FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Choosing a Genre
In describing movies or books, the term genre refers to the content of the work. Historical fiction, romance fiction, spy fiction, and so on are genres of popular fiction. With video games, however, genre refers to the types of challenges that a game offers. In games, the genres are independent of the content. Action games are one genre; they are set in the Old West, in a fantasy world, or in outer space, and they are still all action games. In his lecture "Imagining New Game Styles" at the 2005 Futureplay conference, the designer and commentator Greg Costikyan wrote that he prefers the term game style rather than game genre to avoid this difference in meaning among the different media (Costikyan, 2005), but this book will continue to use genre because it is more widely recognized.
GENRE A genre is a category of games characterized by a particular set of challenges, regardless of setting or game-world content.
