Genre is a remarkably useful concept. It helps us immeasurably with the task of classifying and organising swells of stuff into groups and clusters. It introduces and reinforces conventional ways of thinking that are mutually understood for everyone concerned: people who make games; the people who play them; and the people, the publishers and marketers who mediate between the two.
For developers, working within a particular genre gives a well of experience from which to draw: mistakes that have been made, lessons that have been learned, techniques developed and perfected over generations. Much of this is delivered technically, through advancing and increasingly efficient game engines and design tools but it is also, culturally at least, delivered through the art of design and the conventions of genre.
For consumers, genre is equally powerful because it creates mental shortcuts that allow them to quickly assess and form expectations about a particular game. For example, the term FPS is quite a dry, technical description of the genre – that you look through the protagonists own eyes and shoot a gun. However, what the term lacks in direct allusion it makes up for in the associations it carries. We know that firstperson shooters are gritty and involved – they require sharp reflexes, technical precision and the ability to make lots of good tactical decisions consistently in short succession.
Genre’s power to conjure such ideas is a dream for advertisers. Nobody needs telling that today we consume more information faster than at any preceding point in history. The average western consumer is exposed to thousands of commercial messages and pieces of content daily. Attention is a desperately scarce commodity. Genre, and all it invokes, cuts out 90 per cent of the work of building expectation and conveying meaning to audiences and lets advertisers worry about communicating the detail of why this particular experience is special.
It is, however, a double-edged sword. The slippery beast known as consumer satisfaction is derived from the aligning of expectation with experience. Failing to meet expectations naturally results in disappointment. Despite this, designers must deviate from convention to innovate. The expectations that a genre spontaneously produces within the minds of potential players must therefore be carefully managed.
Gran Turismo is a textbook of example of how this goes wrong. Always billing itself as a driving simulator, rather than a racing game, the Gran Turismo franchise has become used to receiving criticism that it has not kept up with the racing genre as a whole. Particularly when it came to vehicle damage.
The first line of defence to this criticism is, quite simply, that if you’re crashing in Gran Turismo then you’re not doing it right, you’re trying to play a different game. Why should the game therefore reward players for indulging in the destruction of these beautiful automobiles? This is comparable with killing civilians in war games. Just because you could theoretically do it in reality does not mean the designer wants it or that the game should allow it.
Consumers find this argument hard to swallow, and understandably, because in most other respects Gran Turismo is utterly in line with the rest of the genre. It appears on the surface that Gran Turismo, Forza, and their contemporaries are offering competing experiences and should be judged against one another.
When Polyphony Digital eventually bowed to the pressure to include damage, the studio disappointed players yet again because it wasn’t instantly available, having to be unlocked after a significant portion of play. Again, what is acceptable from the point of view of a driving simulator is unacceptable in the context of the wider genre and its conventions.
Admittedly, Gran Turismo 5 didn’t help itself. Ads for the game (at least in the UK and the US), despite making the most of an opportunity to manage expectation, sold the game on the basis of screeching tires, the crash of metal and a turbo injected competitiveness on which such a sober, calculated game could never deliver.
UK AD
US AD
At its heart, this problem comes from the fact that genre is a borrowed term. Genre in other artistic fields generally refers to issues of content: romance, horror, action, comedy etc. While this is occasionally well applied to games, it overlooks entirely the behavioural elements that make games distinct from other media (and which define RPG and FPS genres). Further complicating elements such as studio management ('indie') and country of origin (JRPG) are also occasionally thrown into the mix. Unfortunately, all are used to define game genres and so all form the structures that determine how gamers understand and build expectations about the offerings in front of them.
That Red Dead Redemption became known (affectionately) as Grand Theft Horsey is a marvellous illustration of how content is often just skin deep. What defines games, as media, is as much the kind of interactions and behaviours they foster. While, within the context of advertising and communications, its too easy to default to content as a source of creative inspiration, ultimately it is the behavioural experience that will determine whether a player is happy with how they have spent their money.