Abstract
The article discusses the issue of how to categorize video games—not the medium of video games, but individual video games. As a lead in to this discussion, the article discusses video game specificity and genericity and moves on to genre theory. On the basis of this discussion, a cognitive experientialist genre framework is sketched, which incorporates both general points from genre theory and theories more specific to the video game domain. The framework is illustrated through a brief example. One virtue of the framework is that it offers a way to bridge the gap between game ontology and player experience; a brief conclusion discusses how the breadth of this gap may depend upon player biographies and also outlines how further work may proceed.
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Notes
The comment about glasses and their contents applies here as well: anything could be seen as yielding unique experiences given that inclination; this is the flipside of the well-known argument that anything can be seen as similar to anything else. This, in turn, means that everything can be seen as yielding typical experiences, but I shall attempt to elaborate and unpack this seemingly vacous claim as we go on.
For a representative expression of the early phase of this debate, see Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan (2004), and for a later commentary, see Simons (2007). I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out that these labels can be quite misleading, in that the label “narratology” as used in “narratology vs. ludology” collapses narrativist scholars who prefer to use narrative as what I would call a sensitizing concept (such as Jenkins) and scholars who are inspired by and indebted to formal narratology (such as Aarseth and Eskelinen) – and some of the latter are often taken to be ludologists.
There is of course one domain which is allowed for self-avowed ludologists such as (Juul 2005) and like minded writers such as Salen and Zimmerman (2004): The domain of games. Their position seems to be that video games are or should be seen simply as part of this domain—give or take a couple of provisos. One might thus say that the strict ludologist that I am conjuring forth is really a strict video-ludologist.
One of the most immediately visible ways to achieve a particular framing in the cultural industries is the extensive use of paratext(s), where products such as games are explicitly furnished with genre labels—but collective understandings obviously also depend upon previous experiences of the works themselves, which form the basis of the myriad potential relations between individual works that genres offer to the producers and consumers, without these being explicated by paratexts.
I will forego any discussion of whether video games are, in fact, fictional or not; I use the terms representation and simulation throughout.
For an example of how multiple elements can be tracked in evolution of a particular game genre, see Arsenault (2009) on the first-person shooter.
Another approach to classification could be mentioned here, namely that exemplified by Elverdam and Aarseth (2007) game classification scheme. Such classification schemes should, I think, not be seen as fundamentally antithetical to or incompatible with genre theories, since both are at root involved in classification. One simple argument for classification schemes is that they allow for categorizing without making larger claims about genre and may be used to pick out categories which may fall outside of traditional genre concerns while still being useful. Since classifications schemes are often built with mutually exclusive subcategories, there is a tendency towards the aims of classical genre theory—either X is A or B, never both. It might be possible to build a formal faceted classification scheme from a synthesis of the available resources outlined above and tie this to genre concerns, but this would go way beyond this paper. The primary argument is still that games can be and are routinely classified as exhibiting typicality by people interacting with games and, in addition, that games may be said to utilize a vast collection of generic resources and in doing so instantiate similarities on many different levels. The argument is further that all of these similarities may be seen as the generic scaffolding of the potentially generic experience of playing such games.
Or has no experience of the relevant domains outside of games, for instance, science fiction or fantasy literature or war movies.
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Gregersen, A. Generic Structures, Generic Experiences: A Cognitive Experientialist Approach to Video Game Analysis. Philos. Technol. 27, 159–175 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0125-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0125-8