List of video game genres

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Horror game

Main article: Horror game

Horror games are games that incorporate elements of horror fiction into their narrative, generally irrespective of the type of gameplay. It is one of the few major video game categories that are recognized by narrative elements rather than by gameplay, gameplay mode, or platform. Survival horror is a subgenre of horror games focused on action-adventure style of gameplay.

Idle game

Main article: Incremental game

In an IGN article, Cookie Clicker is credited as one of the few games to have played a major role in the establishment of the genre of idle gaming.

This genre involves games that orient the player with a trivial task, such as clicking a cookie; and as the game progresses, the player is gradually rewarded certain upgrades for completing said task. In all, these games require very little involvement from the player, and in most cases they play themselves; hence the use of the word "idle".

In early 2014, Orteil released an early version of Idle Game Maker, a tool allowing customized idle games to be made without coding knowledge.

Party game

Party games are video games developed specifically for multiplayer games between many players. Normally, party games have a variety of mini-games that range between collecting more of a certain item than other players or having the fastest time at something. Such games include the Mario Party series, Crash Bash, and Rayman Raving Rabbids. Versus multiplayer games are not generally considered to be party games.

Photography game

A photography game tasks players with taking photos using the in-game camera system, typically awarding more points for better composed images. Photography mechanics are often implemented as sidequests in games in other genres, but there are also games where photography is the main gameplay mode. These include Pokémon Snap, Afrika and the Fatal Frame series.

Social deduction game

A social deduction game is a game in which players attempt to uncover each other's hidden role or team allegiance. During gameplay, players can use logic and deductive reasoning to try to deduce one another's roles, while other players can bluff to keep players from suspecting them. A notable example of the social deduction video game is Among Us, which received a massive influx of popularity in 2020 due to many well-known Twitch streamers and YouTubers playing it.

Trivia game

Trivia games are growing in popularity, especially on mobile phones where people may only have a few minutes to play the game. In trivia games, the object is to answer questions with the goal of obtaining points. They may be based on real-life trivia game shows such as Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? or Family Feud.

Typing game

A typing game is any game that uses typing as the main method of interaction. While they initially started as a type of educational game, they later became more entertainment focused as indie developers explored possibilities within the genre.

Video game genres by purpose

While most video games are designed as entertainment, many video games are designed with additional purposes. These purposes are as varied as the nature of information itself—to inform, persuade, or stimulate. These games can have any kind of gameplay, from puzzles to action to adventure.

Advergame

Main article: Advergame

Advergames, in the context of video game genres, refers to promotional software specifically made to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint. The first advergames were distributed on floppy disk by the Chef Boyardee, Coca-Cola, and Samsung brands, while the first cereal box advergame was Chex Quest in 1996. The majority of advergames are found online and mostly include simple and cheaply made Flash games. Some advergames were released to consoles, like Pepsiman for Sony PlayStation.

Art game

Main article: Art game

Art games are designed so as to emphasize art or whose structures are intended to produce some kind of non-ludological reaction in its audience. Art games typically go out of their way to have a unique, unconventional look, often standing out for aesthetic beauty or complexity in design. This concept extends to the realm of modified ("modded") gaming when modifications have been made to existing non-art-games to produce graphic results intended to be viewed as an artistic display, as opposed to modifications intended to change game play scenarios or for storytelling. Modified games created for artistic purposes are sometimes referred to as "videogame art."

Casual game

Main article: Casual game

Casual games are designed to be easily picked up and put down again with relatively low time commitment, allowing for potentially short bursts of play. This genre of gaming is meant to be a short and relaxing pastime, a rest in between other occupations and so is most popular with demographics who have less free time. They usually have very simple rules or play techniques and a very low degree of strategy. They have no lengthy tutorials and require no special skills, making them easy to learn and play as a pastime. Retaining players involves a lot of careful design of levels, challenges and events. Market leaders in this genre are often boldly coloured, designed for intuitive interaction and have a high balance of reward to time to keep people coming back. Designers of these games should add a lot of "juice" (sound and motion elements that excite the senses) to make them stand out in a sea of highly similar games.

Casual games typically are played in web browsers or on mobile devices, although they now are starting to become popular on game consoles. The games often have auto-saving and syncing as standard so the games can be minimized, put into sleep, or otherwise put down with no loss to the player. There are comparatively low production and distribution costs for the producer.

Christian game

Main article: Christian video games

Christian games attempt to provide the dual purposes of spreading the Christian religion to non-believers through the medium of video games, and providing gamers who identify as Christian with a common pool of games. Christian video games were first developed by Wisdom Tree for the NES, without license. While largely regarded as derivative titles by the mainstream gaming culture, Christian games have nevertheless expanded in distribution since their inception.

Educational game

Main article: Educational game

Educational games, as the name implies, attempt to teach the user using the game as a vehicle. Most of these types of games target young users from the ages of about three years to mid-teens; past the mid-teens, subjects become so complex (e.g. Calculus) that teaching via a game is generally impractical, though exceptions do exist in some areas, such as programming. Numerous subgenres exist, in fields such as math or typing.

Esports

Main article: Esports

Esports games are multiplayer games that are usually played competitively at the professional level. These games are often targeted at the "hardcore" gaming audience, and are usually first-person shooter games, requiring twitch-based reaction speed and coordination, or real-time strategy games, requiring high levels of strategic macro- and micromanagement, or MOBAs, requiring both.

Exergame (Fitness Game)

Main article: Exergaming

An exergame (portmanteau of "exercise" and "game") is a video game that provides exercise. "Exergames" sub-divide into two main implementations, those with a game specifically designed to use an exercise input device (for example, the game Wii Fit using the Wii Balance Board) and those implementations using a genre of a game. Games fit into the category of entertainment, and similarly "exergames" are a category of "exertainment" (formed from "exercise" and "entertainment"). "Exertainment" refers to one aspect of adding entertainment to an exercise workout.

Personalized game

Main article: Personalized video game

Personalized games are created for one specific player or a group of players usually as a gift. They are hand-made to feature real names, places and events from the recipient's life. Usual occasions for such games are birthdays, anniversaries, and engagement proposals.

Serious game

Main article: Serious game

Serious games are intended to educate or train the player. These games tend to promote "education, science, social change, health care or even the military." Some of these games have no specific ending or goal in the game. Rather, the player learns a real life lesson from the game. For example, games from websites such as Newsgaming.com and gamesforchange.org raise political issues using the distinct properties of games.

Live Interactive Game

Live interactive games, also known as bullet screen interactive game, are a genre of games built on live streaming platforms. During a live broadcast, the host initiates the game, and viewers can participate by forming teams, giving likes, sending gifts, and posting comments. The barrage mechanism translates these signals into in-game resources or effects, transforming the live broadcast from a one-to-many format to a space where viewers can also interact with each other.

Sandbox / open world games

Main articles: Sandbox game and Open world

Sandbox and open-world games are not specifically video game genres, as they generally describe gameplay features, but often games will be described as a sandbox or an open-world game as if it were a defining genre. They are included here for such distinguishing purposes.

Sandbox

A sandbox game is a video with a gameplay element that gives the player a great degree of creativity to complete tasks towards a goal within the game, if such a goal exists. Some games exist as pure sandbox games with no objectives; these are also known as non-games or software toys. More commonly, sandbox games results from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres and allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with open world concepts which gives the player freedom of movement and progression in the game's world. The "sandbox" term derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets children create nearly anything they want within it.

Early sandbox games came out of space trading and combat games like Elite (1984) and city-building simulations and tycoon games like SimCity (1989). The releases of The Sims and Grand Theft Auto III in 2000 and 2001, respectively, demonstrated that games with highly detailed interacting systems that encouraged player experimentation could also be seen as sandbox games. Sandbox games also found ground with the ability to interact socially and share user-generated content across the Internet like Second Life (2003). Minecraft (2011) is one of the most successful examples of a sandbox game, with players able to enjoy in both creative modes and through more goal-driven survival modes.

Creative

Main article: Sandbox mode

Creative games are games that are often grounded into other genres but have certain modes of gameplay that allow for a Sandbox and/or Openworld Gameplay, It is extremely common for a "Creative" Game mode to use the same aspects, assets, mechanics, etc. of the Parent Game. However, this isn't always the case as some games have used assets unavailable in the normal Game. Story/Narrative is often removed or non-existent in these modes. However, while generally rare, creative modes have been seen to have an independent story from the main game or even be an entirely independent game.

Open world

In video games, an open world is a game mechanic of using a virtual world that the player can explore and approach objectives freely, as opposed to a world with more linear and structured gameplay. While games have used open-world designs since the 1980s, the implementation in Grand Theft Auto III (2001) set a standard that has been used since.

Games with open or free-roaming worlds typically lack level structures like walls and locked doors, or the invisible walls in more open areas that prevent the player from venturing beyond them; only at the bounds of an open-world game will players be limited by geographic features like vast oceans or impassible mountains. Players typically do not encounter loading screens common in linear level designs when moving about the game world, with the open-world game using strategic storage and memory techniques to load the game world in a dynamic and seamless manner. Open-world games still enforce many restrictions in the game environment, either because of absolute technical limitations or in-game limitations imposed by a game's linearity.

While the openness of the game world is an important facet to games featuring open worlds, the main draw of open-world games is about providing the player with autonomy – not so much the freedom to do anything they want in the game (which is nearly impossible with current computing technology), but the ability to choose how to approach the game and its challenges in the order and manner as the player desires while still constrained by gameplay rules. Examples of high level of autonomy in computer games can be found in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) or in single-player games adhering to the open-world concept such as the Fallout series. The main appeal of open-world gameplay is that they provide a simulated reality and allow players to develop their character and its behaviour in the direction and the pace of their own choosing. In these cases, there is often no concrete goal or end to the game, although there may be the main storyline, such as with games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Scientific studies

As video games are increasingly the subject of scientific studies, game genres are themselves becoming a subject of study.

An early attempt at analysis of the action and adventure genres appeared in a Game Developers Conference 2000 paper 'Mostly Armless: Grabbing the 3D World'. This critiqued a variety of adventure and action games to categorize gameplay and interaction for adventure, action, and hybrid genres. It provided a graph of the genres along the axes of 'immediacy' vs 'complexity', with an 'ideal-zone' for gameplay that covered and linked adventure and action games. It detailed various interaction styles present in these genres and extrapolated to future user interface and gameplay possibilities for these and other genres. Some of these have since been adopted by persistent worlds. For example, Second Life uses some of the gameplay investment and interface elements described in section 4 of the paper.

In a University of Queensland study, game enjoyment was correlated with attributes such as immersion, social interaction, and the nature of the goals. These may be underlying factors in differentiating game genres.

Statistical scaling techniques were used in a study presented at the 2007 Siggraph Video Game Symposium to convert subject ratings of game similarity into visual maps of game genres. The maps reproduced some of the commonly identified genres such as first-person shooters and god games. A Michigan State University study found that men have a higher preference for genres that require competition and three-dimensional navigation and manipulation than women do.

See also

Game interfaces

• Audio game
• Browser game
• Text-based game
• Tile-based video games
• Side-scrolling video game

Game platforms

• Arcade game
• Console game
• Handheld video game
• Massively multiplayer online game
• Mobile game
• Online game
• Personal computer game

Other related topics

• Game classification
• List of types of games
• List of gaming topics
• Nonviolent video game
• Non-game
• Video game
• Asymmetry

References

• Rollings, Andrew; Adams, Ernest (May 11, 2003). Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design. New Riders Games. ISBN 978-1-59273-001-8.

Bibliography

• Adams, Ernest (2013). Fundamentals of Game Design (3rd ed.). San Francisco: New Riders. ISBN 978-0-321-92967-9.
• Adams, Ernest (2014). Fundamentals of Action and Arcade Game Design. San Francisco: New Riders. ISBN 978-0-13-381130-8.
• Adams, Ernest (2015). Fundamentals of Shooter Game Design. San Francisco: New Riders. ISBN 978-0-13-381094-3.
• Wolf, Mark, J. P. (2012). Encyclopedia of video games : the culture, technology, and art of gaming. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0313379369.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Rogers, Scott (2014). Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design (2nd ed.). Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-87716-6.
• Call, Joshua; Whitlock, Katie; Voorhees, Gerald A. (2012). Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781441193537.
• Barton, Matt; Loguidice, Bill (2009). Vintage Games. Boston: Focal Press. ISBN 978-0-240-81146-8.