i love that this still puts Tetris and like, The Witcher in the same sector
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Fighting games are just Puyo played on the same screen, therefore puzzle imo
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Yes, Tetris is definitely an action game and not a puzzle game. Watching high/level play like speed runs of TGM makes that clear.
Ocarina of Time is a fighting game, obviously, and Zelda 1 and ALttP are miniature gardens that you blow up.
Wind Waker is a simulation game.
Majora’s Mask is a dating sim.
Zelda 2 is the only one that’s an RPG.
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I’m so happy
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I have an easier time mapping things onto this but I’ve got a few taxonomic bugbears:
- How do we map exploration and player freedom into this? I’d actually place the activity of receiving and parsing narrative and lore as similar to exploration, in that the player is building context, but there’s an important down time aspect of it.
- How would we map social play in this? Comparison, community building, competition are key drivers of play and targets of games designed to be multiplayer.
I suppose both your and Tulpa and T’s schemas place these as outcomes achieved through {Action, Adventure, Strategy} or {Puzzle, Dungeon, War}. But exploration is an activity in its own right.
Yeah the phrase “solving of puzzles” does a lot of work there. I take this to mean something like “decrypting hidden information.” Which would include exploration in the normal sense of revealing more map or finding hidden ways through places.
Not really! Tetris is basically a pure action game. If we were to crudely postulate that every game has 10 points to distribute among its interactive loads, Tetris would be Action 10 while the Witcher would be something like Action 5 Adventure 4 Strategy 1.
what does the “asynchronous” in “the asynchronous manipulation of numerical systems” mean exactly?
like, in tetris vs you are definitely manipulating a numerical system in terms of when to send what lines, deciding whether to do a big send or small, should it be a counter to block junk or should you eat the junk and send your own, etc…but is it asynchronous?? since it’s sort-of outside of the actual moment-to-moment of “where do i put my pieces?”
That’s not quite satisfying. But using the word ‘adventure’ helps even if that’s not how you define it.
Action games are where you either are hitting things with a sword or a gun you dummies
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Any comprehensive taxonomy will need to account for pure simulations like Shuttle. In fact, simulation is kind of the Ur-Genre. Most early RPGs were really just role playing simulations. Even as late as Wizardry 7 the box says “A Fantasy Role-Playing Simulation”.
I do think the Action, Adventure, Strategy split is close though, and perhaps one could successfully argue that a simulation like Shuttle is just a mix of the three.
One question though: is Chess Adventure or Strategy? It would seem to be Strategy, but are it’s systems numeric? They can definitely be described mathematically with game theory and such, but so can every puzzle I can think of.
I feel like there’s something around the way players interact with and poke into “the game space” that will probably help solve some of the issues @BustedAstromech is having with things like multiplayer and player freedom
I’d suggest some sort of spectrum centered around the performative nature of games that situates the “performers” and the “audience” in various ways around the modes of interaction they have with whatever “the game” is
and then “play” wraps around all of this like a big warm blanket
so I guess I’m not as concerned with a taxonomy of games as much as I am with a taxonomy of play
but that can probably go in this thread anyway whatever send tweet
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I haven’t adequately defined “dungeon” as a genre but it encapsulates much of what you call exploration (harking back to my brief description of ‘temporal dungeons’ from the sb cast a while ago, which I have since further defined and expanded on in private)
A temporal dungeon is just a clever way to refer to a video game narrative; its using an intentionally artificial/gamey construct as a metonym for how video games are structured. In fact, all 3 of the meta-genres are game-like concepts that help explain games.
But the temporal dungeon is a mapping of the game’s narrative and architectural possibilities where the x and y axes are choice and time. (and it would be both insufficient and too conventional to refer to this as just a decision tree. Those are neither romantic nor do they suggest what ‘good’ design looks like. Dungeons manage both.)
Shuttle is of course a puzzle game, as the act of solving a puzzle means understanding the underlying structure of a thing and acting based on that understanding. Simulation games such as Shuttle or X-Plane are entirely games because you pursue the goal of systematic fluency.
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At times I feel like all games are asynchronous multiplayer games, with the developers as the other players. @T has argued me out of the most useless extreme of this position, but the moderated version draws a parallel between the Referee/Game Master role in an RPG and the game designer in a video game.
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This is very true. In fact, thinking about the difference between pen & paper writers, Game Masters, and video game designers, pen & paper writers are analogous to game systems designers, forever building towards ‘potential’ but hobbled by understanding exactly how things get used, while video game designers working on level and quest content are much more reliant on playtests because they need to design in reaction to players and can only guess beforehand; they’re operating like game masters.
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i have been canonized, fear me
i like to think that the ‘genre’ Action RPG has been there before, and someone was playing a truly boring version of one, and proclaimed after a lot of text boxes
all talk, no action!
… vetoed the usage of Action, and thus the RPG was born.
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n. b. hot j/k take in theol’ SB spirit:
Split/Second is action, and a lot of games pale in comparison, period.
Call them games now engagement RPGs. Wait, games aren’t what they used to be, remove that ‘games’ word.
So these are erps now… these take place in dungeons a lot, so… derps…
ok, forget it, back to the drawing board!
srsly though, i find collectathon being the perfect genre for the katamari-series instead of roll’em up, but that term has been burned properly by Zelda:TP and Okami, and i am still grumpy about that and those two games…