Years ago, a more experienced game designer I worked with told me that I was still developing my “game design aesthetic”. I didn’t really understand. Questions lingered in my mind: What does it mean for an artist to have a personal aesthetic? Why is it so hard to develop one? Why is it important? And what is this strange gravity that they exert over us?

With this article series, I’m here to offer some answers—though maybe not the answers—to my younger self.

What is a genre?

We can all list genres of games: FPS, action-adventure, roguelike, otome, hidden object, and so on. When someone uses these terms we (mostly) know what they mean, and they help to quickly summarize a lot of information. Developers use them as shortcuts to answer a lot of design questions, retailers and award shows use them to categorize, gamers use them to describe games to their friends, marketing uses them to set expectations. Everyone loves to argue about where exactly to draw the lines between them.

Article Series:

1. A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
2. A Game Designer’s Genres
3. A Game Designer’s Choices
4. A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
5. A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)

But what is a genre, and how do they come to be?

In the previous article, I introduced the concept of game design patterns. To summarize, a pattern is a known solution to a design problem, or a known method to achieve a design goal. They are the basic atoms of game design, our brushstrokes, and they can be defined and combined in many ways to create all sorts of games. A set of interrelated design patterns can form a pattern language.

A genre is a set of design patterns that co-occur enough to be noticed and given a popular name.

Let’s dig in more.

Genres are not a formal taxonomy

Before we do, let’s talk about what genres are not: a prescriptive taxonomy.

Taxonomy is the science of classification. The term originally described the practice of defining and sorting animals: species, genus, family, and the like, before taking on a broader meaning. Taxonomies are built with intention and attempt to follow consistent rules and logic.

Many people expect to be able approach genres that way: with clear rules, mutually exclusive categories, and set definitions. But that is not the case! Nobody can ever agree on definitions for any genre, and they’re all over the place! Some genres seem to be about…:

• Emotions and tone (survival horror)
• Player verbs (platformers)
• Audience (otome)
• Progression structures (Metroidvanias)
• System design (immersive sims)
• Real-world function (edutainment)

There is no rhyme or reason, and there is a lot of potential for overlap and blurred lines. 

Genre evolution

Genres are not intentionally made; they arise naturally. When a game does something new or different, something that makes it stand out from the crowd, people talk about it. All sorts of people from all sorts of angles, in parallel: marketers, reviewers, players, developers. At this stage they may not yet be using specialized language. Not every game that gets here goes on to spawn a recognizable new genre. We aren’t seeing a lot of Katamari Damacy-likes or Shenmue-likes, after all.

The ones that do tend to check several boxes:

• They innovate on multiple axes
• They are experienced by a critical mass of people; ie, they sell well
• Other developers see a path forward to incorporate lessons from them into their own games
• The games that incorporate those lessons:
  • Also reach enough people to get talked about
  • Are able to combine those lessons with their own innovations

Over time, this leads to a body of games that people can tell are related; there are throughlines that intuitively connect them into a set. And people want to be able to talk about that set! They might start by saying “It has the Dark Souls souls mechanic and dodge rolls”, then start saying “Dark Souls clones”, before moving on to “Soulslikes”. Who knows what the next step will be–or maybe this subgenre will die out before it gets there.

Genres are like language: their meanings arise from consensus among the people using them. As long as people know what you mean when you say it, it works. They evolve over time, subcultures may have their own definitions, and no authority can control or define them.

Case Study: The FPS Genre

When I said “people can tell they’re related” because they can see “throughlines”, what I meant was that people see a recurring set of design patterns within the games in question, which could also be described as genre conventions. The patterns that define a genre, that allow people to correlate the games, are fuzzy: they change over time, and not every game needs every pattern to be perceived as part of the set. 

The FPS genre is a good example to study, for a few reasons:

• When Wolfenstein 3D and Doom burst onto the scene in the early 90s , they immediately inspired a bunch of other games
• You can pretty clearly see how, over time, new games added new patterns to the genre
• The conventions changed so much over time that when some newer FPSs like Doom (2016) went back to the old conventions, they felt so different that they got their own subgenre label: boomer shooters

See the chart below for a glimpse into how just a few of the shifting design patterns that helped define the FPS genre came and went. This is meant to be an example to illustrate how patterns can shift over time; it is not an exhaustive chart and I’m not an FPS historian. It mostly focuses on mechanical stuff like controls, camera, and game systems. It doesn’t include every notable FPS from that time.

Case Study: Roguelikes

Rogue was released in 1980. It was a dungeon-crawler RPG with ASCII graphics, procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and perma-death. It inspired or influenced a number of other games, such as Hack (1984), Angband (1993), and Shiren the Wanderer (1995). These titles kept most or all of the traits I listed above for Rogue, and this style of game came to be called “Roguelikes”.

Later on other titles dropped many of those traits, but kept permadeath and procedural generation, traits that could be mixed or combined with any number of other genres. They also added meta progression, progression that persists across runs. That set of games came to be called “Roguelites”.

In 2008, a group of Roguelike developers gathered at the International Roguelike Development Conference and published the “Berlin Interpretation”, a definition of the Roguelike genre that they had voted on together. They defined a list of “high value factors”, like procedural generation and permadeath, and a list of “low value factors”, like “ASCII display” and “dungeons”. Per their definition, any game that had enough of the factors could be called a “Roguelike”.  None of the factors were absolutely required; a game could be missing any given factor and, if it had enough of the others, it could still count.

These factors, of course, are all design patterns, just like the ones I’ve been discussing. Their definition was a snapshot of design patterns at a specific time that, together, defined a genre.

Using Genres

The blank slate

The day-to-day craft of game design is mostly problem-solving: you are trying to build a particular experience with specific creative goals, and figuring out a set of game design patterns and content that creates that experience is our main job.

For example, the first Zelda game grew from early goals like making the player figure out what to do next and having the player grow stronger over time, like in an RPG. The developers have cited inspirational touchstones like Indiana Jones, personal experiences exploring in the mountains, and games like Black Onyx and Ultima. From that set of goals and influences, they had to figure out how to make an experience that actually worked as a game in practice. How does the player grow? What perspective should it have? What verbs does the player have? Where does the push-and-pull of gameplay tension come from? How should the spaces be laid out? What causes the game to evoke the feelings they want to evoke?

There are a lot of pieces that need to line up to make a functional game, let alone a good one. The possibilities are incredibly broad! We could grab a random handful of examples from across the medium–let’s say Ace Attorney, Bejeweled, Wii Sports, Katamari Damacy, and Gears of War–and find few commonalities in input, systems, progression structure, second-to-second game loops, narrative, or anything else.

Games are a delicately balanced equilibrium with many elements, and all these pieces need to support and multiply one another. Changing any element can force you to redesign many others. Designing from this kind of blank slate and these big unknowns means designing from first principles. But designing from first principles is serious research & development, with costly setbacks, big unknowns, and unclear destinations. It can often lead to just reinventing the wheel.

Genre as a framework

Genres by their nature are a set of design patterns that work well together. Patterns describe known solutions to problems, or known methods to achieve specific goals. Choosing to make a game within an existing genre, or that borrows from one, lets you stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from the past. It’s a recipe that, if followed, makes a functioning game.

It’s impossible to make a brand-new game from absolute scratch, without borrowing anything from anyone. We’re always borrowing lessons from other games. It’s mostly a question of just how much and which parts of a game do you have time to build from first principles vs using known frameworks.

Genre as a palette

When you encounter a problem or a goal during game development, we can’t help but think back to examples we’ve experienced of the same goal being achieved in other games. When you’re working within a genre, you may have many examples at hand of solutions that people have used, and evidence of how well they worked.

This is both a blessing and a curse: it can be hard to break free from the gravity of genre, but you can also choose when and where you want to expend effort being innovative. The rest of the time? Pick options from the buffet.

Genre as a medium

Major game genres like “FPS” and “Platformer” are arguably as different from one another as Film and TV, which are widely accepted as separate mediums entirely. Some people approach genre that way. This is especially apparent in genres like JRPGs, FPSs, Visual Novels, or Adventure games: the core game design is often very set and they don’t change it much, and yet people still release endless new stories, scenarios, and progressions using that foundation.

Genre in conclusion

Genres are defined by popular, often unconscious, perception of their design patterns.They arise naturally and inevitably as human audiences pattern-match and communicate, and they evolve or disappear for the same reasons. By their nature they are always a functional framework a game could be built on, or borrow from.

Genres are one of the available tools to help us make game design choices with our eyes open. Next, I’ll delve into how we make choices as game designers.

Article Series:

1. A Game Designer’s Brushstrokes
2. A Game Designer’s Genres
3. A Game Designer’s Choices
4. A Game Designer’s Aesthetic
5. A Game Team’s Aesthetic (Coming soon!)