RF Generation Message Board

Staff and VIP members have already had their chances to make suggestions. Bringing it to the general populace now...

NOT NEARLY A FINISHED PRODUCT PLEASE READ, CRITIQUE AND POST IDEAS FOR SUBGENRES OR GENRES.
Including specific examples of games that could cause problems or might have trouble finding a new home.
I am hoping that we can get this fully flushed out so that in the coming month or year or whenever it is implemented there is (almost*)no confusion as to what game belongs where. (*because lets face it there are always games that cross/blur genres)

Action/Adventure- combine elements of Action and Adventure, as the name suggests. A game in this genre might incorporate a strong storyline, exploration of the game environment, peaceful interaction with non-player characters, and puzzle solving, among others, to complement and give context to its action mechanics. Adventure - 2600! LEGEND OF ZELDA FOR NES IS AN ACTION/ADVENTURE THIS IS NOT FOR DEBATE.
Sandbox – GTA, Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed
Stealth – Chronicles of Riddick, Splinter Cell, Batman Arkham, MetalGearSolid
Survival Horror – Resident Evil, Alan Wake, Blue Stinger, DinoCrisis

Action - is a diverse genre that groups games where the primary appeal and challenge is to test the player’s physical skills, such as timing, precision, or reaction speed.
Beat'em Up - Street of Rage, TMNT, etc
Hack N Slash – Devil May Cry, Dante’s Inferno(? RPG elements), Gauntlet(?), Dynasty Warriors
Shoot 'em Up - Space Invaders, Asteroids, Ikaruga, Defender, R-Type, Castle Shikigami
Run N Gun - Contra
Maze - Pacman and the hundreds of clones
Minigame -  WarioWare, XX/XY,
Pong - Pong and its 10k clones.

Adventure - games where the player takes part in an interactive story. The gameplay typically involves gathering information and items to solve puzzles and advance the plot. Pure Adventure games lack physical challenges, instead proceeding based on a series of choices, especially dialogue prompts, which may result in success or failure.
Text Adventure - Zork, etc
Visual novel – I only know of Japanese Storybook games. Voyuer?, NightTrap? Do those 2 qualify? EDIT: Ace Attorney does!
Point and Click – Myst, Monkey Island, etc

Board&Card&Trivia
Board – Family Game Night etc
Card – Poker, Solitaire, Hearts, Spades, Etc
Casino? – To include things not covered in the above. Dice games, slots, pachinko, etc
Trivia – Scene it, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, etc

Platformer
2D – Mario, Sonic, Trials HD, Joe Danger
2.5D/Isometric – Sonic 3D Blast, Toejam and Earl, Congo Bongo
3D – Crash, Sonic, Mario, Gex

Puzzle
Word/Number – Crosswords, Sudoku, Karuko, etc
Matching – Bejeweled, Bust-a-Move, Tetris, Puzzle Arcade
Physics Based - Portal, World of Goo, Osmos
Platformer - Qbert, Braid
Hidden Object

Music/Rhythm
Karaoke - duhhh
Dance – DDR/Space channel5(?)
Instrument – Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Taiko Drum Master, Samba de Amigo(?)
Creation - Music Maker, eJay Clubworld

Simulation
Life - The Sims, SimAnt
Construction/Management - Farming Simulator 2013(seriously this is coming out)/Harvest Moon(?), Wall$treet Kid(?) - SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, EverythingElse Tycoon
Vehicular - Flight Simulator, Train Simulators

Sports
Baseball
Billiards/Pool/Snooker
Bowling
Boxing
Cricket
Cycling
Darts
Dodgeball – There are only 20 of these in the DB(as of writing) most of them from Japan I think we could get away with not having this subegenre.
Extreme – THPS, Dave Mirra, 1/2/3Xtreme, SSX, 1080, 720, etc?
Football(/American Football?)
Golf
Futuristic – Cyberball, Speedball 2100
Hockey
Hunting/Fishing
Lacrosse
Management(IMO could be the subgenre of the sport you are managing) I believe NFL Head Coach and some others I don’t care about…
Soccer(/Football?)
Skiing
Tennis/Badminton
Track and Field
Olympic(?)
Rugby
Whatever other godforsaken sports I missed

Racing
F1/Grand Prix
Simulation - Gran Turismo, Forza
NASCAR
Street/Drag – TestDrive, Need for Speed, (Burnout? See vehicle combat)
Offroad – ATV vs MX, DiRT
Rally – (Combine with offroad?)
Futuristic – Star Wars Episode 1, Venetica, Rollcage(?)

Vehicular Combat - MARIO KART, CRASH TEAM RACING, DIDDY KONG RACING ETC
Arial – Ace Combat, JASF, Wing Commander(?)
Automotive – Burnout, blur Carmageddon, Mayhem, Twisted Metal, Vigilante 8
Naval – Shipwreckers, BattleStations,

Strategy
Real Time – Command and Conquer
Turn Based – Civ
Tower Defense
Time Management - [Insert Title] Dash series, etc

RPG
Dungeon Crawler
MMORPG
Tactical?/Turnbased?/Strategy? - Final Fantasy Tactics(?), Disgeae(? Or would there need to be a Tactical/Strategy RPG Subgenre ) - Decide what you actually want this to be called.
Action RPG
Sandbox - Morrowind, Fallout, Borderlands
Game Creation - RPG Maker series

Shooter
First Person
Third Person
Mech
Rail

Fighting
2D – MK, SF, Marvel vs, ETC
3D – MK, Virtua Fighter, Tekken
MMA – I suppose could also be put into sports. I like it here though
Wrestling – could also could get put into sports – I REALLY REALLY prefer this in fighting
Game Creation - Fighter Maker series

Compilation - For compilations that include multiple genres
Mario/Duck Hunt/Track Meet
Sega GT 2002/ Jet Set Radio Future

Non-game - For the things that are not quite hardware but are definitely not games. PSP Media Manager i am looking at you.

Unique - I would like us to try and categorize all the games that fit into this field currently. Unique seems like a cop out.

EDIT
Forgot these
Adult
Edutainment

Isometric?

2.5D/Isometric corrected. Thanks :)

Also added Platformer under Puzzle for Qbert(also isometric :D ) and Braid and other stuff i can't think of at the moment.

It looks like there are many "game making games" currently in the Unique category. Could a subgenre for Sim be created for these?

Simulation
Game Creator - Fighter Maker, RPG Maker

Those are the only 2 i know off hand...

Exciting!  I always thought Action/Adventure was a tad broad. :)  And it was annoying how many games "Shooter" could apply to, so this is great.  Okay, how about...


Action - Minigame.  I'd say something like WarioWare fits solidly under Action rather than Party.  Aside from the party-focused one on Gamecube of course.

Strategy - Time Management.  I think that's the best way to categorize those pesky Diner Dash & Hotel Dash games.

Puzzle - Hidden Object.  Yep.

Party - Physical.  For games like B.U.T.T.O.N. and J.S. Joust.

Sports - Lacrosse.  Frankly I am shocked you could forget this one.


And I was thinking about the Rhythm Heaven games... none of those subgenres describe it, but I suppose Music/Rhythm does a perfectly good job on its own. 

Added Mini Game
Added Time Management
Added Hidden Object
Added Lacross

Removed Party Genre
Moved Minigame subgenre to Action
Moved Trivia to Card & Board & Trivia (was initially going to move it to Puzzle but it makes much more sense in Card & Board.)

EDIT
Also moved Dukes suggestion of Game Creator into the genres you create the games for.
Fighter Maker and RPG Maker and eJay Club world and Music Maker and Music Maker Deluxe and whatever other games i cannot think of at the moment you not only create the game but you can actually play it too.

Things like uuuhhhhh.... Excitebike and other racing games or Forge mode in Halo for example or other games with creation modes in them AFAIK all come with racing environments in them. The reason the afformentioned games are distinctive is because the game is entirely about you making your own game.

I know you guys want more simplicity, but I'd really like the vehicular subgenre under sim broken up into more descriptive subgenes such as Space Sim, Flight Sim, Combat Sim, etc.

Combat Simulator falls into either Shooter or Vehicular Combat or i guess Stealth if you are simming a Spy or Assassin or something.

The rest fit nicely into vehicular simulation. Since those are all some form of vehicle and i am really not trying to have every tiny niche have its own subgenre.

EDIT
We could end up with Space Sim, Flight Sim, Racing Sim, Biking Sim, Dating Sim(FALLS UNDER LIFE FOR NOW GAHHH THIS SHOULD PROBABLY EXIST! DAMN YOU JAPAN!) i'm done for now. ...

There are lots of KINDS of sims but every one does not need to be its own subgenre if they fall into a larger umbrella.

Thank you.  Can everyone finally accept that Zelda isn't an RPG?

I just want to spell this out for everyone that reads this...

GENRE/SUBGENRE for every title in the database will be reset, and it will be up to EVERYONE on the site to fill them back in.

This is not just a staff project.

 :tinfoil:

LOL I wanted to make sure i put that in there.
NES_Rules made a post about it awhile back can't find it now. But the LoZ page had like 75 people credited with Genre changes..

We should have those distinctions, though!  I mean, I understand your point Iz, but if we can realize a difference between a Hack N Slash and a Beat'em Up (which using the examples seems to be weapons?) what is the difference?

Because i like the difference between Hack N Slash and Beat'em Ups.

The difference for those has become more clearly defined over the years.
Streets of Rage and GoldenAxe are Hack n Slash or Beat'em Up. I consider them a Beat'em up. Like most of the early games.

But something like Bayonetta or Gungrave Overdose i would not consider a Beat'em Up. They are just too different.


But a Flight vs a Space simulator. They are both just simulators to me. Emulating a Jet is different from emulating a prop plane. Doesn't need to be broken down into Super Sonic Flight sim and Subsonic Flight Sim.

Opinions!

One thing that jumps out to me right away is that there are Shoot Em Ups within the action genre, but 'shooters' are another category. There seems to be a good distinction between them but I could see this being potentially confusing.

Having "Action", "Adventure" AND "Action/Adventure" feels somewhat redundant. The "Action/Adventure" sub-categories seem like they could comfortably fit in under 'Action'.

In the end, there's no universal way to do some of these, but the above are my thoughts.

EDIT: I also suggest Sports->Olympic to be Sports->Compilation. There are a handful of games I can think of that are Olympic-like but aren't actually THE Olympics (Decathlete, Caveman Games, World Games, etc.)

That is why i have text in italics to hopefully denote the reason for all 3 of them.
Which are more confused than any other genre.

Action/Adventure being used as a catch all was probably the primary reason for the restructuring.

I had similar thoughts in the VIP thread, but it seems modern terms (i.e. shmups are no longer shooters, FPS has stolen the genre title) are what is going here.


Will there be any reference to what they were set to? I could imagine some obscure foreign games that someone submitted a long time ago that no one presently may remember what they are.

In response for Shadow quote:
That was my initial concern in the staff forums too. I would like the reset to not clear out existing Genre/Subgenre information. Hopefully much like the release type field we can find a way to differentiate between new and old to see what has been corrected and what has not.

In response to Shooters:
Trying to split them up into clearly defined genres has been EXTREMELY hard. Initially i had wanted to come up with terms that would clearly and obviously define them each as shooter but would also define the differences of each.
Since yes Halo and Space Invaders are both shooters, Call of Duty and Asteroids are both shooters. But they are completely different in a way that they do not belong in the same category.

But the definition i have chosen to use for Action fits "classic" shooters into that.

Couldn't we get rid of the whole Vehicular Combat genre?  It seems that most of the subgenres in that genre could go over to Action, seeing that the primary focus is on action and also fit your definition of the Action genre (timing, precision, reaction).

Responded to PM.
Vehicular combat stands. They are in most cases shooters(AGAIN WITH THE SHOOTERS) But unlike "Modern" vs "Classic" shooters we had a way to actually clarify the differences that people could easily understand.

Vigilante 8 is a racing game... well kinda.
Vigialnte 8 is a shooter... more or less.
Vigilante 8 is vehicular combat. DEFINITELY!

Would it be better to make vehicle combat a subgenre of action? Or a subgenre or shooting? Or a subgenre of racing?

Classification gets crazy, its a constant debate in my field of work.

carnival? under somthing, like the mini game stuff or putt putt golf...

there's no correlation between vigilante 8 and racing games besides the fact that cars are in them. i can't speak for other games like that because that's the only one i have experience with. also i'm not sure about carnival (haven't played it), but it sounds like it would be under minigames...there are a million games that could be up for debate, everything would have to be thought about on a case by case basis and there will always be differing opinions, no matter how much we try to narrow things down.

Lets not be overzealous with reducing the amount of genres. Having a fine-grained array of subgenres is the beauty of this system and should allow for some very specific searches once everything is filled out. Lumping everything together in Action/adventure (as is the case with 50% of the DB today) serves no one.

Hi,
One thing that is coming to my mind is that Tycoon subgenre is more Strategy than Simulation. The same with all the Manager games where you really don't play football/soccer or ride bike like Football Manager or Championship Manager, Cycling Manager etc.

Genres from Xbox.com:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games

Strategy and Sim are in the same genre listing. Doesn't help :(

but they're supposed to be more like simulating the different business jobs in the theme park, like construction manager, finance manager, human resources, marketting, etc. it's not meant to simulate being a customer and riding the rides (though some do let you do that as an extra feature).

Sports games where you simulate being a manager or team owner or coach or whatever go under as it stands now.

Genre:Sports
Subgenre: Sim

I disagree.

To me, simulation games are stuff like the Tycoon games, The Sims, "virtual pet" games, sports manager simulation games or any games that involve simulating something else (games that simulate board games could fit this too, although there might be a seperate genre for that).

"Strategy" is to me: Age of Empires, Warcraft, ... (Real-Time Strategy) or Civilization, Heroes of Might & Magic (Turn-based strategy).

Then there's stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics, which some might list under Strategy. Although to me, those are RPG -> Tactical RPG.

I agree with Izret on the sports manager games.

Thank you, Sirgin.  I would support the subgenre Tactical being under the genre RPG, seeing is that while these types of games (Disgaea, FF Tactics) are tactical by nature (i.e., short-term, versus the long-term goals that accompany a strategy game) they almost always have a strong RPG feel to them, which pretty much all strategy games lack.  Makes me wonder if Tactical should be under RPG, Strategy, or both...

I third this idea.

I did have questions marks next to each one where it was and even asked about it in the original list.
Which has not been questioned or commented on up until now even though 2/3 people who brought it up had the ability to do so long before :-P

Better late than never :P

tactics and strategies are different things. they are short term and long term planning respectively. i agree with putting tactical games under RPG, because the only ones i know of that are actually tactical are essentially RPGs as well.

oyang's got a good point.  I believe a simulator should be more towards something like Railworks or Microsoft Flight Simulator - first and foremost they strive to simulate the real life experience.  The tycoon-style games teeter on the edge, I'd say more towards strategy usually.  Zoo Tycoon: it's kinda simulating being a tycoon, but is it really mimicking reality all that much?  If you focus on the core gameplay, it's more about strategically building up your zoo for success.  Now, you could say driving a train in Railworks requires strategy - true, but only because it's simulating a real train.  This is a very fine line, draped with opinions... but I say tycoon games tend to be about strategically building up something, rather than simulating the experience of being a tycoon.

Just imagine the designers at Blue Fang, giving birth to Zoo Tycoon - did they set out primarily to accurately recreate a zoo and all of its inner-workings, or to build a game about a zoo, consisting of bunches of components you the player can strategically ( ;)) manipulate to meet a goal?

Just throwing that out there.  It's tough, and probably has to be decided on a game-by-game basis.  It might be easy to label something like Zoo Tycoon a simulator since there are many similarities to what a real tycoon does... but then would Warcraft be an orc-general-simulator?

Subgenre will definitely have to be reset.

...not resetting Genre could be very difficult. I could just add the new ones beside the old ones, and we'd have to make sure they kept getting updated (e.g. change the current Action/Adventure to Action/Adventure (Deprecated)), or just clear out the ones that no longer match up (e.g. "Unique"). However, how do we want to handle Genres that have changed definitions?

The thing is that you are simulating a zoo director (albeit in a very light fashion).  Labeling a game a pure strategy game can be very dangerous, primarily because the name itself has always carried a strong combat feel to it (traditionally).  Games such as the Tycoon series have traditionally been called business simulation because the main focus of the game is running a business, much in the same way that The Political Machine (http://www.politicalmachine.com/) has always been labeled a sim, even though there is quite a bit of strategy to running a campaign.  Speaking of politics...

I'd like to lobby for a Sandbox subgenre put into the Vehicular Combat genre, with the goal being to accommodate Vehicular Combat games where the combat is secondary to a large, free-roaming world where there are plenty secondary goals and activities (similar to established Sandbox games like GTA and Oblivion).  This would help differentiate titles such as the X series (X3 The Reunion, X2 The Threat), Wing Commander: Privateer, Elite, and Evochron Mercenary which are all about freedom and diversions (and trade) from titles such as Freespace and the main Wing Commander games where the focus is entirely on combat and combat-themed missions.

The more I think about this the more I feel sorry for those tasked with approving the deluge of genre/subgenre-themed submissions that will be coming down the pipe.

Hmmm.  Right, right.  You could pick strategy out of a lot of different games, but business simulation is a much better label for those tycoon games.  Okay, I concede.  :D

That is an excellent question.  Your suggestion seems the most sane, which seems saner than trying to release all games into a placeholder genre (such as N/A) and simply wait for submissions (although this would guarantee all the games would migrate over to the new genres).

You could start by just changing the submission page to reflect only the new genre choices, and wait for the submissions to roll in.  There should be a way to bring games that haven't migrated over to peoples attention.  Maybe publishing a daily updated list on a separate page showing the names and platforms of all non-migrated games...

Here's one more suggestion for now: Mario Kart and similar games should go in a Kart subgenre under Racing.  They definitely are racing games in which you're trying to finish the track faster than the other dudes - there just happens to be a lot of vehicular combat going on during the race.

About the current guidelines: it's mostly good but there are some parts I don't agree with and also a lot of it is missing newer genres that are now in the database and is outdated in that regard. I could write up a new post using Izret's work as a base and fill the uncertainties in and make it more complete. Staff, it's up to you guys. I'd put it into a thread like this for suggestions and tweaks of course.

You're the one running the show for it, sir. Feel free to provide your initial plan, and people will be more than happy to soundoff on their feedback for it.
:cat: Cat emote just 'cause.

Okeydoke, I'll see what I can cook up. Also lmao I was wondering why I was ranked above DB contributer status, looks like someone took notice and took me down a peg. :P

I blame Izret. I really do.

Yea i made a mistake when cross referencing to make sure you would have access to the appropriate things.
WHOOPSIE!

But now you know what could be available.
STRIVE FOR GREATNESS!