{"id":1120,"date":"2008-12-11T11:30:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-11T15:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/12\/11\/dune-ii-and-genre-birth-pangs\/"},"modified":"2008-12-11T11:30:24","modified_gmt":"2008-12-11T15:30:24","slug":"dune-ii-and-genre-birth-pangs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/12\/11\/dune-ii-and-genre-birth-pangs\/","title":{"rendered":"Dune II and Genre Birth Pangs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure how many people here remember Dune II<\/em>. I do – quite vividly. I remember sitting in my friend Frank’s dorm room and watching him gather spice to build an army. Then I would play and get eaten by worms. There’s a nice history of the game and its importance at Edge Online.<\/a><\/p>\n

When I interviewed the guys at Tilted Mill a few months ago, Chris Beatrice made the point that we never used to think about games in term of their genres, but more in terms of their subject matter. This was certainly case for us college kids in the early 90s. Every new game we played was dramatically different in interface and display than whatever we’d been playing before. It probably never occurred to us to put Dune II<\/em> and Civilization<\/em> and Populous<\/em> in the same “strategy” category, let alone divide them into turn-based and real-time.<\/p>\n

This is how genres are still born, I bet, not with someone claiming they invented the 4x RTS or RTS\/RPG or War\/RPG. Thinking of game design in terms of genres is, of course, natural and maybe inevitable. But it also subconsciously ties developers to the conventions of whatever genres he\/she is drawing on. One of the things I love most about Spore<\/em> is that, even in the parts that mimic other genres, it never compromises what it is in service to a role playing or city building plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not sure how many people here remember Dune II. I do – quite vividly. I remember sitting in my friend Frank’s dorm room and watching him gather spice to build an army. Then I would play and get eaten by worms. There’s a nice history of the game and its importance at Edge Online. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78,41],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-i4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}