Game/Genre: A Critique of Generic Formulas in Video Games in the Context of "The Real"

Abstract

Genre is a contentious topic in any medium. Genre fiction or “genred” fiction carries with it a mark of marginality. A typical remark from a New York Times Book Reviewdemonstrates this pattern: “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘’L,’’ and this is because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character” (Birkerts). Similarly, fiction titles of specific genres such as Western and Science Fiction bear conspicuous labels that distinguish works like Dunefrom the unmarked, real fiction, saying in effect, “Warning—this is not really Literature.” While there is some degree of generic criticism (that is, criticism that asserts one genre’s superiority to all other genres based on nothing more than its distinguishing criticism) in game journalismand reception, there have only been a few attempts to deal with the issue of genre in game studies. It is my goal to reach an understanding of the conflicting generic sensibilities established by video game journalism on the one hand and game studies scholarship on the other. A common rhetorical phenomenon in writing about video games is to begin with a broad statement invoking the volume of games produced or the surpassing quality of the most recent generation of games to “wow” skeptics into considering the possibility that games mean something more than play. As this essay has a more meta-critical approach, it seems appropriate instead to pay appropriate respect to the growing amount of critical literature on gaming and avoid the apologetics that many earlier scholars have felt obligated to undergo. Games have indeed come a long way, and so has game scholarship. The recent publication of The Video Game Theory Reader (edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron) indicates both that reading is an appropriate task for learning about games and that a critical mass of viewpoints exists to justify an anthology of wildly different and, sometimes, antithetical scholarship on video games