The most complete categorization system for video games?

Part 1 of many where I singlehandedly reorganize the gaming industry

👋🏼Hello JOMT Reader!

I’ve become obsessed with organizing information. A lot of it stems from what I think about every day: what’s the best way to get technical information to a non-technical audience? In my line of work, the answer to that question lies in how technical information is organized, what and how it links to other pieces of information, and the context in which that information appears.

That same obsession with clarity is changing how I think about games. Last week, I shared a Science Short about a hyper-personalized game ranking system and how that could help us sift through the countless video games being released every year. At the heart of such a system is information that needs to be organized in a way that makes sense for you and I.

Video games have evolved significantly from the single-genre titles of years past. Super Mario Bros. is a single-player, platforming game. Days of the Tentacle and Monkey Island are point-and-click adventure games. But today’s game descriptions read like genre soups, mixing them freely as developers continue to explore new horizons in gaming.

Word and genre soups might not be as helpful as regular soups are delightful. || Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

But the genre soup is proof that the current genre labels we inherited when games were simpler aren’t good enough to categorize modern video games. We need a better way to organize the information about video games that goes beyond “genres” as we know them.

In this multipart series, I want to explore what that categorization system could look like for video games. I want to build this with input from all of you who live and breathe video games as much as I do — please share your thoughts and feedback as I selfishly reorganize the information for an entire industry!

🎯What we have now: genres

If you open Steam or practically any other game aggregation site, you’ll find a “categories” list of genres like first-person shooter, role-playing game, and sports games to name a few. Sometimes, those categories will have subcategories like soccer, baseball, or hockey. Other times, there may be a “play style” category like single player or multiplayer for a different way to categorize games.

My personal issue with this genre-based categorization is that most modern games don’t neatly fit into these categories. Take Grand Theft Auto V for example. On Steam, it has the tags open world, action, sexual content, and multiplayer. On Fanatical, it has the tags action, shooter, adventure, and automobile sim. The only genre that the two seem to agree on is that GTA V is an action game. Clearly, the genre labels we have now just aren’t enough to fully describe a modern game.

❌Why it’s not working

When I look at these tags, they describe very different things about the game.

1. Content tags that say something about what you can find in the game (e.g., open world, sexual content)

2. Mechanics tags that say something about how the game works (e.g., action, shooter, adventure, automobile sim)

3. Play style tags that say something about how a player could play the game (e.g., multiplayer)

That’s three different ways to tag games: by content, by your actions in the game, and by how you’ll be playing the game. Content can probably be subdivided to include things like setting of the game and when a game takes place.

These aren’t the only categories of tags we could include. In the next section, I propose some additional categories that we’ll do some deep dives into over the next several posts.

🔮The future of game categorization

This is a big topic to cover. But I want to do it because it’ll give us a solid foundation and language for how we talk about game categorization. If you’re a researcher, it might help define or identify games for the next research question. As a gamer, you might discover games that you might not consider based on the current genre classifications. If you’re an educator incorporating games in the classroom, this new classification system might flag certain games that might not be useful.

So, here’s a rough outline of a next-generation categorization system that aims to be a complete description of a video game:

1. Game content: where the game takes place, when the game takes place, narrative or theme, music, and type of ending

2. Game context: other titles in the series, developer, publisher, platform, and game atmosphere/rhythm

3. Player experience: number of players, and in-game roles, tasks, perspectives, and actions

4. Reviewer sentiment: aggregate scores and sentiment word cloud

To make this categorization system useful, it has to be paired with a user filter that takes into account your personal preferences.

1. User persona: takes into account history of games played, preferences for game content and player experience, keyword list of game requirements, and motivations for playing games

Will this categorization system be perfect? Maybe not, but I hope to get as close to perfect as I possibly can. To that end, in the next issue, I’ll take a deeper dive into game content categorizations with examples to see how the system works (and where it might fall short).

If you want to read the article that inspired this post, you can read it here for free: https://portal.tpu.ru/SHARED/r/RAZDYAKONOVA/publications/Publications/1.pdf

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