What is a game genre? What is a game type? The definition of a each is as follows: game type is the description of the game play, and game genre is a a description of the narrative content of the game.
For me Game Type and Genre are not as easy to define as first it appears. With games taking bits of different elements you get a blending of these definitions. Games are not movies or books and can't just be categorized into such defined categories. What's the saying about a square peg and a round hole?
Yes you could argue that the definitions of game genre and type are more broad, but then you would be helping my point. I think we, as a society, have this need to conform games (and lots more) into a nice neat definition. I assume this is great for marketing or putting a description on a box when space is limited. But is this approach helping games develop as a proper media? Whenever I describe a game, I rarely am able to fit the game into a single genre or type. I just describe the game as is. Take Fallout 3 for example. Is it a role playing game, shooter, science fiction or frontier? What about Borderlands or Portal? Even a old 8-bit era game I have mentioned before, River City Ransom, is a mix of fighting and role playing.
Of course there are exceptions. A classic game such as Dragon Quest I is an RPG. No one would mistake it for a puzzle game. Black is another, just a pure action game. This just goes to show that we should describe the games with no rigid definitions, just let them be. Give us what the game gives us, not what it fits into.
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