Does anyone else get irrationally bothered by the generally agreed upon names of genres for games? I have a huge spreadsheet cataloguing games I’m interested in playing and ones I’ve beaten and I list genres on it as part of the data, but I’m never satisfied with most of the terms I use. Things like FPS and 2D/3D platformer are pretty self explanatory and are fitting for most games you’d refer to as those, but then there’s stuff like Western/Japanese RPGs which are two terms I refuse to use because while I know what most people mean when they say that they’re just so nondescript and even within general definitions there’s so many exceptions to the rules. Then there’s things like “action adventure” which is so wildly broad it basically means nothing. Sometimes I try to make up new names for things, but I’m often at a loss like what genre is Katamari? I feel this is a mostly unsolvable problem cause I can’t change the minds of the masses, but I do wonder if it bothers others or am I just very nitpicky (I am).
the concept “genre” predates video games and i don’t think it really maps 1:1 onto this particular medium
in terms of “how is the game played”, katamari should be hard to classify, since imo (like a lot of profoundly original video games) it is mostly in conversation with things that aren’t video games. it doesn’t have an obvious genre because it isn’t particularly similar in play style to pretty much any prior game, certainly in terms of any kind of nameable movement.
idk, i think these terms are exclusively useful in terms of communicating to other people and utterly useless in terms of understanding anything whatsoever about the categorized items. i use metroidvania to be understood rather than to ascribe any taxonomy - it’s a graspable cluster in ideaspace. i also don’t consider it less appropriate due to its lexical emergence during my lifetime versus something like, idk, “classical music” in common parlance.
i think this ailment is common, though, given how many here complain about genre terms! but yes ultimately you either prioritize your own novel categorization or you are understood by most people
Yeah I definitely focus on catering it to myself more than anyone else. Currently since I couldn’t think of an actual name I just put a 
in the box next to the Katamari games. Though there’s other more pressing ones I’ve struggled with like what to label games that follow a format similar to Zelda titles. Currently I have them labeled as “zelda-likes” which I’m very not keen on especially since I’m not a huge Zelda guy, but I also know exactly what that means when I scroll past it so it does work. It’s a balance of trying to find a readable term that is also clean
zelda-like is a good term! nearly every game i think you might want to put there is almost certainly specifically inspired by it or its direct lineage in that case
this got me wondering; at what point is bossa no longer nova enough to be bossa nova
Katamari is a roll-em-up imo.
I think game genres should just be descriptive of what you do in the game and/or maybe reference the defining characteristic of the primary mode of interaction. Those sound like the same thing but there is a distinction I’m trying (poorly) to get at.
“Beat-em-up” is pretty descriptive and “shoot-em-up” by the same token but you wouldn’t call an FPS a shoot-em-up even though that’s what you’re doing because there the interesting characteristic was the first person perspective.
I listen to some of the IGN podcasts occasionally and they’ve started using Search Action for Metroid type games (a phrase I want to give Select Button credit for helping popularize but I don’t know how much influence we really had).
“Open world”, “action/adventure” and the like should probably just fall under some subheading of Third Person Shooter or Third Person Adventure.
It gets messy real quick though because genre names evolve organically over time. It would be nice if everyone had some basic rule(s) or hermeneutics from the start but those would probably drift over time as well.
that is a nice point too. if you’re real stubborn and keep repeating sensible genre names, people might like them and use them themselves. is ‘search action’ a term traceable to IC/SB?
I’ve been working on genre categories to sort my steam library into, and I feel like I’m getting closer to the common dna that binds games together:
Cluttervania: A game about collecting a bunch of items
(Castlevania GBA, Spyro the Dragon, Control)
Job Game: a game about rote action with permissive failure states
(Powerwash Simulator, Cookie Clicker, Metal Slug Attack)
We Bought a Zoo: a game where you have a place you put stuff in
(Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Fallout 76)
I was wondering something along those lines with a game I finished recently called Finny the Fish. In some regards I feel it could be seen as maybe a 3D platformer. There really isn’t much platforming, but there’s enough where I feel a justification could be made. On the other hand it also more heavily features elements of a graphic adventure type game where you pick up objects that you then use to solve puzzles. Ultimately I just labeled it as “fish game” cause who am I to place Finny into a rigid defined box.
I like search action that rolls off the tongue better than metroidvania. I might start using that.
Genre has and always will be an imprecise measure of a thing. Both Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are fantasy, but they are not terribly similar, excepting maybe for all the swords.
As such I think it is the god-given duty of all people to come up with as many nonsense personal genre distinctions as possible, and to develop complex and contradictory definitions of those genres, so as to sufficiently drive anyone who takes genre categorization seriously into mental derangement. I have personally made enemies by doing this, so that’s how you know it works!
I’ve started calling the classic-style of these (like Streets of Rage) “belt scrollers”.
I haven’t actually sorted it into my spreadsheet yet, but on my steam account I have power wash simulator under FPS. It sounds funny to put it there, but I’d also argue it’s definitely not wrong.
Something about “belt scrollers” sounds British. That being in spite of the fact I know some British people call that type of game a fighting game.
Katamari is a snowball game.
I like the way you think. It’s not helpful at all for my spreadsheet, but it’s a very strong approach to life.
Most other snowball games are flash games where you, for example, play as a fish and eat fish smaller than you to get bigger until you’re so big no fish can eat you.
Another example is the older indie game Osmos.
The only problem with belt-scroller is that it excludes Spartan X and Ninja Warriors, but it does a good job of locking onto a specific mechanic exclusive to those types of games. And all those games also have very similar pacing, aside from the odd Korean MMO.
Those aren’t belt scrollers! They’re beat-em-ups (supergenre) or some other unnamed genre (microgenre). Kinda like how you could separate “classical roguelikes” into “berlin interpretation” and “mystery dungeons”
Something I’ve actually wanted is a good catch all for beat em ups and hack n slashes cause they’re almost the exact same thing, but you can’t interchange those names
The first I heard the term was someone here quoting a tweet from a Japanese developer where “search action” was a translation of something they were saying in Japanese, I think.