While I agree with Apperley that it is a problem to have multiple levels of categories conflated together, I do not believe this is something that can be worked out, even by rethinking genre with a critical perspective.

This is due to something I would like to call the Great Genre Illusion. In brief, the idea is that the word genre is an umbrella word, and that the bundling of disparate concepts under a single name gives them a false impression of unity. I claim that the word has no more internal coherence than the word "thingy".

To paraphrase Wittgenstein on games, consider, for instance, what is a thingy; what is common to all of them; what do all thingies share? It is natural to expect literary genres, speech genres and film genres to share certain characteristics - they are all genres , after all - but the reality might be far less logical and satisfying.

As Rick Altman writes, "it cannot be taken for granted that film genre is the same thing as literary genre. What emerges from Steve Neale's overview of genre across linguistics, literature and film studies is that:. As an example of the vagueness of the word and concept at stake here, it is worth taking a little linguistic detour. The word genre as we use it comes from French inherited from Latin and Greek and means type or kind, but it also subsumes gender in Greek, it also included race!

What I'd like to stress is that it means nothing more specific than that. Northrop Frye's famous assertion that "The very word "genre" sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien thing it is" Frye , p. Andrew Tudor provides the perfect illustration of this duality:. Now almost everyone uses terms like "western", the neurotic critic as much as the undisturbed cinemagoer.

The difference, and the source of difficulty, lies in how the critic seeks to use the term. What is normally a thumbnail classification for everyday purposes is now being asked to carry rather more weight. The fact that there is a special term, genre , for these categories suggests that the critic's conception of "western" is more complex than is the case in everyday discourse; if not, why the special term?

Tudor , p. Of course, in its native language, there is no special term. Foreign words are typically used for specific concepts that can't be translated without losing something, but not so much in the case of genre. In fact, this is not exactly true: what gets lost is the very openness and extent of the vagueness of the concept. In French, it is used in everyday, layman sentences such as "Quel genre de film est-ce? There is no mystique or prestige associated with the word genre in French.

Saying " c'est genre un film de science-fiction " or " c'est un genre de film de science-fiction " amounts to "it's kind of a Science-Fiction movie" or "it's a kind of Science-Fiction movie", and is very much unlike the assertive, unhesitant "it's a movie of the Science-Fiction kind". In the first case, genre allows us to say that the movie shares many characteristics with other movies of the Science-Fiction genre, but not that it is absolutely, or exclusively, a science-fiction movie.

Indeed, it seems to imply a follow-up sentence that is going to explain why it isn't just a Science-Fiction movie or else we would have said it like it is: "it's a Science-Fiction movie". I may have painted in broad strokes, and in the process blurred out the landscape - which is exactly my point about genre: I think usage of the word in other languages contributes to an illusion of coherence that the concept does not have in everyday use in its native language, and hence the image of genre as blurry.

If this is true, then we are facing a contradiction, for academics - linguists, literary types, film scholars, and game theorists alike - obviously do not use or build genres in such a free-form way, and are genuinely interested in defining them as well and as coherently as possible. These two usages of the same word echo Tzvetan Todorov's historical and theoretical genres: everyday usage that acts as little more than tags in a diffuse and imprecise whole, and theoretical categories or constructs meant to be structured and rational.

How do we reconcile these two then? Simply put, we don't - or rather can't. The layman and critic's uses of the term do not differ, despite the contingent fact that many languages rely on an imported French word to differentiate one from the other. According to the view of the concept I have presented, historical and theoretical genres share only one thing: impreciseness. While it is undeniable that theorists try to come up with genre categories and criteria that are fixed and unambiguous, it does not mean that they succeed in doing so.

More importantly, producing theoretical generic categories does not mean that they become superimposed on the historical generic tags and labels, that they refine or alter them in any way. The earlier quote from Tudor has a key element in it: the difference between the usage of genres such as 'western' by laymen and critics "lies in how the critic seeks to use the term" emphasis added.

Genre study, when understood in this way, is the history of repeated attempts from academics, critics and institutions to impose order onto a chaotic, messy and fluctuating mass of terms that respects no authority - or at least, no apparent authority, and certainly not theirs. For all the critics and academics who profess that Star Wars Lucas is better understood as a Western, the ordinary cinemagoer will probably continue to view it as a Science-Fiction movie.

Moine , p. In the bleak light of this look on genre, a few conclusions can be reached. Genre appears to be an imprecise and intuitive concept; it is impervious to rigorous classification and systematization; it denotes potentially very different phenomena across media or disciplines; and it is a multifaceted and multidimensional phenomenon. Those are common to all usages of the concept, and are about the only thing that all kinds of genres share, whether in literature, linguistics, or film studies: and they apply to video game genres as well.

No amount of critical thinking can get us past these points to a grand, unified and stable genre categorization. But if video games can be seen as fully embodying the internal characteristics of genre, we could be tempted to apply onto them the conclusions reached by genre theory from other disciplines. More to the point of concern to us here, current genre theory has abandoned the idea of genre evolution in its strongest, biological sense 'things getting better' , and the only admission of the word nowadays is to describe 'the changing of things through time'.

Is this a general property of the concept of genre, or only a localized, isolated phenomenon common to literary and film genres for instance but in which games differ? It could be easy to brandish the stick of theoretical imperialism in self-defense Aarseth , but as any Civilization MicroProse player knows, blindly swinging at anything that approaches is generally a bad long-term strategy. I propose then to earnestly examine how and why genre theory has arrived to these conclusions regarding genre evolution, and then come back to game genres.

The earliest writings on the "nature", "kinds" or "species" of the "poetic art", which we would call today literary genres , were mostly concerned with evaluation and prescription: evaluation in determining which type of "poetry" was the best for the education of youth and inspiration of men, and prescription in telling poets what they should do and how to do it for instance, the dogma of reciprocal appropriateness of style and substance.

Things took quite a turn in the 20th century however due to one major influence: Darwinism. This biological model of a "survival of the fittest literature" is established as a new paradigm and can still be found, as I have pointed out at the beginning of this piece, for genre in the context of the video game. In literary theory, however, it has largely fallen out of fashion. The biological-evolutional model is simply refuted as a confusion of categories.

While biological beings reproduce and are the primary cause in the philosophical, Aristotelian sense of their offspring, texts and other works do not reproduce but are reproduce d by human agents who act as external and secondary causes.

Biological natural genre predetermines the characteristics of a species and individual, while literary and other artificial genres are determined from the work's characteristics, themselves determined by an author.

In short, genre works the other way around: "Maupassant's Une vie does not contain a narrative structure because it belongs to the class of narratives, because it was born from this class, rather it belongs to this class because Maupassant decided to tell a story. What is the answer to the evolutional model then? Late 20th century genre theory rejects the idea of genre evolution altogether and replaces it with nonteleological experimentation and variation.

One of the most well-known authors of this shift is Hans Robert Jauss and his concept of horizon of expectation. In this statement from Toward an Aesthetics of Reception , he defines genre as a perpetually mutating range of productions, a playground in which writers try out new possibilities to surprise the reader until the experiment is stretched so far that it yields a new genre.

If one follows the fundamental rule of the historicization of the concept of form, and sees the history of literary genres as a temporal process of the continual founding and altering of horizons, then the metaphorics of the courses of development, function, and decay can be replaced by the nonteleological concept of the playing out of a limited number of possibilities Jauss , p.

Genre does not "evolve" here, but simply changes or mutates; things are tried without any sense of progression towards anything. This has become the prevailing view through most, if not all, genre studies, whether literary or filmic. To enter the specific question of video game genre, it is worth quoting Rick Altman's own take on the inadequacy of the biological metaphor:. According to the Darwinian approach to evolution, the specificity of a new genus is guaranteed by its inviolability.

That is, no genus is interfertile with another genus. Besides the lack of fertility between genera, the purity and thus the identity of the species is also guaranteed by the fact that previous life forms, once extinct, disappear from the world forever. Only in the multi-era imaginary world of a ' Jurassic Park ' do the categories of a previous evolutionary state continue to exist.

In the genre world, however, every day is Jurassic Park day. Not only are all genres interfertile, they may at any time be crossed with any genre that ever existed Altman , p. The freedom given to authors, filmmakers and game designers in choosing to mix whichever part of whichever genre they want without any physical or theoretical restrictions is a result of their indirect causality, contra biological genii and species.

It implies a degree of free-form and non-linear mutations that is unavailable to regular models of biological evolution. And this observation also highlights the limits of commonality between literary and linguistic genre, as Alastair Fowler comically remarks:. Fowler , p. We have learned a few things from this brief overview of the idea of genre development in literature and film. We know that a cluster of works sharing common characteristics culturally identified as a genre do not mate once in a while and engender new works that bring the genre forward in an ultimate forward progression like an early platformer such as Super Mario Bros.

Since a new game coming out in might borrow an element or otherwise lean on some obscure game released in with limited success, there does not seem to be any proper 'evolution': genres don't die, they simply cease to be used for some period of time. We might say that they hibernate, ready to return when someone deems it appropriate to wake them from their cryogenic sleep. Though no FMV adventures are being created anymore at least not on a significant scale , the ones from the s are still viewed through the lenses of this generic label, and are available and ripe for plucking.

The permanence and cycles of genres is evidenced by the current trend of retrogaming and, as an example, the release of Mega Man 9 Capcom that is constitutively identical to the NES games of yore. Yet we should not accept the findings of genre theory from other media too hastily.

If someone were to make an FMV adventure in , it would not use grainy, color video occupying only a fraction of the screen and running at 12 or 16 frames per second. Such a game would likely not require the user to flip through 5 or 6 CDs during gameplay, but rather fit all the data on a DVD.

For all its old-schoolness, Mega Man 9 still incorporates a save system instead of a password system. There seems to be an obvious degree of technological determinism in video games, if only by virtue of Moore 's Law. And yet, ever greater technological prowess cannot be held as a necessary mark of generic evolution.

A remake of an old game with updated graphics - or an FMV game with quality video - but no change to the gameplay whatsoever does not mark an evolution of the genre, only a general technical evolution on the level of media, exactly as a book in electronic form that we read on a portable digital device or on the internet does not constitute an evolution of a "genre".

We can back down a level and look into the evolution of a genre from within, and how the individual works build and expand it. For a while, certain academic circles have turned a condescending eye on "genre films" and "genre literature", considering them as endless repetitions of the same-old, made to comfort audience expectations or as "mythic embodiments of the dominant ideology" Grant , xiii.

Many genre theorists have reacted by showing in what ways genre could constitute a code of conventions capable of subversion, critical discourse, and much more.

One of the most important contributions to the understanding of genre is the paradoxical pleasure of variability, as mentioned in Barry Keith Grant's introduction to the Film Genre Reader : "Stated simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations. Roberts elegantly put it, variation inside familiarity seems to be the name of the genre game:.

The writers [of genre fiction] are like the jazz musicians who give us a familiar melody at the opening of the piece so that we can understand the variations that follow. We do not listen for that melody, we listen for the variations. Roberts , p. Where things get interesting, however, is when Roberts opposes this assessment in his discussion of science-fiction literature and the convention of the 'body shield'. As he explains, Edgar Rice Burroughs introduced, in his novel The Princess of Mars , lizard-like aliens that carried heavy spears and used radium rifles reportedly accurate at miles.

The goal was to offer magic-like high technology with the rifles, and exciting hand-to-hand combat with the spears. The question then becomes why would the warriors "carry heavy spears if they already had rifles accurate at two hundred miles?

Interestingly, Roberts , p.