Genre: Can We Really Apply This?

Hack 'n slash adventure sandbox... not something you want to write out every time you define Assassins' Creed; however useful, it may be it may be too cumbersome of a title to be used for a categorizing term like a genre. But is it really without merit? Have we been talking about genre all this time only to create something that we can't use? In short, no; this new genre system is still useful even if you can't use it as a genre, it creates a vocabulary for gaming,  something important for any medium, especially a growing one like gaming. But even then, can't we use it for genre at all?

Our current genre system is not terrible (save for the vague action-adventure genre that needs to be redefined to maintain usefulness) and it does fulfill it's purpose as a way to group like games together, but to go back to our reoccurring example there needs to be a differentiation between Creed and Red Dead. Is it possible to use the specific system as sub-genres?

Genre: How We Should Define Games

We've established that genre doesn't work for games as a viable system for defining them, a more specific and informative system is needed to fulfill  its purpose. We need to not only talk about the core feature of the game (first person shooting, platforming, etc.) but also other features that effect gameplay.

Assassins' Creed is a game often described as action-adventure, now redefined by me as adventure sandbox; however, as we talked about yesterday even adventure sandbox doesn't do a good enough job differentiating for the consumer the difference between Assassins' Creed and say, Red Dead Redemption. So we'll breakdown the key features in Assassins' Creed (Brotherhood, specifically) and re-redefine its genre to be helpful without being overwhelming.

Genre: What does Genre Really tell us?

The thing about genre is it tells you relativity nothing about the game itself, look at two mainstream FPS, Call of Duty and Halo. The games are the same genre, have a mostly shared audience but the games themselves have almost nothing in common: COD has guns based on real weapon models, Halo doesn't; Halo is set in the distant future, COD isn't. So what does genre really tell us, well they are both in the first person perspective and feature shooting stuff, but even the shooting is different. COD features iron sights, a realistic approach to aiming where you hold down a button to look down the sights and aim, where Halo features a more classic 'from the hip' approach to aiming found in old fashion shooters like Doom. But even those traits are quantifiable (meaning you can describe them in a manor that can be taken as fact), still other differences between the two games include graphics, physics and countless other software differences; as well as opinions like personal preference and overall playability.

Genre: What is an Action-Adventure game

Gaming is an innovative industry by nature, with every game the way we make games improves along with the quality of the games themselves; but through this innovation we also push boundaries and push into new genres, and when these new games are hard to define, we often lump them in as 'Action-Adventure game.'

Wikipedia defines action-adventure games as, you guessed it, a game with the qualities of an action game as well as an adventure. It defines an action game as a game that requires quick thinking, skill, and reflexes; while adventure titles feature puzzle and role-playing elements that need more careful planning as well as a story centric gameplay. Now that seems fair as a definition until you realize that every game on the market features opportunities for planning and story as well as fast paced combat encounters. The action-adventure genre literally covers every game out there (with the exception of a few purist adventure indie games.)

The main difference between adventure games and easier to define RPGs is adventure games don't give the player as much choice. Adventure games might feature open worlds, branching paths, etc., but every playthrough is more or less the same, where as an RPG features varying storylines and encounters based on your choices.

Genre: How do we define games?

All art forms use genre to sub-define themselves; movies, books even television shows all use genre to help consumers choose which product to buy. Gaming itself is built off of several 'core' genres:
First Person Shooters and Third Person Shooters (FPS e.g. Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War)
Real Time Strategy games (RTS e.g. Starcraft, Age of Empires)
Platformer (e.g. Mario)
Role Playing Game (RPG e.g. Final Fantasy, Zelda [Zelda may be arguable but we'll talk about that tomorrow])

But genre is not a perfect system, and we often see it limit the potential of games. When a producer green-lights a game, they often do it based on genre; if they are producing an FPS and the product is very heavily based on puzzle elements they are less likely to produce that product because they are worried that their core FPS community won't be as interested in that game. That game may have been really fun, and the puzzle elements may have helped the game sell better, but the studio is afraid to cross genre lines. This is why FPS/RPGs are generally not FPS/RPGs but rather FPS with a dash of RPG on the side (Borderlands, Mass Effect 2).