Board 8 > The 4 Video Game Genres

(+) Yeah! (+)

Shooter
Puzzle
Adventure
Racing

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1. You control a single character
2. You control multiple characters
3. You control no characters
4. You control nothing

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StealThisSheen posted...

Where would something like Harvest Moon go? They definitely have goals, but no like definite campaign end, and you don't go for scores.

Campaign-lite

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Single Player
Multiplayer
Skyrim remaster
GTA remaster

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Epyo posted...

Yeah that's a cool answer. Very nontraditional way of looking at genres, looking at the overall goal instead of the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Yeah, I'd say it's a bottom up approach to the question rather than top down. Looking at the WHY rather than the HOW

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Welp my answer to this thread is:

2D Action (2d zelda, 2d mario, pong, gradius, spelunky, guitar hero)
3D Action (3d zelda, 3d mario, wolfenstein 3d, katamari, minecraft, f-zero gx)
Puzzle (tetris, portal, myst, jackbox, virtual chess)
Math Sim (final fantasy, pokemon, rogue, sim city, cookie clicker, dating sims, animal crossing)

Yeah maybe the 2d / 3d action division feels weak, but they do feel completely different in my mind--if someone's describing a new action game to me, the absolute first thing I wanna know off the bat is, is it 2d or 3d?

But probably what I've been most interested in in the thread, is how to divide up non "action" games...

...My initial temptation is to divide them up into Puzzles and RPGs...but the big problem is, where do sports managers and sim cities go? They feel like role-playing, but they also feel like puzzles. What if there's a Final Fantasy based on sports manager mechanics, surely that should be in the RPG genre...

I decided the key difference is numbers. If there are a lot of numbers that get bigger or get compared to each other, that's not a puzzle game. We'll call it a new genre, Math Sim.

Then the final boss is dating sims--but wait, dating sims presumably all have a lot of numbers behind the scenes, right? So that belongs in Math Sim! Nice.

Then the final final boss is Animal Crossing--but again, it's mostly making numbers get bigger.

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Epyo posted...

Welp my answer to this thread is:

2D Action (2d zelda, 2d mario, pong, gradius, spelunky, guitar hero)
3D Action (3d zelda, 3d mario, wolfenstein 3d, katamari, minecraft, f-zero gx)
Puzzle (tetris, portal, myst, jackbox, virtual chess)
Math Sim (final fantasy, pokemon, rogue, sim city, cookie clicker, dating sims, animal crossing)

Yeah maybe the 2d / 3d action division feels weak, but they do feel completely different in my mind--if someone's describing a new action game to me, the absolute first thing I wanna know off the bat is, is it 2d or 3d?

But probably what I've been most interested in in the thread, is how to divide up non "action" games...

...My initial temptation is to divide them up into Puzzles and RPGs...but the big problem is, where do sports managers and sim cities go? They feel like role-playing, but they also feel like puzzles. What if there's a Final Fantasy based on sports manager mechanics, surely that should be in the RPG genre...

I decided the key difference is numbers. If there are a lot of numbers that get bigger or get compared to each other, that's not a puzzle game. We'll call it a new genre, Math Sim.

Then the final boss is dating sims--but wait, dating sims presumably all have a lot of numbers behind the scenes, right? So that belongs in Math Sim! Nice.

Then the final final boss is Animal Crossing--but again, it's mostly making numbers get bigger.

Congratulations on beating all of the joke posts into creating the most useless and reductionist category

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Well if you're gonna come up with genres it's way more fun to make them sound dumb!

But I stand by the reasoning!

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Action
Adventure
Cognitive
Sports

But yeah, MrGreenonion's suggestion is pretty good honestly as a radically different way to look at game genres.

Action
Strategy
Puzzle
Story

Under this definition sims would be divided into action and strategy - sports and racing would be considered action while life and management sims would be considered strategy (so Animal Crossing is a strategy game). Likewise RPGs would be split depending on if they are action or turn-based. Puzzle is self-explanatory and Story would include adventure games and visual novels. I dont think I left anything out.

If the main way you interact with a game is action, its an action game, if its planning and thinking its a strategy game, if its solving puzzles its a puzzle game and if its engaging with a story its a story game. Really good answer from MrGreenonion though.

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HanOfTheNekos posted...

1. You control a single character
2. You control multiple characters
3. You control no characters
4. You control nothing

If it has to be evenly distributed, then I remove point 4 here, and just say I've done it in 3.

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