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GUN, Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, Outlaws, and Wanted: A Wild Western Adventure. Grouped like this, it’s easy to see a collection of Westerns, but that’s not the way gamers (or I) look at games.
If I pick up a book, turn on the TV, or grab a DVD, it doesn’t take long for me to apply a genre label to what I’m seeing. Cover artwork clues me in faster and I’ll even go beyond this and say that when it comes to entertainment outside of gaming, I typically decide on genre first and go from there–meaning that I know when I’m in the mood for a mystery, horror, comedy, etc.
Bookstores, libraries, iTunes, and Amazon know this. But genre means something different when it comes to gaming. I don’t differentiate games by their settings, archetypes, or tropes, I differentiate them by how they’re played. There are times when I want to play first-person shooters, times when I’m interested in controlling units, and times when I just want to be immersed in virtual world. If a game is good, I don’t care if I’m shooting Stormtroopers or Nazis, if I’m controlling Orcs or Marines, or if I’m a pirate or a prince.
I’m not sure what this means. Gaming is interactive, so maybe the activity side is dominant (my brain and thumbs tell me what they want to do)–but I also side with the “games are art” camp, so I’d like to think that games transcend gaming… or at least the potential is there.