I wrote an essay about game genre definitions as part of my coursework, and I would now be perfectly happy to never hear the term mentioned again. After some intense research into genre studies itself, it has become clear that genre descriptions themselves are fairly meaningless.

Genres evolve as part of an ongoing negotiation between artists and audiences – although, in the games industry’s case, ‘artists’ includes publishers’ PR departments, and… well, games journalists manage to sit in both camps, depending on how much editorial freedom they have. But, in theory, you have one group of people making art, and another group appreciating it, and both groups eventually start to notice particular trends and themes, which are sometimes focused upon and become recognised as a distinct genre.

It’s a very organic process, with genres merging and subdividing and coming and going, all with the flow of time. Once upon a time, Doom was an ‘action’ game… later, it became a ‘shoot-em-up’, and now it’s specifically a ‘first-person shooter’. Because these genres have expanded in different directions, they have bifurcated out to become more specific – and, hence, relevant. Similarly, they can describe different elements of a game; not just gameplay, but setting. ‘War’, for example, which could be subdivided into ‘World War 2′ or ‘interplanetary war’, depending on whether you’re describing Call of Duty or Halo.

The important thing to remember is that genres only become established when they describe a broad enough sample of works. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Llamasoft’s seminal acid trip simulator Space Giraffe was written off as a Tempest clone by so many people – aside from its own sequels, there haven’t really been any other games like Tempest, so people had a hard time understanding the subtle differences. I’m not suggesting that this is why it flopped, of course, but it’s part of why the game is so misunderstood.

So, given that genre definitions are so fluid, and usually only describe one particular aspect of a game (‘it has guns in it’ or ‘there are platforms’), I get very annoyed when people start bandying them about without thinking. I especially hate the way ‘role-playing game’ seems to have become shorthand for ‘contains meaningless statistics’ – I become consumed with rage when people try to tell me that Zelda isn’t an RPG. One acquaintance of mine believes adamantly that a game is only an RPG if it has random battles.

Anyway. My essay concludes that there will, rather obviously, never be a single, definitive list of genres. Sticking two fingers up to Plato’s theory of forms, I propose that the best practice we can hope to achieve is to develop a method of classifying current genres for a particular point in time, and to always remember that games can be placed within multiple genres at the same time.

You can download the complete essay here.