The non-gamers who read this blog are here for many reasons. Some are family and obligated, some are friends who follow it as the sole sign that I’m not dead yet, and some just happened to stumble by while looking for something else. However, for all their differences, all these people share one complaint in common: they have no idea what I’m talking about. Gaming is an insular little hobby. We have our own jargon and incestuous little comparisons that make perfect sense if you’ve been following the hobby for a decade, but everyone else is out in the cold. So in the spirit of Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy (see, I did it again right there), this week we’ll be doing some outreach to the non-addicted community. This week we’ll be looking at gaming genres: what they’re good for, why we use them, and a primer for some of the more ubiquitous genres that’ll be suitable for linking in future reviews.

Genres are a terrible way to characterize art and entertainment. They take richness and nuance and pigeonhole them into arbitrary categories that strip the medium of its meaning. Take movies as an example. There’s Something About Mary and Shaun of the Dead may both be romantic comedies, but one is braindead slapstick while the other is a smart send-up. You could argue that it’s helpful to have a shorthand way to summarize common form, style, and subject matter among related films, even at the expense of the information you lose during the categorization process. However genres falter even there, because films rarely fit just one genre. There’s an awful lot of violent death in Shaun of the Dead for a romantic comedy. Is it horror instead? Genres just break down if you examine them with any rigor at all.

Despite that weakness, it’s still useful to be able to say, “I hate romantic comedies.” Unfortunately, the reason why is a little depressing: humans just aren’t smart enough to get by with anything else. We take complex things and categorize them into info-bytes that the brain can effectively use. You do this all the time without even thinking about it, like with color. There are a lot of wavelengths between 667 nm and 612 nm, but it’s hard to nail down just when red becomes orange, or even what to call two different shades of red. Even fashionistas and artists who actually can do this have to train and study, because the brain just can’t pull this off without effort. Now take that problem and extend it to something as ridiculously complex as a movie, and you can see why awkward categorical divisions like genres actually have some value: they’re a way to help you predict what to expect from the experience provided by a given movie.

Things are more complicated for video games, though. Movies have it lucky as an exclusively storytelling medium, just as plays, radio dramas, and books before them—they can lean on the culture and genres of those antecedent media. Indeed, even if you’d never seen a movie before in your life, you could probably still take a fair guess about the difference between a mystery and a romance. However, video games are an interactive medium as well as a storytelling medium, so a game’s story doesn’t really tell you much about the experience of playing the game. Even if they were so simple, games can last 6, 40, or even 120 hours, and the story can touch on every genre in the history of filmmaking (when there’s a story at all).

It makes more sense to break from genre conventions of older entertainment media, and instead use genres to communicate the way you interact with a game or the role of a player’s agency. In that way, genres can still serve their primary function and help you predict what to expect from a given gaming experience. Unfortunately, that means games can’t rely on the cultural scaffolding that storytelling media enjoy. That is, the average person on the street won’t be able to tell you the difference between a platformer and a sim even though he enjoys the work of Chaucer or Spielberg. So to lift those poor savages from the bondage of their ignorance, this week I’ll be constructing a primer on the genres that have emerged to capture most of gaming. Here’s a sample genre summary; more will arrive on Wednesday and Friday.

Action Adventure
These are games where players express their agency by exploring the game’s world. Puzzles and enemies may obstruct your progress, but the reason you ultimately overcome them is because they’re in your way. Games in this genre are often littered with collectible fobs that encourage players to examine every nook and cranny, but whether you’re led by the ear or the game is one big sandbox, there’s not much replay value after you’ve scoured every square inch. There have been a variety of tweaks on this formula that have grown into subgenres.

Subgenre: Stealth
These games take the world and populate it with enemies and punishing combat. The idea is to encourage players to avoid hostile encounters and instead sneak around them. Games in this vein tend to involve a lot of waiting for guards to march into the perfect configuration so that you can make a dead sprint to your goal, though some mix it up by allowing you to trick them.

Subgenre: Survival Horror
As with stealth games, survival horror is about filling the world with punishment for the brave explorer, though survival horror games aren’t usually so forgiving as to let you sneak through without incident. Instead, these games are often wars of attrition, with the you must choose your battles so that your relentless foes don’t overwhelm you before you can find your goal. These games are usually riddled with the kinds of puzzles you’d expect from an adventure game (below). Games in this subgenre also tend to follow the same kinds of stories told by horror movies, though the Japanese origin of many of these games tends to favor eerie atmosphere over out and out slasher gore.

Notable examples
• Traditional: The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
• Stealth: Metal Gear Solid
• Survival Horror: Silent Hill

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