Of late much of the casual and competitive spheres of gaming have been dominated by a game of building and collecting loot and materials, and I am not talking about Minecraft. The zeitgeistic Fortnite is a proverbial cash cow. Board meetings across the industry see investors drilling developers on how they can have a slice of that sweet battle royale pie. The stagnant Call of Duty (CoD) is looking to the battle royale formula, codified by Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBg) to shake its aging image.
“So what is a battle royale?” one may ask. In its simplest form, it is a competitive game in which a large number of players take to a vast map. They must then proceed to eliminate the other players until a single player or team remains. It is a thrilling and engaging genre, or is it? Was CoD not already a shooter like Fortnite? For that matter, Fortnite involves resource gathering and construction, is it a building game like the aforementioned Minecraft? It includes environmental storytelling and walking, therefore perhaps we could call it a walking simulator, like Firewatch.
Of course, I hyperbolise with the final example, but one game can often fall under many genres and more concerningly to me as a critic is that those genres scarcely inform people why they might care about a given game. In 2016, my brother was hooked on Star Wars Battlefront (SWB). Meanwhile, I was loving the rebooted Doom, which was fast, fluid and made every action satisfying. I recommended the game to my brother likening it to SWB. When I convinced him to play, however, he was running around the levels yawning. The game did not grab him in the way it grabbed me. Why was this?
The word shooter connotes a myriad of games, from the hilariously bombastic explosion fest Just Cause (JC), to the minimalist yet mind bending Portal. This example I think is key to understanding the problem. In both games you aim a “gun” and shoot, but it is clear that you are doing it for different reasons in each. I believe that this is what we should focus on. The Witness creator Jonathan Blow said in an interview with Gamespot at the 2012 Game Developers Conference, “when you go to a different genre of movie, you have different emotional expectations, right?… you feel like, I paid to go see a comedy so this better be funny, but that is not an expectation you would have going to see a drama”. For Blow, current genres do not explain why we play certain games. As he styled it, “right now our genres are more along mechanical lines than emotional lines”.
What is JC in this case? The term sandbox is thrown around to describe games such as Grand Theft Auto, where the player is dropped into a world with a myriad of possibilities. I think this designation is far more helpful for a game such as JC as it defines it as a game in which you explore possibilities. You shoot in order to find a new way of blowing something up. As opposed to Portal where you shoot at walls to create the eponymous portals, allowing one to get around obstacles and over gaps. This mental challenge is at the heart of the experience making it more of a puzzle game. In the case of my brother, I have realised that SWB’s dynamic competition is a far cry from Doom’s breakneck adrenaline rush.
A more interesting outcome of this way of thinking is how it splits the customary CoD modes into different genres. The single player modes, with their action set pieces are more akin to Doom. By contrast, the competitive multiplayer matches are closer to those of SWB. For me, this describes why many people tend to have a strong preference for one of these modes.
Many dub Firewatch a walking simulator, but I believe its focus on the player character makes it more of a character study, or a drama or ANYTHING BUT A WALKING SIMULATOR!!! (moves away from keyboard and collects). So, the original question, what genre is Fortnite? Is it a thriller because of the tense anticipation between each encounter as Extra Credits postulated in their video on PUBg? Is it a competitive game like CoD? Or is it an adventure game like Minecraft as one explores looking for other players and loot? Honestly, it could be all, or none of them. Games can straddle genres or combine them, but these types of genres tell one a lot more about a given game. So why do we not try to think about genres like this? If we do we may find new reasons why we love our favourite games, because it probably is not the walking.
