Beyond Action & Strategy: New Ways of Thinking About Videogame Genre pt.1

I’ve been thinking about game categorisation way too much:

Traditionally, games were divided into games of chance and games of skill. Games of skill could be further broken down according to particular skills: memory games test memory, bluffing games test emotional control, and so on.

Sports are also a category of game. There, players are tested on their physical strength, speed, dexterity, and endurance. These skills relate to the wider body; in contrast, eSports and other videogames test fine motor skills. They are all about fingers and thumbs. It is still a form of dexterity and endurance, but with a narrower focus.

It shouldn’t surprise us to find that game-skills are more specific versions of wider-world skills: although games follow their own sets of rules, they are still exist within the rules of the universe. The rules of a game are boundaries that we impose on reality; games are boxes that reduce the possibility space of life. The skills that games test are restricted subsets of our full real-world abilities.

Sports, after all, are a restricted form of war — restricted by a time limit and featuring far less killing, among other things.

The skills that allow us to succeed in games are analogous to skills that let us find success in “real life”. If you think of what might be considered a person’s strengths or virtues, you might be able to relate it to a genre of game. For example:

Genre: Strategy. Real-Life Skill: Forethought / Planning

Genre: Puzzle Games. Real-Life Skill:Lateral Thinking / Creativity

Genre: Action. Real-Life Skill: Dexterity / Technique

Genre: Games of Chance. Real-Life Skill: Good Fortune / Luck

Seeing games as training grounds for virtues gave me a new perspective on the matter of videogame categorisation. The action/strategy/puzzle/luck model seemed a good starting point, but I felt there was more work to be done.

To start with, I wanted a way to set apart the types of games where the fruits of your actions are unknown, where you might wonder from room to room but the location of the key treasure is the game’s own secret. Such a game doesn’t fall into the strategy category, as you don’t have the information to formulate any strategic paths though the game. Furthermore, though it can seem like a stroke of good fortune when you find a nice item behind a random bush, it can’t be described as a game of chance, wither, as you will always find the right path as long as you keep looking. Your success is determined by the durability of your inquisitiveness.

Hidden items games are a pure expression of this exploration skill-category, but the same quality can be found in any game that has a touch of adventure in its blood.

Genre: Exploration / Adventure. Real-Life Skill: Curiosity

The correct categorisation of computer RPGs eluded me for many years. My brain was stuck in the dichotomy of action vs. strategy, and RPGs seemed like they must be just a branch of strategy game, where the cerebral challenge was in planning your build. That’s not exactly wrong, but it’s obviously not a critical hit: the skill involved in playing Morrowind is of course something entirely different from playing Advance Wars.

When I fell out of love with JRPGs I decided that the “skill” they are testing is “patience”, in the sense that you get stronger simply by the more time you put into the game. When an action game series introduces RPG mechanics it change the skill-category: rather than having not choice but to get better at the action element of the game, players can spend some of their time grinding a few level-ups and negate the action test entirely. In these cases, it felt appropriate to me to describe the game as Patience-Action game, rather than an Action-RPG.

Though this conclusion amused me, I still wasn’t quite on the mark. I thought again about how game skills relate to life skills:

If we think of a sport like weightlifting, success depends not only in your lifting technique “on the day”, but even more so on the strength in your muscles that has been built up in the years preceding the competition. Essentially, by the time you get to the competition, you already have developed the qualities that will determine how much you can lift which far more important to the outcome than the correctness of your technique. This duality goes for all challenges in life. What skill does weightlifting test? Strength, of course. But you can break that down into 1) technique and 2) preparation.

In action videogames, this distinction often isn’t relevant, because the innate qualities of your character — and their opponents — are determined by the designer, “balanced” to provide a fun challenge. It is mainly role-playing games that represent the other side of the equation, the character building, the pre-work, going into battle with the +10 sword you spend 30 hours gathering materials for. This “skill” includes patience, but I now think of it as preparation.

We can now add a new column to our virtue table:

Genre: Role-Playing. Real-Life Skill: Preparation

Recently, a new game genre has emerged that made me think about skill categorisation again: gatcha games. Gatcha are somewhat related to RPGs as success is determined more by you stats when you start a level than anything you can actually in the level (see above). In other words, these are also games of preparation. There is also a luck component, as the quality of the characters you receive depends on rolls made in the game’s summoning chamber.

Then there’s the other “skill” involved, which is “How much money can you spend summoning lots of powerful heroes/items?”. It can’t be denied that those who reach the top ranks in gatcha are those that can outspend the other players. That’s when it occurred to me that “Pay-To-Win” isn’t just a criticism, it is a genre that stands alongside “Action” or “Strategy”:

Genre: Pay-To-Win / “Games of Wealth”. Real-Life Skill: Wealth

Steam should really have a category for that.

What’s the point of all this? Having this language in our arsenal helps immensely when describing games or determining genre. It is skill categorisation that distinguishes a platformer from a puzzle-platformer (the former is testing finger-technique, the latter testing lateral thinking). A similar example is the puzzle-FPS, such as Portal, a very different beast from the more common action-FPSs.

Additionally, when we think about a broader spectrum of skills, it offers new perspectives on existing games and genres. Perhaps you’ve never thought of a roguelike as having a relation to card games before, but they’re both games of chance. Perhaps you’ve never thought of a metroidvania as a “game of curiosity”, but that, in essence, it what it is.

Perhaps we can also see new possibilities for games yet to be. I’ve played lots of puzzle-platformers, but what about a bluffing-brawler? What about… a game of kindness?