When we talk about the genre of a videogame, what are we talking about exactly? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines genre as: “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content”. That’s vague enough to apply to almost any type of categorization used to define media in relation to one another, but in casual use genre has a more specific meaning. Most of us have a good grasp of, say, film genre. When your friend describes a film as an “action thriller” or “romantic comedy” you already have a pretty good idea of the tone, style, content and atmosphere of the film. This is also broadly similar with books, where “high fantasy” or “historical romance” gives you a huge amount of information about the book in question.

But the words we use to describe video game genres don’t resemble those we use for books or films. Video game genres are usually described, not in terms of tone or setting, but in terms of mechanics. A game is a “puzzle platformer” or a “first-person shooter” before anyone starts talking about whether it’s a comedy or a drama, whether it’s set in the far future or medieval Japan, whether the focus of the plot is on saving the world or interpersonal drama. 

This is something unique to videogames, as no other form of media categorizes itself based on the method of engagement. Films and books are not classified like this, as there is no real analogue to video game mechanics for them. Most types of media are categorized based on a combination of the sorts of emotions they are meant to invoke in the audience, their use of clichés and tropes associated with the genre, and frequently things like the setting or general plot outline. By contrast, most video game classifications ignore these factors entirely and rely solely on the gameplay systems of the game in question. 

This results in games that have nothing in common besides their mechanics being placed in the same genre. For example, both The Legend of Zelda series and the Assassin’s Creed franchise would be considered action-adventure games, but they have very little in common besides their mechanics. The Legend of Zelda is a fantasy series mostly aimed at children, while the Assassin’s Creed games are mostly violent historical dramas with a sci-fi framing device. Clearly, categorizing games based on their mechanics alone can cause problems.

However, there is some merit to this mechanics-based approach. Firstly, some people derive most of their enjoyment of videogames purely from the mechanics, and they genuinely have no interest in anything else, but for those of us who do care about tone, narrative and style, the mechanics do provide some information. Some styles of gameplay are more appropriate for some kinds of stories, or at the very least, are more commonly used to tell certain types of stories. If you are looking for an action thriller, you should probably start looking among the action-adventure and third-person shooter titles. If you want to solve mysteries, a point-and-click adventure game or visual novel is more likely to have what you are looking for.

I still feel that this type of categorization is inadequate. The assumptions we make about games based on their mechanics are not always correct, and it adds a layer of ambiguity to critical discussions of video games. If I describe a game as an excellent RPG, am I talking about its mechanics or its story? Or both? RGPs as a genre have typically relied more heavily on plot and character than other genres, so should I hold RPGs to a different standard than, say, first-person shooters? Is this matching of game mechanics to specific kinds of stories necessary or just convention?

So how should we talk about genre in video games? I don’t have any definitive answers, but I believe we should think about games less in terms of their mechanics and more in terms of their content. Describing games entirely in mechanical terms is far too reductive, but it’s also important to remember that mechanics and content do not exist in a vacuum, independent of one another. Any really good game must find a way to integrate its content and mechanics so that they enhance each other, rather than existing in separate planes. Ultimately, I think that if videogames are to mature as a medium, we need to find new, more appropriate language to discuss them in, in the same way we have specialized language to discuss films or music. If videogames are art, we need the vocabulary to discuss them in those terms.