Puzzle

These are games where the player is provided with a set of unfamiliar tools and then asked to explore their uses. Sometimes these tools are falling blocks that you must organize into lines, and other times you’re given a portal gun that lets you explore complex environments. So the role of player agency in puzzle games is to learn the nuances of the core tools so that you can use them in increasingly sophisticated ways or under greater pressure.

These games tend to fall into two major categories, though neither is sufficiently distinct to merit a subgenre. The first and most typical type includes relatively short affairs that rarely last more than a few minutes. However, their short length is usually balanced by a random element to them that makes them more or less infinitely replayable. The latter type of puzzle game is longer and more elaborate, but the puzzles themselves are typically setpieces with one real solution. So once you’ve finished the game, there’s not much point in coming back.

Notable examples
• Tetris
• Portal
• World of Goo

Rhythm

Rhythm games are relatively new to the gaming scene, being only about a decade old. These games resemble nothing so much as tapping your fingers as you listen to music, albeit much more elaborate and engaging. The modal rhythm game takes a huge pile of licensed music (though some smaller titles compose their own) and carefully crafts a series of button presses that track the song’s melody, harmony, or percussion. If you tap the right buttons at the right time, you succeed. However, miss enough beats, and you’re disqualified from finishing the song and have to begin anew.

Games in this genre tend to require peripherals like little plastic guitars or dance pads. Although these peripherals take up space, they offer scaffolding that makes the games easier and more appealing to learn. That is, you’re not tapping buttons at arbitrary times, you’re playing the guitar. Because of these peripherals, the games are more active than gaming’s usual sedentary fare, so don’t forget to warm up.

Notable examples
• Guitar Hero
• Parappa the Rapper
• Dance Dance Revolution

Role-Playing Game (RPG)

When RPGs first surfaced, they were identified as games that delivered a story. After all, no matter how shallow and brief the narrative was in the first Final Fantasy, there was still more story there than in Tetris. However, as time went by and even boilerplate platformers started telling stories, it became obvious that this wasn’t the case.

It turns out that the one thing that all RPGs have in common is character growth. Whether your characters gain numerical experience and levels that empower them or you’re allocated skill points to optimize a character, your agency in an RPG determines the way in which your character develops. Reciprocally, the customization you’ve done will impact your future success.

RPGs still cling to their role as storytellers, and so genre entries are most often linear narratives. They can be very long (ranging from 20-120 hours) and exploit the scripted nature of the story for visual effects that other gaming genres can’t aspire to.

Subgenre: Massively Multiplayer Online RPG
You can imagine how character customization as a primary gameplay mechanic would lend itself well to single player games. MMORPGs take those mechanics and make them more social by having thousands and millions of players take individually developed characters into a shared space. This way, players can offer their particular talents to assist each other with tasks in the game world.

MMORPG worlds are technically persistent, because anyone might want to play the game at any time. So instead of hosting the game on an individual user’s computer, MMORPGS maintain independent server computers that ensure that the game world is present whenever possible. This has the interesting consequence that, any time you’re not playing the game, you may be missing a world event or someone you’d hoped to see.

Subgenre: Action RPG
These games have a great deal in common with action adventure games, with the critical difference being that the success of your actions, and therefore the impact that you have on the world, is determined by the exact same kind of character building that you do in traditional RPGs. The result is a less passive take on traditional RPGs.

Notable examples
• Traditional: Final Fantasy
• MMO: World of Warcraft
• Action: Kingdom Hearts

Shooter

Sometimes called a Shoot-’em-up (or Shmup for short) the appellation shooter mostly represents a supergenre rather than a group of games. As you’d imagine, shooter subgenres comprise games where you interact with the world by shooting it. It sounds grim, but cheery simulated violence is a fundamental part of video game culture. Shooters have been embroiled in controversy during recent years regarding whether they teach the ethics and skills required to commit murder.

Subgenre: Scrolling
The elder shooter subgenre, scrolling shooters are little more than brawlers with guns. You start at one end of a target-rich environment and deplete it as you pass. Scrolling shooters tend to be more precise than brawlers, and the punishment for being hit is often instantaneous death. This little quirk gave rise to some niche shooters affectionately referred to as “bullet hell” shooters, where the play field is literally filled with lethal bullets, and only carefully honed skills can guide you safely through them. As the subgenre transitioned into 3D, scrolling shooters grew to encompass tunnel shooters, where scrolling occurred through depth. These games are fairly brief and emphasize challenge to create replay value.

Subgenre: First Person Shooter (FPS)
Before genres became codified, these games were known as Doom clones, and the subgenre owes its current popularity to the seminal franchise. It popularized the use of first person perspective in shooters, where you see what your avatar sees (and most of the things you see are in dire need of a few bullets). Single player shooters have evolved to incorporate RPG elements, both in terms of character development and storytelling emphasis. Multiplayer shooters have remained more uniformly competitive, pitting players against each other in bloodier versions of capture the flag, king of the hill, and tag. There has, however, been a recent cooperative shooter renaissance, where players work together to survive.

Notable examples
• FPS: Doom
• Tunnel shooter: Star Fox
• Scrolling Shooter: Gradius V

Sim

All games are simulations to some extent, with the only real difference being how closely they try to mimic reality. Games that fall into the simulation genre unite the expression of agency in a game with its goal. That is, you play a flight sim for the experience of flying. So, in a nutshell, you play a sim by controlling a system to which you mightn’t otherwise have access. Sims are more freeform than the average game, and are often likened to playing in a sandbox. This usually makes for an uncommonly high degree of player control in the game world, but does so at the expense of narrative.

Subgenre: Simulation
Simulations try to mimic a real-world activity as closely as possible. Games of this nature are like model ships: high fidelity representations without the trouble required for the real thing. Flight simulators are the best known example of the genre and model the physics of aircraft piloting in an effort to reproduce the experience of flight.

Subgenre: Puppeteer
Puppeteer sims model larger scale systems, like a person’s entire life or a growing city, and place the player in a position to direct its development. These sims are like owning an ant farm with the added bonus of telling the ants what to do. These games are substantially more popular among female players than other genres, and the sex split among players of puppeteer sims is nearly 50/50.

Notable examples
• Puppeteer: The Sims
• Puppeteer: Sim City
• Simulation: The Oregon Trail

Sports

Sports games attempt to recreate collaborative outdoor activities without any of that pesky melanoma or camaraderie. Sports are games in and of themselves, so they’re an obvious choice for simulation in video games. After all, the rules are already in there, so all the developers have to do is simulate the physics. Games simulating traditional sports are often annual releases so that they can track statistics as team rosters change from year to year. Although it’s usually possible to play a single game, traditional sports games will happily run you through a season.

Subgenre: Extreme Sports
Extreme sports games take the ethos of extreme sports to places it can only see in a virtual world. So if you’ve ever wanted to land a 1260° nosegrab in a giant pinball machine, then extreme sports games are where you’ll find it. There are some games in this genre that attempt to faithfully recreate their inspiration, but those games have generally given way to more fantastic interpretations of snowboarding, skateboarding, and even some traditional sports.

Notable examples
• Traditional: Madden NFL 07
• Extreme: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
• Extreme: Mario Tennis

Strategy

Strategy games grew out of board games like chess and Stratego, and the role you play in these games is much the same. You control a group of units, usually with the goal of annihilating another group. Individual units have different specialties, and your strategic allocation of the correct units to the proper time and place marks the line between success and failure.

Subgenre: Turn-Based
Turn-Based strategy games are more closely related to board games than their real-time counterparts. Players (or a player and a computer opponent) alternate commanding units in a a bid to destroy each other. However, because a computer tracks the rules in strategy video games, the rules can be far more complex without grinding the action to a halt.

Subgenre: Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
RTS games take additional advantage of the automatic rule tracking that computers can do and remove the construct of turns from the video game entirely. Instead, time flows forward automatically, and units take a certain amount of it to carry out whatever orders you issue. Some RTS games further allocate resources over time. These limit your troops’ ability to manifest your will, and so RTS games often add resource management to the right-place-right-time strategy core. These additions make for a brisk gameplay experience, though the workload can result in extensive micromanagement

Notable examples
• RTS: StarCraft
• Turn-Based: Civilization
• RTS: Rampart

Action

Action games are like puzzle games in that you’re provided a set of tools, and you play the game by learning to use them. The genres part ways in the skills they teach, however. Puzzle games teach the kinds of deliberative skills you might use to solve a crossword, whereas action games teach skills that are more in line with the kind you use to play the piano. This might sound like a vague description of several genres we’ve already covered, and the action genre comprised several modern genres before they split off into their own genres. The remaining games in the action genre are therefore something of a hodgepodge.

Notable examples
• Katamari Damacy
• Warioware, Inc.: Mega Microgame$
• Bomberman

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