Ludus Novus » genre

Puzzle Quest and the Best of Both Worlds

Gregory Weir — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 06:03:15 +0000

Over at GameSetWatch they just put up my latest column. It’s called “Puzzle Quest and the Best of Both Worlds,” and it’s about genre fusion in the world’s first match-3 RPG.

Creating Within a Genre

Gregory Weir — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:54:50 +0000

In the past, I’ve railed against the uselessness of game genres. They’re restrictive and arbitrary categorizations of games, and lead to design decisions being made according to convention rather than the needs of the game. However, sometimes a game is produced that depends wholly on the genre, doing nothing innovative, yet succeeds at being a stellar game in its own right. One of these games is The Curse of Monkey Island.

Read the rest of Creating Within a Genre...

The Interactive Fiction Genre

Gregory Weir — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:00:08 +0000

In my last podcast, I didn’t even bring up interactive fiction, which suffers from genre staleness as much or more than other types of games. If you have a text game, you’re almost guaranteed that you’ve got a nonviolent, turn-based game where you solve puzzles in a game with a specific sort of world model. Sure, there are a few exceptions: C.E.J. Pacian‘s Gun Mute, Robb Sherwin‘s Necrotic Drift, and Adam Cadre‘s Lock & Key, to name a few. But by and large, interactive fiction is cerebral and derivative of the seminal works: Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, and Graham Nelson’s Curses.

Where is the interactive fiction that simulates colonizing space? Where are the text games that have the same playful feeling as Katamari Damacy? Why are text adventures always either puzzle-filled exploration games or highbrow, slow-paced stories?

I’m being a bit cruel, I think. But I still can’t think of a single piece of interactive fiction that I’d pick up and play for fun after finishing it once. There’s no gameplay to most IF except puzzle solving and figuring out what happens next. A good friend of mine once pointed out that in interactive fiction, you never really do stuff.

I’d like to see that change.

Ludus Novus 012: Genre Fiction

Gregory Weir — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:00:24 +0000

In this podcast, I discuss digital games genres and how I think they’re silly. They’re arbitrary niches based on a few popular games, and using them to describe games limits the way we think about making and playing games. I discuss the evolution of our genre system, from Crawford in 1984 to the modern overstuffed action adventure, and explain how Madden ’08 and Rainbow Six are in the same genre.

References:

Halo: Combat Evolved
Deus Ex
Dungeon Keeper
The Serious Sam series
Smash T.V.
Geometry Wars
The Art of Computer Game Design, Chapter 3: “A Taxonomy of Computer Games“, by Chris Crawford
Super Mario Bros.
Ultima Underworld
Rainbow Six

The music for this episode is “Unforgiven” by spinmeister and featuring TheJoe & Kaer Trouz, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.