New Genres or Themes?
By jeff 113 Comments
Hey everyone. Now that the site's been up and kicking for a few weeks here and many of you have gotten used to using it, I wanted to see what you thought about our list of genres and themes. Are we missing anything? If so, make a case for it in the comments section for this post and we'll take it under consideration. Thanks!
(Bonus points if anyone can come up with good, easy-to-understand terms for arcade-style shoot-'em-ups without using "'em-ups" or "shmups.")
GENRES:
1 - Action
4 - Adventure
34 - Baseball
22 - Basketball
26 - Billiards
29 - Bowling
20 - Boxing
37 - Brawler
13 - Card Game
15 - Compilation
6 - Driving/Racing
31 - Dual-Joystick Shooter
8 - Educational
9 - Fighting
32 - First-Person Shooter
27 - Fishing
24 - Flight Simulator
21 - Football
28 - Golf
39 - Hockey
35 - Light-Gun Shooter
17 - Minigame Collection
16 - MMORPG
19 - Music/Rhythm
30 - Pinball
41 - Platformer
18 - Puzzle
12 - Real-Time Strategy
5 - Role-Playing (RPG)
11 - Shooter
7 - Simulation
23 - Skateboarding
33 - Snowboarding/Skiing
40 - Soccer
3 - Sports
2 - Strategy
25 - Tennis
36 - Text Adventure
14 - Trivia/Board Game
38 - Vehicular Combat
10 - Wrestling
41 genres
THEMES:
22 - Abstract
4 - Alternate Historical
16 - Anime
6 - Comedy
13 - Crime
9 - Cyberpunk
5 - Dating
15 - Egyptian
11 - Espionage
2 - Fantasy
1 - Horror
21 - Management
17 - Martial Arts
14 - Mayan
12 - Modern Military
18 - Post-Apocalyptic
3 - Sci-Fi
10 - Steampunk
19 - Superhero
8 - Vietnam
7 - World War II
21 themes
[UPDATE]
Some notes:
Remember, the main purpose of organizing by genre is so you can click on that genre and get a list of games that qualify. Same for themes. Now, keeping that in mind, some notes...
- Added Western and Adult as themes.
- Breaking shooters out based on the way they scroll doesn't seem right. Breaking Bullet Hell shooters out from the calmer stuff also doesn't seem right to me. Breaking static-screen shooters out from scrolling ones also doesn't seem right. To me, the meaningful split is separating games like Contra from R-Type, not separating Space Invaders from Xevious.
- Games that you would want to tag as "Futuristic" typically fit into the Sci-Fi theme.
- Game attributes like Co-Op and Online will be covered by a separate game attributes section that will also cover fields like Supported HD Resolutions, Number of Players, ESRB Descriptors, and so on.
- Isn't Turn-Based Strategy covered by Strategy? It stands to reason that any game that isn't would probably be tagged as an RTS to begin with.
- I'd rather not get into the practice of "camera angle = genre" if at all possible. FPS seems like the only reasonable exception. "Third-Person Shooter" as a genre seems like a bad idea.
- "Sandbox" is too open of a term to qualify as a game's theme or genre. That should probably be a concept page... or is it just one of those weird marketing terms for something that comes automatically with an association to the "open-world" concept?
- Diablo-style "hack 'n' slash" games are already covered. Select both Action and RPG.
- What should we call games like Wing Commander and Blazing Angels? They're essentially the same, but is putting one in space and one in WWII enough to make them different genres? "Space Simulation" is the typical term for Wing Commander games, but I feel like we can do better than that.
- Due to our (my) rampant dislike of "beat-'em-up," we've gone with Brawler to cover those games.
- Using "Arcade" as a genre or modifier ("Arcade Sports" or "Arcade Racing") is an aging crutch that is becoming more and more meaningless as time goes on. We need a better way to say "not-sim" if we want to make that differentiation.
- "Stealth" and "Stealth Action" games are really just action games that contain stealth. Should probably be covered by a concept page.
- "Button Mashing" is a game mechanic, not a theme/genre.
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