This is a piece I wrote for my video game class as a journal entry. I’m not sure it’s structurally sound, or really makes a valid point, but, hey, why not post it here? I did write it, after all, and it is about video games.
Few things bother me more than the “genrefication” of literature in any media — be it film, or novels, or theatre, or even in less typically narratological forms like music and visual art. The application and blind aspiration to fulfill genre (and even, at times, subvert it) is at best pointless and at worst offensive. Thankfully, most other media have managed to cut out a place where “genre” is secondary. Video games, however, have not caught up to the level of genre-eschewing sophistication that its older siblings have.
There are three things in particular I would like to talk about in relation to “genre games”: the dismissal of the thematic in favour of the mechanical in virtually all definitions of game genre, the abstraction of judgment that genre permits, and, finally, video games’ lack of “genre”-as-genre.
Arsenault’s representation of major web publications shows a heavy bias toward a certain type of genre delineation. With the partial exception of MobyGames (whose genres seem, at best, muddled), the others — allgame.com, and gamespot.com — show an understanding of genre only as deep as the mechanics of the games. From these genres, we can tell that the game in question will require more planning or more reflexes; we can tell from what perspective we will be looking at the gameworld; and, we can tell if the game is intended to be played alone or with a group. These, while important elements of a game from a ludological perspective, ignore theme and narrative entirely. Praise for Braid’s bending/subverting of genre does not in any way represent its narrative or thematic work. By speaking of its genre as “platformer” and not, say, “romantic tragedy,” it is easy to ignore that, narratively, the “deconstructive” ending sequence does nothing to actually deconstruct the save-the-princess trope, and, in fact, doubles down on making the female character twice objectified/made a “goal” instead of a character (running from the knight and to Tim / running from Tim and to the knight). What could have been looked at from a narratological perspective and very sharply criticized was judged almost universally as a “ludic” genre piece, where it succeeds — even though it is, otherwise, a sub-young-adult-fiction, Holden-Caulfield-meets-Memento mess.
What is worse is that, when a game fulfills the ludic specifications of a genre but not the typical thematic specifications, it can be judge (unfairly) against those more “typical” games. If SimCity had come out after Starcraft, would it be criticized for representing a city-building sandbox? Would it be panned for having no competitive multiplayer aspect? It is, after all, a strategic game (in fact, I would argue that the layers of strategy outclass those of most RTS games that came after it) and it plays out in real time. But RTS means one very specific thing now: little buildings that make little men that kill other little men faster than another person can make other little killing men. This concept of how representation should inform design is completely backwards.
What I hope video games can do that other forms have successfully done is remove genre classification from mechanics, and, once it has done that, remove “genre games” from the greater set of games. In film, there is “genre film” — Golden Age oaters, or 50’s low-budget sci-fi, or mischief films, or anything-sploitation — but these are, by and large, splinter genres that are only aimed at and enjoyed by genre aficionados. The films that reach critical success are, for the most part, non-”genre.” Last year, Metacritic’s top films included The Social Network, Winter’s Bone, and Black Swan — none easily classified as any “genre” (The Social Network may be considered a “docudrama” but that speaks more to the origin of the film’s narrative than the presentation of the narrative). When looking for fiction in a book store, one usually finds a section dedicated to fantasy and sci-fi, and another dedicated to young-adult fiction, and perhaps a couple more “genre” sections, but they are all dwarfed by the general fiction section. And it’s in this section that you will find some of literature’s most adored and successful works. Even in music, where most critics are stumbling over themselves to coin the term for the next “genre”, it seems that those records with the most crossover appeal are not “country” or “rap” or “electronic” or even “rock” — the records that are most universally acclaimed are the ones that are simply great music.
This change can only occur in video games once we stop classifying them based on how we perceive them (can you imagine if all “first-person” novels were expected to include gunplay and action sequences?!) and classify them on their thematic content. Only then will bending and subverting those genres lead to an exciting new mode of storytelling. For now, we’re just trying to pick the king of B-Games.
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