Slashdot has put out the call for the “definitive” list of game genres – no needless specificity or redundancy. For the PC world, Gamespot lists ten genres on their main page.

First Person Shooters
Real Time Strategy
Role Playing
Action Adventure
Massively Multiplayer
Other Strategy Games
Adventure Games
Tactical Shooters
Racing
Virtual Life

This leaves out other genres buried deeper in, like sports games that don’t involve driving really fast. RTS and “other strategy” are still strategy. MMORPGs are still RPGs. Many tactical shooters are also first person shooters. So you can trim these lists down pretty quickly.

Anyone else remember when there were only 2 genres? Strategy and Action/Adventure. Leave to Computer Gaming World to cut to the chase. Note that Earl Weaver Baseball is strategy but Hardball is action/adventure.

Genres are useful as descriptors, and for building in expectations for the player. Genres are blending now more than ever – pure adventure games have been completely replaced by the story-telling so prevalent in RPGs (which had traditionally eschewed story in favor of killing lots of things) and even some shooters. Sports management games like NFL Head Coach and Baseball Mogul are closer in spirit to tycoon games than action sports titles, but now even they have franchise modes.

If we can accept that strategy games are a arch-genre – one from which many different sub-genres bloom, we have a lot of possible descriptors. I’m not a huge fan of the Real Time/Turn Based dichotomy because it doesn’t do much to describe how the games are different beyond when events are resolved. War games can be both turn based and real time and are an obvious subset of strategy. Most WW2 RTS games don’t involve base building or even army building – you get what you start with or capture along the way. Maybe you get reinforcements. But they look and feel like Age of Empires.

But, as my wise mother-in-law always says, hard cases make bad law. There will always be straddlers on a subgenre line. Broad categories work best. Certainly not as broad as CGW in 1988. But we can narrow it down to five or six I think.

Strategy – a broad category covering wargames, grand strategy, city builders, business sims
Vehicle Simulations – Flight sims, tank sims, train sims,
Sports – you know what this is
Role Playing/Adventure – story telling games as usually understood, you could maybe fit The Sims in here if not in strategy
Arcade/Action – button mashers, platformers, fighting games
Shooters – this could be a subset of action, but has such a different feel and look that it needs its own place.

You can, of course, mix and match these. Sports Strategy (management sims), Roleplaying Shooters (Deux Ex), etc. And most of the interesting debates are subgenre ones. But I think this is the base of the building.

We are halfway through this decade, so it makes sense to have a list like this. Doing it by sales is certainly not as iffy a proposition as doing it by opinion or Gamerankings, but it’s certainly not perfect. The NPD numbers are the best we have, but are still not completely reliable, especially for online transactions. And Next Gen decides to start the century in 2000 instead of the correct 2001. (I’m feeling pedantic today.)

Sure, they cheat a little by only including the best selling game of a particular franchise. (If Age of Empires III hasn’t outsold Ultimate Mahjohng, Microsoft must be very unhappy.) It would be interesting to see the whole list laid out, though the top 12 would all be Sims games.

No major surprises for strategy gamers on the list. The sales of Civ III (No. 21) apparently outdid those of Civ IV, since the former makes the list and the latter is just lumped in with “other franchise titles” (which curiously includes the Activision Call to Power games.) Yeah, it’s only US sales and a sale based list will favor games that have had price reductions – the long tail of sales.

A look at the top ten reveals how lucrative the strategy and sim genre is. Six of ten are either Tycoon games, RTS or The Sims – which is in a category all its own. The impression of many that Age of Mythology was not a well-received mass hit is revealed as false. It was huge. Bigger than the Age of Kings expansion. Step back to do a top twenty look and we only get two more RTS added to the list (the aforemention Conquerors add-on to AoK and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2.) But they’re 11 and 12 – not 16 and 19.

It’s also worth noting how few of the top 50 are what you would call “bad games” (judging by the collective wisdom via Gamerankings). The successful games that score under 75 percent (the bottom line of good for many people) are movie tie-ins or riding on the crest of a cultural touchstone like Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Find a list of the top 20 grossing movies for this century and you will see a lot of crap. Same with books. Same with TV. Maybe it’s because games are really hard to screw up so bad that your GR score will dip below 70 – lots of sites don’t venture even that low unless it’s time to pick on Deer Hunter (no. 81 on the list, GR score of 71.)

I won’t repeat their entire list – that would be wrong, and a waste of my time since you can read it over there. Children’s games do well, game show games do well (Survivor is no. 77) and the hits you expect are there.

Reflect, ruminate and comment below.

October’s Computer Games Magazine has a few things with my name on them. Reviews of Operational Art of War 3, Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare, Rush for Berlin, Moscow to Berlin, and American Conquest Divided Nation, my Alt.Games column and a brief account of the first Apolycon – a convention of Civilization fans held this summer in Timonium. This explains the surprisingly large check.

Two points on the reviews. The American Conquest review has a factual error blaming GSC for stuff they didn’t do. ACDN is not a GSC game though it looks like one, plays like one and is a sequel to one of their games. It even has the same publisher. My mistake is understandable, but entirely my own and entirely avoidable. It doesn’t take away from my problems with the game – it is still too little new to recommend and too klugey in many ways. It is a CDV game developed by group who operated independently of the GSC umbrella. The comparisons to the GSC series are not unwarranted in my opinion – it follows the formula very closely, too closely in my opinion. But the factual error is there, and I spend much of the review slagging on an innocent group of developers. Who knows what I was thinking at the time. Readers expect better of me.

The Operational Art of War 3 review was done before the recent patch which increases stability of the game, largely by letting you know which scenarios aren’t suited for single person play. The larger scenarios that fail most of the time are really designed for PBEM.

I’ll have more on Apolycon later in the week.

This is the big fall preview issue, so there are a lot of games in there that I hadn’t even heard of, plus EIC Steve Bauman complaining about Metacritics and Gamerankings (and Amazon, too). I highly recommend the guest column by Elisa Romero. It gives me a warm glow when I read about how people get hooked on games.

The big plus for me is William Abner’s enthusiastic review of PureSim Baseball 2007. He was iffy on OOTP Baseball, my poison of choice, but heartily recommends this alternative. With the Nats season almost over (well, you could argue it was over three months ago), I will be keeping the home fires burning with baseball simulations. I have an earlier version of PureSim, but it played too slowly for me. Maybe I should give the new one a shot.

Dear Maxis:

I love The Sims. I love The Sims 2. I like many of the expansions.

But would you stop making so many of them? Trying to install Sims 2 + expansions on a virgin machine is a forty minute job. Swap this disc, swap that disc…

Put them all on one or two big DVDs that I get in exchange for my CD license keys and 5 bucks. Or something like that. Because this is crazy.

Trent Polack has started writing what looks like will be a very long history of the genre. (Like me, he separates the Total War games from the core RTS definition.) {spotted at Tacticular Cancer}

The most interesting part of the initial chapter is an obiter dictum on the lack of “strategical prowess” in your run-of-the-mill multiplayer RTS session.

There are numerous instances in the history of world conflict where a country’s forces have entered into a battle completely overpowered, outnumbered, and generally outmatched, but yet have managed to “win” the battle by most counts due to the strategic brilliance of their commander. Most RTS titles, though, don’t generally allow for this to happen; an inept player with massed units, in some games, can simply enter a fight with a superior player in command of very few units, and pull out with a total victory. Does this prevalent shortcoming of the genre really change the way we look at games under which it’s labeled? I’d say no, but it raises interesting questions which the next generation of real-time strategy games — Supreme Commander in particular — are looking to remedy.

First, an inept player will almost never accumulate mass units of any power against a superior player. That’s not the way the games are built. In an online world where superiority is demonstrated by a win/loss column, I don’t know how we would even recognize strategic brilliance in a player who keeps getting outmatched in production. When an RTS player does use small forces to destroy larger ones, this is often derided as “dancing” or “micromanaging”.

Second, those historic instances Polack refers to are few and far between and heavily reliant on external factors. Even in those cases where one giant mind was able to win a battle, like Hannibal at Cannae, the war was often lost because the Romans or Russians or Mongols kept pumping out units. (In RTS terms, think of velites needing a serious nerfing or increase in cost.)

Third, if Supreme Commander can, in fact, make last stands by superior minds a fruitful strategic avenue, I’ll preorder tomorrow.

I’ll update and summarize when Polack finishes his magnum opus. (As a history, it is quite good so far.)