that may vary by game developer. as a game developer i do sometimes compare my games with others and see where they're better and where their worse. for instance, a lot of my fans claim my game immortal defense is the best tower defense game. i don't absolutely agree, but i'd certainly put it in the top 5 (out of all the hundreds i've played, anyway). but it's harder to be objective about one's own game of course.

i didn't necessarily *intend* to make the best tower defense game when i was working on the game, though. i didn't play much of the competition at all (i played a single flash td game, roman sanine's basic tower defense game, and then made my own, without checking up on the competition to make sure mine was better). but that doesn't mean i never compare it to other games in the same genre.

I have done what you're describing. After I finished my first major game, I compared it to its inspirations to ask "Is this a success? Have I successfully improved on Zachtronics' games?" (Though I wasn't really asking a general 'is my game better than his' question, even then - I was more specifically concerned with whether I'd improved the learning curve / UI, which I felt was a weakness of Zachtronics' games.)

That's not what Breadcultist is saying, though. He claimed that "the point is to compare existing games to potential, as-yet-imaginary ones" - that is, to compare while planning and designing, not in a post-mortem sort of sense. That's what seems bizarre to me.

he also claims in the thread linked to by derek that genres are tools and interesting to him because they allow him to review games and form top 10 lists, and that any definition of genre must allow him to do those things. but if that is true, what if others, like indie game developers, have other uses for genre, can't they equally use genre as tools for their own purposes, such as, oh i don't know, *designing games*? it seems to me that organizing genres for the purpose of designing games is more important than organizing genres for the purpose of making top 10 lists.

Wouldn't the same concept of genre be the right tool for the job? The point for the critic is to compare existing games to each other. For the designer, the point is to compare existing games to potential, as-yet-imaginary ones. Because both are interested in knowing: what is the better game?

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.

As a hobbyist developer, I choose game ideas to make based on whatever seems most interesting to make and most feasible based on my limited resources. (Time, mainly.) Commercial game designers choose games to make partially based on the same factors, as well as the commercial potential of a game idea - how much money can they make off of it? At no point would it be useful to ask "will this game idea be better than Half-Life?" (for, say, an FPS) - not only is it almost impossible to tell (so much of a game's quality depends on implementation, not on the raw idea), but it's irrelevant.

There isn't really a competition between games, not beyond maybe six months or so - no one's going to decide not to buy your game because they want to buy Half-Life instead. (If they really haven't played HL already, odds are good they'll just get both!) Any game that would be released in the same time-frame as your game will still be in planning when yours is, so it'd obviously be impossible to compare with a game that hasn't been announced yet. And in a noncommercial sense, I don't know of any hobbyist developers who are strongly competitive in the way you're describing - when Zaratustra began making Eversion, I doubt he wondered "will this game be better than Braid?"

I respect you as a poster - I think you're by far the most insightful of the Icycalm-board immigrants in this thread - but I'm really perplexed by your statement. Do you want to rephrase?

I licked Foucalt's frenulum. He thanked me for it and was very cordial.

Can it be?

Dear god, I hope so.

Not sure yet, holding up my enthusiasm.

finally i can see what a tigsource with super joe was like.

I am incredibly excited.

Already, it's... so beautiful. So beautiful.

They should've sent a poet.

World of Warcraft is a fantasy role-playing game, in which players take sides on a vast conflict between the noble Alliance and monstrous Horde, the so-called "World of Warcraft". When I was a child, I, too, played at War - I would steal my father's old poker deck from the dusty games closet behind the pantry, and my brother and I would take turns drawing card after card. It was only years later that I realized what seems so painfully obvious now - it wasn't a game at all! All I was doing was drawing cards! The realization forced me into an existential panic - if I'd been so foolish then without having the faintest inkling of the pointlessness of my actions, then what thing that I valued now, what work of uncountable hours, might turn to dust in my hands at any moment?

3/10.

@p. diddy

TIGSource may be the wrong place to say this, but I think there's a place for a game of spectacle. Like Avatar or Transformers or whichever other movie examples you might prefer, they aren't especially deep in meaning or mechanics, they won't age very well... but by god, when they first come out, are they ever a sight to see!

The primary goal of games, in general, is to entertain. If your game does that, it's a good game! It may not still be a good game in 10 years, or 20, or 200. But I'm not sure that matters.

"In the long run, we're all dead."

-

I'm going to elaborate a little more: this discussion periodically returns to the idea of ideal games, or the idea that there's only one way to make a good game. Maybe it has to be mechanically complex. Maybe it has to stand the test of time. Maybe it has to approximate the ideal of its genre, or whatever the hell icycalm's bizarre genre fixation is.

But there's a tremendous diversity in games, and that's not just because most of them are terrible. There are different games for different purposes: mindless games for when you need to relax, involved games for when you want to sink yourself into a system. There are different games for different people: some people are fascinated by shmups and fighting games, others don't care. That doesn't mean that they're "subhumans" or worse - it just means that they like different things.

I think this might be an axiomatic statement: your taste is not an arbiter of your quality as a human being.

Ranking games in general might also be a pretty dumb idea. But I'll get back on that one.

(Currently running a mild fever; apologies for any unusual incoherence.)

but none of you are internet friends, with the exceptions of eva and maybe bobo

 

also i never really get embarrassed. i can't even imagine what it'd feel like to be embarrassed.

great, now I owe googoogjoob twenty bucks.

man, I thought I had that pot nailed!.

-

oh man
http://rinku.livejournal.com/1988/05/06/
http://rinku.livejournal.com/1988/05/25/
not even 20 days went by
his father must have done something horrible

http://rinku.livejournal.com/1992/

Today I was embarrassed and happy. My internet friends were reading from my elementary school journal, which made me embarrassed. But I fixed a bug in Saturated Reamers, which made me happy.

(an entire IRC channel has been reading from it for 15 minutes straight now.)

(secretly, I am also embarrassed)

You're still doing it! You really can't work this out, can you?

You realize you and he are just shouting back and forth at each-other: "You're so dumb!" "No, you're so dumb!" It's kind of a waste of a thread. Maybe you could take it to PM?

The problem is really:

Genre definition is muddy and relative to context, they work as shortcut and alias more than proper definition else. Myself I use concatenation of mechanics and various aspect to define a genre, which is too flexible for a discussion (too many variable) and just rigid enough for my design purpose.

I agree, to some extent. Certainly it's impossible to have any kind of logically rigorous discussion about genres. They just aren't very well-defined. You've got a genre composed of games with different mechanics but a similar theme - sports - you've got genres composed of games with similar mechanics but different themes - adventure, shooter - you've got genres defined by mechanics and theme - survival horror - and then you've got puzzle games, which are just... well, we've covered that earlier in the thread.

(Oh! Also, "arcade" is a really shoddy genre.)

I'm not actually convinced that there's any way to mathematically analyze the amount of 'diversity' in a generation of games. It'd be basically 'how different are the games that most people are playing from each other?', which is... well, subjective.

On the other hand. It does seem like most people can agree, generally, on which genre a game is in, for most games. Space Invaders is a (crude) shmup; Gran Turismo is a racing game; and so forth. Basically, identifying traits that make games similar (to some level of detail) and grouping them accordingly. There's not much objective truth present in that kind of assessment, but it does seem possible to reach a rough consensus based on it, which allows for rough conclusions about the genres represented in mainstream games.

It's not perfect, but with a subject like this, it's about as good as you're going to get, I think!

Back to top chart: no top chart is credible without the following game > Nancy drew, the sims, bejeweled, animal crossing, pokemon.
Whenever it's an insider industry chart they vanish despite selling shitload!

Bejeweled, Nancy Drew, and the Sims are all PC games, and thus not featured on the sales charts for consoles. Pokemon was primarily popular on the portable consoles (though one or two Pokemon console releases did appear in the list); Animal Crossing did actually appear.

If you want to go through the numbers for top-selling PC games, broken down into 5-year periods, or want to point me to an appropriate resource, I'd be more than happy to discuss sales of The Sims and Nancy Drew with you. But I suspect that'd take rather more research than either of us is willing to put into it. Selecting only console games to discuss may seem unfair, but the reason is that they're the only ones there are readily-available numbers for!

can you, watching that, figure out what is going on without being told, or what the goals are, etc.? probably not, i'd have to explain it to you, or you'd have to read about it.

Eat seahorses to survive, gather pieces of the trident by eating UFOs, and release the mermaid once you are finished getting four of them.

Try playing Ultima IV without a manual.

Of course - and this is moving the goalposts, but reasonably so, I think - watching someone play a game, correctly, is much easier to figure out than diving into the game head-first on your own.

With this game, anyway. (Seriously, turning into a fish?)

This is 100% retarded(plasingfungus' list).
You are picking games seemingly at random and creating genre and totally ignoring others.

I have no inter'est in this discussion but I can't let false things being thrown out about videogames history.

You're right; I didn't explain my methodology at all. Like Rinku's original list, I was basing the list on the top-selling games for each console. I chose the top ten games from each console (or as many as were listed, if fewer than ten) and listed them by genre.

Genre divisions are always somewhat arbitrary (a point I've argued myself in this thread), but the games listed generally aren't too challenging; there are only a few that I think are borderline or otherwise ambiguous, and I marked them as such in the list.

I'm not claiming the list is absolute incontestable truth about anything, but I do think it provides us some numbers to argue with/about; a starting point.

----

Re: 3D vs 2D RPGs; Dragonmaw's making my points better than I could. If I classed 3D RPGs separately from 2D ones, I'd probably end up splitting a ton of the other genres in that list - Gears of War would probably be separate from Call of Duty and Halo, for instance. In general, when in doubt, I tended to divide earlier games into different genres and merge later ones, for the sake of fairness. (While arguing that diversity in genres isn't decreasing over time.)

----

@pleasingfungus - ya, that makes sense. but another consideration: in "SEVENTH GENERATION (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)" you list RPG twice, and count it twice.

Editing.

----

P. Diddy, my impression is that guitar_mobster is just an icycalm minion, not icycalm himself. (He doesn't tend to venture out of his own forums, to the best of my knowledge.)

@pleasingfungus - i do feel that most of those atari 2600 best-sellers took more knowledge to play than modern 3d shooters, yes. most of those did require a manual; try playing E.T. or adventure without one. they require a significant time investment to even find fun, let alone to play well. certainly at least they require a greater frustration capacity than modern games (most modern gamers give up in frustration too early when confronted with an atari 2600 game, i've found, and don't spend the time necessary to get to the point where the game is fun).

Ah, I see what you mean; I was pretty young when I played even NES/SNES games, so I'd mostly forgotten the days between in-game tutorials, even ones as simple as "here's a controls screen, get cracking". I think I'd still argue that your Pac-Man is significantly simpler than your Gears of War, but I can see how Adventure might be equally frustrating to a new player.

one correction: E.T. is not a platformer

there are multiple camera angles: top-down, sideview, etc., and there's no jumping or platforms involved; i think the closest genre is adventure game

Ah, all right. The only screenshot I'd seen was side-view and made it look like an adventure game. That pushes the numbers up for that generation somewhat (.6 and .7 for the overall numbers and the Atari specifically), though the Dreamcast remains the most diverse single console.

<graph snipped>

if you look at the blue line there, i don't see that as 'steady' at all, but a decrease. steady over the last 25 years yes, but still less than 25+ years ago.

Agh, I knew that phrasing would bite me in the rear. I'll try to clarify what I meant:

If the genre diversity had steadily (monotonically) decreased, generation after generation (.6, .5, .45, .42, .38....), then I would say that games diversity decreased. If it was more or less steady over time (.6, .5, .65, .55...), then I'd say it was consistently steady. But the graph displays neither of these: diversity decreases sharply after the first generation, but is steady for the next five. Since it's been steady for most of its history, I say that genre diversity is steady overall.

Does that make sense?

(I'll edit the post after I have a few more corrections; editing the graphs is a bit of a pain.)

[METHODOLOGY]

You guys are completely ignoring computer games in all of your lists about genre diversity. What about the games for the Amiga, Sinclair ZX, Commodore 64, and the games that ran on mainframes and such? Until recently, computers were the place to look for the most complex games and the greatest variety of genres.

They still are.

But they're impossible to find sales numbers for!

I have ever more sympathy for the makers of Game Dev Story.

Anyway, here's an enormous wall of text. (Feel free to skip to the bit with the graphs; I'm putting the rest in so people can check my facts.)

----------

(Underlined text was edited in, and was not in the original post.)

----------


METHODOLOGY: Following the lead of RinkuHero's original post, I looked through Wikipedia's List of top-selling games, and selected the top ten for each console in each generation, where possible. (Some consoles didn't have ten games listed; the Atari 2600's sales numbers were imprecise enough that I included the full list, 12 games in total. When one game appeared on multiple consoles, I only counted it once.

Genres are somewhat arbitrary; current genres don't fit early games well, so I attempted to sort them as best I could. Any games that are midway between genres or otherwise particularly ambiguous are noted as such; there aren't very many.


SECOND GENERATION (Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision)

Falling-Object Shooters: Missile Command, Atlantis,
Protoshmups*: Space Invaders, Space Armada, Megamania, Demon Attack, River Raid
Asteroids Variants: Astrosmash, Cosmic Ark
Platformers: Pitfall
Sports: Las Vegas Poker, Major League Baseball, NFL Football
Other: Pac-Man
   Adventure
   Kaboom!**
   Space Battle
        E.T.
*Space Invaders clones, basically, though River Raid is slightly more advanced.
**This could be classed with the 'Falling-Object Shooters” at a stretch.

Roughly 10 genres in 18 games. (It's difficult to cull the list further; most of the games listed are no more precise than “1 million sold”, so it's an enormous tie for the latter half of the list.) The ratio of genres to top-selling games is roughly .56. (This is the number I'll be using for the rest of the post, for lack of anything more obviously indicative.)

THIRD GENERATION (NES)
   (Wikipedia doesn't list anything for the Sega Master System)

Platformers: Super Mario Bros 1, SMB2, SMB3, TMNT
Action-Adventure: The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II
Role-Playing Games: Dragon Warrior II, DWIII, DWIV
Sports: Golf

As Rinku summarizes, 4 genres in 10 games. Including Disk System games doesn't really change anything, even if you're into that kind of thing. .4.

FOURTH GENERATION (Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES)
Platformers: Sonic, Sonic 2, Aladdin, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic 3, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, DKC2, Yoshi's Island
Sports: NBA Jam
Fighting: Mortal Kombat II, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat 3, Street Fighter II Turbo
Beat-Em-Up: Altered Beast
Racing: Super Mario Kart
3D Shmup*: Star Fox
RPG: Dragon Quest VI

Total genres: 7 across 20 games. .35.

*As Rinku suggests.

FIFTH GENERATION (PS1, N64)
3D Platformer: Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong 64, Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 3
Racing: Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Gran Turismo, GT2
3D Shooters: GoldenEye 007
Action-Adventure: Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask
Fighting: Super Smash Bros
3D Shmups: Star Fox 64
RPG: Final Fantasy VII, FFVIII, FFIX
Metal Gear Solid: Metal Gear Solid

Total genres: 8 across 20 games. .4. (If you only look at the N64, there are 6 genres across 10 games: .6, as diverse as the Atari!)

SIXTH GENERATION (Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube)
3D Platformer: Sonic Adventure, Super Mario Sunshine
Fighting: Soulcalibur, Super Smash Bros. Melee
Racing: Crazy Taxi, Gran Turismo 3, GT4, Project Gotham Racing, Need for Speed: Underground, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
Survival Horror: Resident Evil Code: Veronica
Sports: NFL 2K, NFL 2K1
Sandbox: GTA: San Andreas, GTA: Vice City, GTA II, Animal Crossing
RPG: Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest VIII, Fable, KOTOR, Pokemon Colosseum
MMO: FFXII.
Stealth: Metal Gear Solid 2, Splinter Cell
3D Shooter: Halo 2, Halo 1, Counter-Strike (Xbox), Metroid Prime
Action-Adventure: Wind Waker, Luigi's Mansion*
Party: Mario Party 4, Mario Party 7 (???)
???: Shenmue

*Luigi's Mansion should probably be listed separately, but I'm not sure what it'd be listed as. Anyway, this generation doesn't really need the help.)

That's a total of 13 genres in 37 games; .35 . The Gamecube and Dreamcast are relatively diverse (.8 and .86 respectively, dramatically better than the Atari!), but they get drowned out by the Xbox and PS2.

SEVENTH GENERATION (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)
3D Shooters: Halo 3, Modern Warfare 2, Gears of War, GoW2, Modern Warfare, CoD: World at War, Halo: Reach, Halo 3: ODST, Uncharted 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops
Sandbox: GTAIV*
RPGs: Fable II, Final Fantasy XIII
Racing: Mario Kart Wii, Gran Turismo 5, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, MotorStorm
Motion/Fitness: Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus**
2D Platformers: New Super Bros. Wii, LittleBigPlanet
Fighting: Super Smash Bros. Brawl
3D Platformers: Super Mario Galaxy
Party: Mario Party 8
Sports: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games***
Stealth: Metal Gear Solid 4


Ten shooters, 18 other games. (Some games are in the top 10 of both 360 and PS3, so I'm not counting them twice.) 11 genres in 28 games; .43 .39 . (The Wii alone is .7; even with all the fitness games.)


*Arguably this belongs with “3D Shooters”.
**Should this really count twice?
***Throughout this whole discussion of genre, has anyone ever questioned shoving all of “sports” into a single box? Seems odd that we haven't.

----------

In summary, from second generation to seventh (current), the ratio of genres to top-selling games seems to be: .56, .4, .35, .4, .35, .43 .39; looking at the most diverse console of each generation gets .6 (Atari 2600), .4 (NES), .6 (SNES), .6 (N64), .86 (Dreamcast), .7 (Wii). Graphs:





So, depending on your preferred set of numbers, genre diversity has either remained generally steady or increased over the last five generations.

Criticism? (I suspect some of the genre classifications are iffy - Shenmue could probably be shoved into "Sandbox" or "Action-Adventure" with a little pushing, for instance - but try to avoid mentioning anything that wouldn't make a significant difference to the numbers, to keep the discussion on track.)

A hardcore genre becomes casual to hardcore players? No no no it doesn't work that waaaay.

I'm using RinkuHero's definition of casual: something that can be picked up easily ('doesn't require a manual') and doesn't require too much investment to play - presumably as opposed to something like WoW or Eve, known for their fighter-jet cockpit UIs, or a competitive strategy game that requires intense concentration at all times...? Actually, I'm not sure what he's contrasting them against.

If it makes things simpler for the purpose of discussion, though, you can pretend that he's TIGSource's icycalm, arbiting a definition for the purpose of discussion. Is that helpful?

(WoW reference image.)

since i feel i've shown why i think genres are less differentiated now, i should also mention why i think it's become that way:

besides the obvious of games taking less risks, the main reason from the buyer's standpoint is that i feel that 3d shooters are one of the simplest genres to understand: you just shoot the bad guys and avoid getting shot yourself. it doesn't require a manual or much research, it can be played casually (even though there are people who are expert at it and do study it, i'm talking about the majority: they play it casually). people play a few games online fighting team vs team, and it's easy to pick up, it's not very nerdy, it doesn't require much time or thought investment. 3d shooters are often thought of as hardcore games but i see them as extremely casual games (even though they aren't targeted towards middle aged women).

That explains why 3D shooters sell. It doesn't explain why other genres don't.

Looking at your Atari chart, pretty much every game is very simple to learn - the most complicated one is probably Adventure - but allows for a high skill ceiling for anyone trying to actually beat the games / get high scores. (Depending on the game. Also, probably excluding E.T.. Seriously?)

Chart quoted since it last appeared quite a few pages back:

Pac-Man
Pitfall!
Missile Command
Demon Attack
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Adventure
Atlantis
Cosmic Ark
Kaboom!
Megamania

In contrast, 3D shooters seem ludicrously complex and daunting - consider the amount of time invested until a player new to the genre is able to move and aim at the same time! (typically: quite a lot). Most mass-market 3D shooters are very much casual games for people with experience in the genre (that is, skill easily transfers from one to the other, and the games are easy to complete on normal settings for someone who's played any of the others) - but I think it's much harder to argue that they're 'casual' in terms of allowing easy access to the genre.

(Though I may be belaboring the obvious.)

And yeah, having looked up most of the Atari games in the list, I really don't see how you can argue they're all in separate genres - look at Demon Attack and Megamania for heaven's sake, if nothing else. (Atlantis seems pretty similar to Missile Command, though I'm not sure... but this is a digression.)

@jimmy - i agree, but i didn't say i showed it to the point where others would be convinced, just that i showed why *i* am convinced of it (as i mentioned, i only owned those particular consoles, and i don't own an iphone). if i were to take everything into account it'd require more knowledge than i personally have about videogames. so as i mentioned, because i don't have a wii, ds, or any iOS system, i can say nothing about them. others could do so if they wished.

I'm looking through the relevant wikipedia article now, and will post some genre breakdowns shortly. Will this prove anything useful? Only one way to find out.

That looks pretty cool!

I think the genre is called "sidescrolling RTS" (though I guess yours won't scroll?) - the most mainstream release was Swords & Soldiers. You're obviously taking a very different approach to the genre than it, though.

Best of luck!

Worst first day at work.

On which subject, isn't this Half-Life?

Where you flippin bro?  Like what part exactly?  It shouldn't be your war machine design that early in the game, the whole game can be completed on the bare stock 2 wheeler so not sure whats up.  If you can pinpoint the part where you flip I might be able to make it a bit more easy there, but chances are if your struggling on the 2nd then the 3rd is going to hurt.

Every single time, after I go off the ramp leading to the houses (on the second level), I flipped over and couldn't get up again. Tried with a ton of combinations of different wheels and suspensions, tried going faster and slower and the ramp, tried sliding around while I was upside-down in an attempt to right myself, but nothing really helped! It was pretty frustrating.

Then I bought the Wussy Main Thing and won the level on my first go. GOLD SKULLMEDAL.

I don't really know what to conclude from this!

(But: congrats, a Rock Paper Shotgun link!)


EDIT: And beat the game!

That was really fun, once I got past level 2. (Though more of my time than I'd have liked was spent repeatedly trying to get past the collapsing bridges.)

Still. Fun!

You know what's fun?

Stalking people on the internet.

 

How did that internet experiment go, by the way?