Video game genre

A video game genre is an informal classification of a video game based on how it is played rather than visual or narrative elements. This is independent of setting, unlike works of fiction that are expressed through other media, such as films or books. For example, a shooter game is still a shooter game, regardless of where or when it takes place. A specific game's genre is open to subjective interpretation. An individual game may belong to several genres at once.

Early attempts at categorizing video games were primarily for organizing catalogs and books. A 1981 catalog for the Atari Video Computer System uses 8 headings: Skill Gallery, Space Station, Classics Corner, Adventure Territory, Race Track, Sports Arena, Combat Zone, and Learning Center. ("Classics", in this case, refers to chess and checkers.) In Tom Hirschfeld's 1981 book How to Master the Video Games, he divides the games into broad categories in the table of contents: Space Invaders-type, Asteroids-type, maze, reflex, and miscellaneous. The first two of these correspond to the still-used genres of fixed shooter and multidirectional shooter.

For home computers, two publications established a small number of categories based on the best-selling software in the early 1980s: Softalk, which ran its Top Thirty list from 1980 to 1984 with the genres of strategy, adventure, fantasy and arcade; and Computer Gaming World, which collected user-submitted rankings. Computer Gaming World initially used three categories in 1981—arcade, wargame, and adventure—but by 1989 had expanded its genre list to strategy, simulation, adventure, role-playing adventure, wargame, and action/arcade.

Chris Crawford attempted to classify video games in his 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design. Crawford focused on the player's experience and activities required for gameplay. He wrote, "the state of computer game design is changing quickly. We would therefore expect the taxonomy presented [in this book] to become obsolete or inadequate in a short time."

Nintendo, in bringing its Family Computer system into the North American market as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, looked to avoid the issues with loss of publishing control that had led to the video game crash of 1983 and to prevent unauthorized games for the system. To solve this, Nintendo required approval of all games for the NES. To support this, Nintendo classified games into eight major series: Adventure, Action, Sports, Light-Gun, Programmable, Arcade, Robot, and Educational. The series description appeared on early "black box" covers and subsequently in the NES Player's Guide. By the time of the Game Boy and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo had retired the Arcade, Light-Gun, Robot, Programmable, and Educational series, but added RPG & Simulation and Puzzle.

Consoles manufacturers that followed the NES followed similar behavior in requiring licenses to develop games for their systems. To assure they would get these licenses, console developers tended to stay with gameplay of previously published games for that console, thus causing groups of games within the same genre to grow. Subsequently, retailers displayed games grouped by genres, and market research firms found that players had preferences for certain types over others, based on region, and developers could plan out future strategies through this.

With the industry expanding in the 1990s and budgets for video games began growing, large publishers like Electronic Arts began to form to handle the marketing and publication of games, both for consoles and personal computers. Targeting high-value, low-risk video game genres was key for some publishers, and small and independent developers were typically forced to compete by abandoning more experimental gameplay and settling into the same genres used by larger publishers.

As hardware capabilities have increased, new genres have become possible, with examples being increased memory, the move from 2D to 3D, new peripherals, online functionalities, and location-based mechanics. Experimental gameplay from indie game development drew more attention in the late 2000s and 2010s aided by independent digital distribution, as large publishers focused on triple-A titles were extremely risk-averse. Through indie games, a revival of experimental gameplay had emerged, and several new genres have emerged since then.