Talking genre in games
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 10:25PM A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in Roxana Hadad's online course on game design. The topic was genre in video games, and the (arguably) ambitious title of my presentation was Exploding Genre in Games. I've attached the presentation (as a .ppt) below.
Click to download in .ppt. The exploding head came out of a Google image search, apologies for not having a better cite.
I should mention two things about it:
- The fonts and chalkboard are borrowed from TF2. I'm not sure if that's entirely legal, but if Valve takes notice of it for some reason at least I'll have made an impression before asking them for a job ;)
- I used Dan Kline's taxonomy in this talk and took a pass at modifying it based on some issues I had around classifying some games. In the process, I kind of butchered the placement of the games Roxana's students are currently playing and a core feature of the chart (Platformers are misplaced), apologies Dan.
I'd love to talk through the core ideas from the lecture here and I've also had a bunch of other thoughts on the matter that deserve mention, but I'm going to post on them at a later date. If I start trying to write them down now I'll never get this post up, and it's almost two weeks late as is.
In other news, the dissertation proceeds apace.
Dan Kline, Roxana Hadad, video game genre in Academic, Games 
Reader Comments (2)
Cool!
I wrote about 2 dimensions to classify games (narrative and embodied action) in my gen exams a while back, too, but I didn't do much of a lit review before just writing that stuff...
http://markdangerchen.net/2007/06/04/exam-question-2/
[...] way, I owe a debt to the folks at OKC on this one for sure. Using my own rubric, this is a subversion of their design for the purpose of matching gamers instead of partners. [...]