Player perspective and genres.

I've recently been looking for more classic top-down style shooter games (Alien breed, Close combat, etc.), but this is proven much more difficult than I had hoped. My search has brought me to the realization that there's one aspect of games that has always been lumped in with genres, even though it isn't exclusive to any of them; the player perspective.

I now think that including the player perspective in the definition of a genre makes the entire system more complex and much less flexible. For example, a "first-person shooter" is consider a genre, but there are first-person games out there with little to no shooting in them (Portal, Gone Home, Mirror's Edge, etc.). Now we could create a genre definition for each type of first-person game like; first-person adventure, first-person puzzler, etc., but this would be a bit redundant.

However, if we take a look at the examples above we'll notice something in common; player perspective. Would it not make more since to separate the concept of perspective from the concept of genre? We already have genres for adventure, puzzle, platformer, etc., but anyone of these styles could use a different kind of perspective. Since the player perspective is an idea shared between all games it seems quite logical to place it in it's own category. Now alternatively we could defined each kind of perspective as a genre ( third-person, Top-down, etc.), but I think we can all agree that a perspective by itself is just that, and not a genre.

So would placing perspective in it's own category not make sense? I'm very interested to hear what other people might think of this idea. My only goal here is to make it easier to define and filter games. With a system like this in place I could easily find top-down shooters by filtering the results by perspective “top-down” and genre “shooter” while searching the wiki. As the system exist now I can only choose between shooter, shoot 'em up, or dual-joystick shooter. Which would return results far too broad or narrow for my liking.

Isn't that pretty much what we've already done with first person puzzle game, first person shooter, first person adventure, etc.?

@believer258: I'm afraid I don't follow you. What exactly have "we" already done?

"We" meaning people who play video games and use these genre names to describe different types of games that we play?

You asked, essentially, "why can't we combine the perspective a game uses and its genre" right? Isn't calling, say, Portal a first person puzzle game pretty much just that? You've got perspective (first person) and genre (puzzle game) so I'm not quite sure if I'm misunderstanding you or if you think you've come across some new idea when you actually haven't.

The exact opposite, actually. I was trying to say "why can't we place perspectives in their own category." Sorry for the confusion. I've edited the topic to try and clarify my point.

So you want to separate them so that the title "first person puzzle game" means "first person" (a category including all games played from the first person perspective) and "puzzle game" (a category of all puzzle games)? If so, we were pretty much saying the same thing in two different ways. We're both viewing "first person" and "puzzle game" as two different ideas smashed together to convey one meaning (a puzzle game played from the first person perspective).

You want to categorize games by perspective and then genre, right?

Otherwise I have no clue what on earth you're trying to say.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty clear. I also think it's a really good idea.

Genres in the wiki pages are still sort of confusing anyway, but the only descriptor mentioning perspective is "first-person shooter". As the OP said, we could just put more categories in the genre menu, "First person platformer, Third person platformer, Side scrolling platformer,..." but that would make it even harder to navigate. If we add a separate perspective field, it could help to cut down on wiki editing clutter, while making the pages more informative, and the search (eventually?) more meaningful.

Although, I'm sure adding something like that could easily break the site or just cause all sorts of bugs that the programming team is ill equipped to handle right now. Still, great idea.

Exactly! Although the order does not matter. Separating the concept of perspective from genre just makes the system much more flexible. With this kind of setup a user could easily search for all puzzle games (by genre) or just one style of puzzle game (genre + perspective). This also "future proofs" the system by allowing you to define new styles (perspective + genre combinations) that have not yet been created.

Unless I'm gravely mistaken adding a perspective category would be quite trivial, since you're essentially just adding a new tag category in the database. The biggest issue would be going through and tagging/re-tagging all the games in the wiki.

Edit: I should also point out that while we do have concept pages for perspectives a category would be much more useful. At the moment there doesn't seem to be any way to search for both a concept and a genre together. So there's no way to narrow it down to just top-down shooters. Even though we can narrow searches by publishers, developers, and resolution.