You make good points man, looks like you win another debate!

If I was in this to win debates, why on earth would I be talking on the internet?

It's the joy of the hunt, man. The joy of the hunt.

(And by "the hunt" I mean "typing 2000 word posts about narrative in games.")

(Obviously.)

One hundred and eighty-five pages we've been talking when we could have been doing something productive. I feel like shit now.

I spend my time in this thread debating video-games theory. You spend your time in this thread bitching about how long it is.

You should feel like shit about your involvement with this thread, because I mean... if you're not going to have fun with it, why bother?

This thread gets more ridiculous every time I visit it.

we live to entertain

[Race for the Pennant]

on immersion i was talking about your previous example of a blunt press a to jump vs braid's press a to jump on some sprite, there is no difference in it.
now about "pop ups" i have never been distracted by one and i'm not going to talk about it as a problem

I think we've been miscommunicating here? I don't know, we don't really have any good examples of bad tutorials to talk about. Maybe someone could volunteer one?

(I could talk about No More Heroes, but I doubt eva's played that. And it's too great a game to be unkind to it.)

game designers are the worst gamers though. no common person thinks about systems
i have never played a game where i didn't enjoy the cutscenes, if ya wana get back to "systems" though, here's one to think about: it's a reward for finishing the level, its also called takin a break. "pacing", ka-chink *place end of level achievement here*, maybe double as a loading screen in the background, maybe even skippable ey.

Of course no ordinary gamer talks about systems. Ordinary gamers don't talk about bump-mapping and trilinear anisotropic filtering either. Doesn't mean it's not in the game; doesn't mean they're not affected.

"Cutscene as reward" is pretty traditional. It can work. Kind of betrays a lack of confidence in your design - you reward the player by letting them not play for a bit? - and it falls down pretty hard if your writing is too terrible... but yeah, the whole pacing/end-of-level reward thing is classic.

Loading screen idea wouldn't really work. Cutscenes are traditionally as computationally heavy as the game itself, if not moreso; a festival of graphical effects. You might be able to pull it off in yonder lightweight indie games, but Devil May Cry or Final Fantasy or whatever seems more likely to require a loading screen for the cutscene than to allow it to act as one.

In the wrong place, they can be seen as intruders. Suddenly an achievement pops up for "running 10000 meters" in a single-player FPS, say - what?

that has never happened in the existence of video games

Not single-player, but the achievement I was thinking of: Race for the Pennant: Run 25 kilometers.

I think I might've played single-player games that offered achievements for just walking around a lot, but I'm not sure. Just Cause 2 has one for driving 75 kilometers, which is basically the same thing.

in summary:

1) it happens
2) it's kinda dumb?

I'd actually like to hear someone offer a rationale for that kind of achievement. The only thing I feel when something like that pops up, or an achievement for "time played" (pretty similar, and also appeared in Just Cause 2) is "oh god, why have I put this much time into this game? Why am I wasting my life?" Seeing an exact measure of the time I put into the game actively saps my will to play.

But maybe that's just me?

theyre no-fun whiners though

hahaha

I can't argue with that!

metroid prime n bioshock does it frequently (they have to, "i was here... but then now im dead!", the characters had to be dead, how the hell would the audiolog be there and the dead body be lying on the floor) and system shock is unplayabl so i wouldnt know

You keep saying this, but I'm not sure there were that many "I was here, I'm dead now" logs? And they're certainly not the ones most people remember, the ones people are holding up as an example of storytelling.

----

I'm not sure there's that much blood left in the stuff we've been talking about. I want to go onto a tangent - have you played L4D, eva?

[for people who think of achievements in that way.]

I don't think anyone was talking about tutorial design. Also, that's a bit of a strawman. Has anyone ever suggested - anywhere - that 'good design' will let a player guess the jump button?

last i've read it it was posted by auntiewhatever and it is one of the things that every retarded designer thinks.
is it a strawman? oop let me check my textbook on how to argu lol

Heh. Right there you're generalizing a bit too much - as multiple people have said already in this thread, and as you should really know, indies are not homogenous. There are plenty of "retarded designers" who hate a.a. even more than you do!

I'm not one of them, but your post did make me look at her article again with a more critical eye than before, leading to the conclusions I mentioned a few posts ago. (That her ideas of ultra-intuitive control/level-design are pretty limited in utility.) So: thanks!

(no one in the thread was talking about a.a.'s assertion, but maybe they should have been. It's interesting to discuss.)

-

there is literally no difference <between tutorial by pop-up and by in-game hints> and "immersion"(a stupid word) is already broken the moment you have hands on the keyboard/gamepad

I had to think about this for a long while before I could respond.

Basically the problem is with the definition of 'immersion'. The obvious definition has something to do with "how much you believe you're in the game world". And that is, as you said, stupid! No one actually thinks they're wandering around Azeroth or Halo or wherever. You're always playing a game!

But there's a better definition of immersion that makes the idea of pop-ups "breaking immersion" actually make sense. Say that immersion means how involved you are with the game systems - the game world in a strictly mechanical sense. How focused you are on playing the game - running the numbers, gauging the angles, shooting the bads, winning the battles. (As applicable to your example game of choice.) Then of course in-game tutorials and achievement pop-ups will detract from immersion - because they're not part of the system that you're just starting to learn, in the case of tutorials, or that you're well familiar with, in the case of achievments. They're intruders, and they're distracting!

This doesn't need to be something apocalyptic. In-game tutorials are not the end of the world - even poorly designed ones. But they can detract from immersion in the way that I defined.

This is also the way that cutscenes can detract from immersion. If you think of "immersion" as immersion in the plot or characters, then of course a cutscene wouldn't do anything to hurt that. But in terms of immersion in the systems, cutscenes are absurdly jarring - taking away your ability to actually play the game (walkaround cutscenes only very slightly less so) until the cutscene ends. It all makes sense!

(I am very excited by this.)

Achievements can be better or worse. In the wrong place, they can be seen as intruders. Suddenly an achievement pops up for "running 10000 meters" in a single-player FPS, say - what? I wasn't trying to do that! That's not an 'in-game' award! Why is that even a thing? The key thing is the idea that it's not something from within the game - it's an award in Xbox Live or Steam or PSN or whatever, not an actual part of the game. That's why achievements can break immersion, for people who think of achievements in that way. (That last bit is key). In the right place, for the right people, they won't - well integrated, not jarring against the grain of the game. Multiplayer FPSes and score-chasing games are, I think, good fits...

I haven't really fully thought out how achievements fit in, but I'd be happy to discuss it more. The key thing is the idea of immersion as immersion in the systems, though.

(I forgot about them while I was writing, but these posts are also relevant.)

metroid was brought up here a bunch.
and i bring up nintendo to mean their "style"(bad word) of "game design"(another bad word) where they pretty much brainwashed everyone on a certain way to present a game, which is where the hate for modern games come from. o no!! cutscenes are bad! adjustable difficulty levels are bad! achievements are bad! literally anything super mario bros didnt have is bad design LOL

Heh. You're right, people were talking about Metroid (Prime). Probably the reason I wasn't thinking of it was because a developer I could actually name (Retro Studios), rather than the monolithic Nintendo... but that's an excuse, and I'm getting distracted.

Yeah, Metroid Prime does a bunch of the stuff people were talking about for enhancing immersion. There are cutscenes, but they're somewhat uncommon and generally minimal; plot and background comes from the scanner almost entirely...

I was going to say that HL2 did it first, but apparently it didn't? (MP1 came out in 2002? How time flies.)

Anyway.

I think the primary inspiration for minimalistic storytelling comes from elsewhere. Half-Life did the whole "no-cutscenes" thing first and more vigorously; Half-Life 2 is much more often cited as an inspiration (for this sort of game design generally) than Metroid Prime... the logs are probably Metroid Prime's thing, in terms of inspiring developers (yes, yes, of course there was another game that did it first, no one cares - that wasn't directed at you, eva), but that's about the limit.

There is a cult of nintendo (basically a.a.?), but I don't think it's that widespread. Adjustable difficulty levels are fantastic. There are arguments against them - the usual problem is that you don't know what difficulty level is right for you until you start playing, after you've chosen your difficulty, and difficulty spikes are an issue - but they're still better than the alternative. (No difficulty options.) In-game tutorials are great - pop-ups aren't ideal, but give me them over "controls only in the manual" any day. And cut-scenes...

I'll talk about them below, eh?

i'll tell you the pinacle of no-cutscene storytelling:
(an excerpt from half life)
some dude: dr freeman welcome to city 17
*ignore and jump on nearest crate*

i was wanting to see More reliance on cutscenes after i finished playing alan wake

Heh.

There's two things you could be describing with that. The first is an actual problem. It's a walkabout cutscene (I think I used a very slightly different word for it earlier in this post?), which is just a cutscene under a very thin disguise. You can still walk around, and maybe just turn your head, or whatever - but you're trapped in a small area until whoever stops talking, and you can't progress until then.

Actually, it's not just a cutscene - it's worse. It's an unskippable cutscene. (How can you add a skip button for a cutscene that the designers don't admit exists?)

So yeah, if you're immersed in the scene, then you'll listen to / watch the people talking, you're involved, everything's great. Same as a normal cutscene. But if you're not, then you're going to basically screw with the game's attempted narrative by "jumping on crates" and doing silly things while people talk, because it's a cutscene that you can't skip, and you have nothing better to do.

That's dumb. I agree. They were a cool novelty when HL1 came out, but by now they're really showing their age. (They tend to suffer particularly when you're replaying a game.)

The second thing you could be describing is one of the bits with optional story - people talking to you ("welcome to city 17"), pretty analogous to the scannable stuff in Metroid Prime, the audiologs in System/Bioshock, etc. (Well, a bit more obtrusive, but basically similar.) It's optional plot, the sort of thing you have to seek out (by standing around until speeches finish in HL2, by hunting down scannable stuff in MP or audiologs in *shock... there is a progression here in terms of play quality! (hint: the one that involves less standing around is better)). It can be 'ruined' - by talking to someone and then doing silly things in HL2, by... not sure how you can mess around with the MP or *shock story, but you can easily ignore it, of course.

I'm not sure what the problem with this is. It's tidbits of delicious plot/history for people who care about it, and for people who don't, it might as well not exist. By piecing together information from Bioshock's logs, for instance, you can learn much more about Rapture's history than you will from the cutscenes... That seems pretty ideal to me.

Audiologs and so forth are hardly the end of cutscene-free storytelling - game environments generally, and L4D's in particular, are an even less obtrusive way of telling stories without getting in the way of players who don't care. L4D manages to pull it off in a purely multiplayer game! How crazy is that?

If I was going to tell you what I thought was the pinnacle of no-cutscenes storytelling, and point you to an example of what it can do for games - honestly, right now, I wouldn't point you to Passage or Metroid Prime or any nonsense like that. I'd point you to L4D.

the point i was making is, that's as far as you go. it wont Ever get any more intersting than that with storytelling by interaction(im saying its a bad idea). tell me when it does though.

Burden of proof is pretty much on me, and I don't have much!

What I will do is move the goalposts a little, if you don't mind. I'm not sure if the pursuit of "pure gameplay" is that interesting - as you said earlier, games are a multimedia... medium, and we should exploit everything we have access to in the interests of making the best game. (And the best story, etc.) What I think is a more interesting question is making a game where the gameplay actually meshes with both plot and theme. Uncharted (2?) was an example I saw the other day - before you nobly spare the villain's life (spoiler alert, I guess!) at the end of the game, you kill hundreds upon hundreds of mooks without a second thought. What sort of hero are you, anyway? In Mass Effect (2), a game I personally loved, you're supposed to be saving the galaxy from an urgent threat, but you spend your time running around doing side-quests for 20-30+ in-game hours before you actually deign to deal with the main plot. What's going on there?

A game where the mechanics actually mesh with the plot and theme, a complex plot ("space invaders" works pretty well, but that ain't much of an achievement) - now that'd be something!

I'm tempted to put forward "The Void" here, but (1) hardly anyone's played it, so it's hard to have a discussion unless I summarize it, and (2) I still haven't beaten it (25-ish hours in?), so I'm not sure I'm qualified!

But there is an interesting point here, and perhaps someone who feels less under-the-weather than I do right now can help continue it for me.

maybe because all <audiologs/scan visor stuff> talks about ever is "someone died here", with the exception of odst where it was actually good

this isn't true

at all

why would you even say that

also i dont get why anyone would call this an "interaction" or "doing", its literally a scroll of text on your screen.

dragonmaw can / probably has answer(ed) this one

I seriously cannot give a toss about "interaction / showing / telling" one way or another

-------------------










I hope you've enjoyed reading this wall of text! I know I sure did.

tl;dr I'm tired and my eyes hurt and I should just go to bed early

Re-read pixelante's thing, and she makes the exact same point in a footnote. (as well as an endorsement of mouse-only controls for this kind of design, which I was actually thinking about.

(2) this kind of design is admittedly easier on a nes than a PC, which has tens of buttons to the nes pad’s four. this is why i like the mouse: it has a common denominator of two buttons, plus motion. the more limited range of action is easier for the player to experiment with.

It's an incredibly difficult sort of design, and of very limited applicability (only for very simple controllers) - interesting, but impractical and unsuitable for most games.

I think both eva and a.a. (were she reading this) could agree on that!

Well, maybe not 'interesting' (for eva), but the rest.

But I can't imagine Super Mario Bros starting with a tutorial. Any retard can add a tutorial to their game. It's another thing to design a game with self-explanitory levels.

You know the controls for SMB weren't in-game, right? You had to look them up in the manual before you started to play.

~that's even worse~

Well, I guess they could have been more obvious about the "hold B to run" thing.

But this will explain better where I'm coming from:

http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=465

I've actually read that, and was thinking about it while composing my response. It's an impressive piece of design! But I'm not sure how well it'd work on a modern console - the 360 (8 buttons, 2 sticks, and a d-pad?) or the PC (2+ mouse buttons, 100+ keyboard keys, esp. with shift, et cetera...)

Eva, I'm reading your post but can't reply right now (typing this from my phone) - remind me in #allen once I get back, probably late tonight.

Whoops, accidental wall of text! Sorry about that. eva, try to read it? Or at least skim. Most of this is directed at you.

and if you actually think there's a Difference between
-showing a player literally press a to jump Vs predicting by some kind of "good design" that the player will figure out the jump button,

I don't think anyone was talking about tutorial design. Also, that's a bit of a strawman. Has anyone ever suggested - anywhere - that 'good design' will let a player guess the jump button?

A more reasonable (though again tangential to the topic) comparison is having a flashing prompt show pop up in the center of the screen - "Press A to jump!" - versus, for instance, Braid's implementation, which had a green "A" button painted on the wall where you first need to jump, next to the picture of a jumping man. (Your character, actually.) It's a fairly subtle difference, but the latter method is much less obtrusive (if executed well) and avoids breaking immersion as violently as a tutorial pop-up would.

Of course, if executed poorly, the player won't notice the control hint and will be completely stuck; it's harder to screw up a popup that badly. So there's a tradeoff.

or showing a cutscene vs diarys/audiologs/etc scattered in the level

This is more relevant.

On the most superficial level, of course there's a difference between a cutscene and a diary. One is just some written or spoken text; in the latter case, you can usually do other things while it plays. The other is an Event - stuff happens, people talk, usually you lose some amount of control, often the camera goes wandering around and explosions commence... it's kind of a big deal!

I think what you're getting at is that, at their core, they do the exact same thing: deliver plot and story. Which is true. But not entirely unlike the popup/in-game controls comparison, one of them is much more intrusive than the other.

(Cutscenes. Cutscenes are more intrusive.)

then you've just been playing too many nintendo games

Ad hominem aside, I don't understand this. Nintendo loves cutscenes, and I don't know of a single game of theirs with audiologs. (Or any diaries to speak of, really.)

If I was going to point to a "pro-immersion" developer, it would not be Nintendo.

(That's not a complaint. Plenty of Nintendo games are among my favorites. But they're not doing what we're talking about here.)

plenty of games would be terrible if it ditched cutscenes for some kind of "interactive storytelling" bullshit. that would SEVERELY LIMIT the kind of stories.

Yep! I couldn't agree more.

I think that it's interesting to see what kind of games can be developed without cutscenes, or with a much slighter reliance on them, but it's impossible to argue with your point. The entire movielike AAA blockbuster genre, for example, (GoW, CoD, MoH...) would be terrible without cutscenes!

by interactive storytelling i mean designers who think player actions have to be married to story or something, a "character moving north at a constant speed, jumping on to a crate" isn't a good storytelling method

Tromack covered this, and I agree with him. A story based on 'a character moving north at a constant speed' etc. probably wouldn't make much sense! Fitting story and gameplay together is trickier than choosing random sets of actions and trying to stick a narrative on them.

"scanning an artifact for lore" isnt either

Why not?

we don't need to avoid words or avoid pictures, games may be interactive yes, but theyre also AUDIOVISUAL. we SHOULD be using pictures, sounds, words, interaction, EVERYTHING. there is NO REASON not to.

Yep!

-

Sorry about dissecting your top quote, but it was pretty dense - needed to be flensed for full appreciation.

-

But I can't imagine Super Mario Bros starting with a tutorial. Any retard can add a tutorial to their game. It's another thing to design a game with self-explanitory levels.

You know the controls for SMB weren't in-game, right? You had to look them up in the manual before you started to play.

~that's even worse~

Minitroid is looking pretty cool. (Thought of it because you mentioned some kind of Metroid 2 remake?)

This would be an interesting topic in Design, maybe. Or an interesting article/blog post.

I'd read it if you wrote it?

Or "unpaid collaborations", in the jobs forum.

Also, that sounds like a really cool idea. Best of luck!

but i understand that subhumans may have lesser tastes :p

god damn it rinku

:p

Out of the things I've kickstarted about 14 months ago.

0/3 successful games released(Resonance, Fly-wrench

Huh?

Either way, you believe that quality can be objectively determined, such that a person with the objectively "best" taste would like games exactly as much as they "deserve."

Remove the word 'objectively' and yes.
But you say I'm splitting hairs. Meaning the distinction I have drawn is unimportant. I think it is important.

I just wanted to apologize about the tone I wrote the last post in. I was in a pretty bad mood at the time I wrote it, so it was a little more confrontative than I'd prefer my posts here to be. Sorry for that.

As for the content... this thread moves too fast for me to find the original post I was replying to, or even my own post (!!), but - essentially, as I understand it, Fat Tony Zirbas asserts the existence of some kind of objective taste, such that anyone who enjoys things that are not objectively good, or doesn't enjoy things that are objectively good, is a "subhuman fagot". My assumption was that you agreed with him, which made the statement I was complaining about an exercise in semantic minutiae...

...but since I can't find or precisely remember what I'm arguing about in the first point, I'll drop the point. Just wanted to apologize for my tone.

You know, Icybalm would be a good brandname for a burn treatment balm. I should copyright it.

Too late!

Well, his "Arcade Culture" essay was published five years ago, i.e. half a decade, and it's still the number 1 essay in the world on the subject of "Arcade Culture". It is basically impossible to discuss the subject in any legth without someone linking it at some point, as icy's feedback thread in his forum plainly demonstrates.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't reply to you, but this sentence in particular is worth quoting. For the benefit of anyone who (understandably) skimmed over that post when it first appeared.

You're arguing that icycalm's essay is the "number 1 essay in the world" on its subject because... it's frequently linked to on icycalm's own forums?

I feel like I'm belabouring the obvious by saying this, but the only point that proves is that people who post on the icycalm forums like to talk about things Icycalm says.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that. Heh.)

Then again, a follower of icycalm (or icycalm himself) does not believe in subjective taste in gaming

Of course I believe in subjective taste. I also believe that some tastes are better than others (subjectively, of course).

What's the difference?

Either way, you believe that quality can be objectively determined, such that a person with the objectively "best" taste would like games exactly as much as they "deserve."

(Actually, there isn't even an alternative - all you're doing there is splitting hairs. Your 'clarification' is pretty clearly what Dragonmaw originally meant.)

Am I misunderstanding you?

I won't stand for this. Pull yourself together and then pull yourself apart, bit by bit, fibrous, sticky red strand by fibrous, sticky red strand. Yow, now there's the fillet I wanted.

Will I be served with some fava beans and a nice chianti?

My ex-girlfriend reminds me of Paul Eres.

In what way?

I'm hoping: not sexually.

i'm gonna do a brief experiment and see if paul eres was in the first few pages of this thread, brb

edit: turns out he posted the thread, congratulations everyone, we did it

there are over 2000 posts in this thread, and in january on tigsource there were about 18000 posts. so one out of nine posts on tigsource for the entire month of january 2011 are contained in this very thread. and that's with all the other controversy regarding the igf selections and the moderator changes (which were also huge threads).

congratulations everyone

here's something I read this morning

congratulations

Risk 2210 (much better than the original!) lasts just 6 turns, if I remember correctly.

(But they're rather long turns.)

Q: Who is your favorite poster on these boards?

a) Superb Joe
b) Superb Joe
c) jwk5
d) Superb Joe


Hint: The answer is Superb Joe.

e) Super Joe

For whatever reason, I have a creeping feeling that this thread will make it to 200.

Shh! You'll jinx it!

Or is that what you're trying to do?

Has a number for a given name.

Suda5 sort-of counts, but I don't think he's who you mean.

As a game developer, I have never, ever, thought "the games I'm thinking of making are in the puzzle genre, so I should compare them to Tetris to see which is better." I've never thought anything close to that.

Puzzle games are a weird case, as Icy said years ago in that Kururin review. Never thought that way with other genres? The point of genre, as a tool, is to compare the comparable. Puzzle games are weird because they're often quite incomparable.

Instead of comparing whole finished games to unfinished ones, then... don't you compare parts of them? "I like the feel of the wall-jumping in Batman, I want to steal that, and I want to combine it with the non-linear level style of Seiklus." Also, given a genre, you can look at the variety within, and decide some of the necessary basic choices based on how you like the end results of past games. E.g. linear or not, what sort of save system (if any), how to deal with enemies (or have none). Subgenre choices.

Heh. I do of course steal (borrow?) ideas from other games; one of my games started out as a test of something very similar (intentionally) to the original Zelda's combat, intended for later use in a larger project. But I think you're making some strange assumptions about how I (or other developers) choose which feature to use.

There is no platonic ideal of genre; the best games aren't made by mixing together the 'best mechanics' from the 'best' of their genre predecessors to make some Nietzschian 'supergame.' Instead, good games are made by taking ideas that make sense together and integrating them well. Some of the most popular mechanics first appeared in games that were mediocre or terrible - look at Gears of War's cover mechanic, for instance, which they've acknowledged taking from Kill/Switch.

So I wouldn't decide what ideas to include "based on how (I) like the end results of past games"; I'd (try to) choose whatever fits best in the game I'm trying to make, to the point of choosing mechanics from 'worse' games over those from 'better' games, if they fit more tightly in the game that I'm making.

There is some element of trend-following that means people do take mechanics from the 'best' games - in the hope that it'll rub off? - but in general, this is an well-understood design principle.

The only competitiveness I'm assuming is that y'all want to make better games. Maybe better in just one specific area. (At early stages: simply better than what you already made.)

If not, then this concept of genre probably is useless to you.

I do want to improve on my past efforts, to improve my skills as a game developer, but when it comes to other game designers, I just don't think in that way. I don't think, "I want to make Zelda (for instance), but better." I think, "I want to make a game like Zelda, but different."

To me, creating something that's new is much more interesting than trying to polish an existing concept. I want to clarify before people leap all over me - I'm not interested in trying to create a new Zirbassian 'supergenre'. That's nonsensical by definition. But it is possible to create something within those supergenres, or even within a supergenre, that feels new - that feels like something people haven't really seen before. A novelty. (The pursuit of novelty is a very large part of the reason I play games.)

I'd argue that this attitude is largely prevalent. Among indies, of course, but also among commercial developers - if you look at Firaxis/Civ, or Squeenix/Final Fantasy, they're not really trying to make some kind of "Perfect Civ" or "Perfect Final Fantasy." (Or "Perfect TBS" or "Perfect RPG".) They're messing around, adding and removing features and rules, monsters and classes and items (respectively), to try to give the game a new feel each time. All across the industry - people aren't trying to make better games, they're trying to make different games. The only people who do have that "better"-focused attitude are the only ones who don't have to compete for sales. EA Sports, who come out with basically the same game, year after year, with a few tweaked features, slightly better graphics (usually), and different names on the rosters; and the sort of weird, obsessive fans who make games like C-Evo. (Check his FAQ. So smug! So socially maladjusted! He reminds me of certain other people we both know.)

There's a further interesting conclusion to be gained from that, I think, but I've already gone far beyond the point of 'rambling'. So I'll close this by saying that I agree with you; I really don't have much idea for the ideas of 'genre' that Fat Tony and you endorse! I've even said as much earlier in the thread.

...a few pages before I wrote a several-thousand-word analysis of the history of genre in video-gaming.