Distilling videogame genres
People say that when you design a game, the first question you should think about is: what do I want players to experience?
I’ve been creating tiny games for some years now. When designing a new game, even before choosing a game genre, recently I explicitly realised that I have to choose how hard is it going to feel.
“Hard” in videogames, as far as I can see, can be either physically hard, or mentally hard.
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Physically challenging games will require different button presses with specific timing. This requires sensory-motor coordination, similar to playing a physical sport, or playing an instrument.
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On the other side, mentally challenging obviously means that you have to solve problems, plan, predict, etc., or you won’t succeed.
Different people get different levels of gratification when succeeding in a physical or mental challenge. Sometimes people don’t even want to face challenges and just want easy entertainment.
(Anecdotal tangent, it seems academia is sometimes biased to favour challenging research, rather than useful research. This video starts talking about programming languages, but I promise it is about biases on the value of challenge.)
So I’m considering whether it’s a good design strategy to think about how challenging I want the game to be, and then choose a genre based on that.
Classifying genres by challenge
These are the main videogame genres according to wikipedia, and my rating on how challenging they usually are:
| ⇅ genre | ⇅ physical challenge | ⇅ mental challenge | example subgenres |
|---|---|---|---|
| action | ***** |
*** |
platformers, shooters |
| role-playing | *** |
*** |
ARPGAction Role-Playing Game, MMORPGMassively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, roguelikes |
| sports | *** |
*** |
racing, (real) sports |
| action-adventure | *** |
**** |
metroidvanias, horror |
| simulation | ** |
** |
life simulation, vehicle simulation. (racing?) |
| strategy | ** |
***** |
4XExplore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate, RTSReal-Time Strategy, (MOBAMultiplayer Online Battle Arena?) |
| adventure | * |
**** |
text adventures, visual novels, interactive movie |
| puzzle | * |
***** |
logic, exploration |
Let me add some notes about that table:
- Any competitive multiplayer game will have the added mental challenge of game theory.
- Some subgenres fall within several main genres, e.g. point-and-click can be both adventure and puzzle.
- Some genres like RPGRole-Playing Game have high variability how challenging they are, which can’t be represented with a single number. Don’t yell at me, I wanted a simple overview.
Choosing genre based on chosen difficulty
So, if I want to design a game that is mildly physically challenging, and very mentally challenging, maybe it makes sense to make a strategy game? Or I could push the limits and make a physically challenging puzzle, or a very complicated metroidvania?
Maybe this frame of mind is too limiting? I still like this kind of mental models, because it allows you to look at the gaps:
- There seems to be more mental challenges than physical challenges. Why is this? Could I exploit that? are computer-things intrinsically more mental than physical?
- Not many games are both physically and mentally challenging. Is this because people don’t usually enjoy both challenges at the same time? In the same sense that a game with many genres only appeal to people which enjoy all those genres?
Another way to use this mental model is, I could try to subvert the genre expectations:
- Make a puzzle game that is easy to understand and solve but requires accurate timing and presses?
- A 4XExplore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate, that requires minimal thinking, for example framed as a clicker game?
Or provide a structured understanding of why original games are original and/or successful:
- Flappy bird could be an action game where the physical difficulty is just timing when pressing a single button, not coordination with other buttons.
- Cookie Clicker is neither physically nor mentally challenging (unless you try to maximize the rewards), but is surreally funny and still manipulates our dopamine with “number go up”.
- What kinds of mental challenges exist? Social games like Among Us have a bigger audience than other strategy games because it leverages the idea (IMO) that most people enjoy social mental challenges (game theory) more than abstract mental challenges (like numeric reward optmization).
Limitations of the model
In terms of distilling the genres, of course the 2-dimensional classification of mental and physical challenges is insufficient to generate all the genres, for 2 main reasons: it doesn’t take into account other important aspects like how important is the narrative (including the theme and aesthetics), and the fact that 2 mechanics can be equally challenging but produce different experiences.
After thinking about this for a bit, I would say that a way to understand game genres (ultimately what kind of experiences a game produces) is to identify how much it has of:
- Physical difficulty
- Mental difficulty
- Narrative
- Aesthetics
- Social interaction