There are FPS-RPGs and RPG-RTSs (or SRPGs). Yet, I still hear people say that FPSs are the furthest things from RPGs. Despite Fallout 3, Bioshock, Deus Ex, the two genres seem irreconcilable.
Perhaps, then, ‘genre’ is the wrong term. Perhaps video games can’t be categorised, and doing so is butt-hurting more and more fanboys by the day.
So let’s move to the term ‘classification’. FPS, RPG, RTS, etcetera are classifications of games. Not genres or categories. They just describe the ways we can classify the mechanics of gameplay. ‘Genre’, then, would describe the style of the game (fantasy, steampunk, space, speculative, etc.).
This is a popular idea in other fields. In linguistics, the idea that a word must sit in a single category was done away with during the post-Chomsky days of non-binary semantic theories. Classification, as such, is what’s usually applied to words, like animals. This is because words are fluid things, like art and video games. The way they behave isn’t cut-and-dry.
There’s a shouting match going on, and I really don’t get it.
Console heavyweights arebanging on about the mobile gaming market muscling in on their handheld sales; mobile gaming moguls are declaring handheld consoles “dead on arrival”.
What the fuck?
I mean, the crowning glory of mobile gaming is the low cost:high grade of software. People can buy quality software for small, inconsequential amounts. The idea: most people will make lots of little purchases. Compared to DS games which range from US$20 – $30, gamers would consider the US$0.99 – $9.99 price tag of mobile games to be insanely cheap. And as we’ve seen, they’ve sold accordingly.
Despite what the console kings say, this sounds to me like mobile gaming can coexist fluidly with console gaming.
Another point: no one is deciding to get an iPhone or a HTC instead of a PSP or 3DS. Like, no one is. The experience is totally different, as is the catalogue you can access.
My view: mobile gaming is actually good for console gaming. A wave of kids playing Angry Birds and Canabalt on their mum’s iPhone will wonder what else is out there in the wide world of gaming.
Think of mobile platforms like shareware. If you give people a taste for free (or cheap), they’ll spend the big bucks on the real stuff.*
* However pejorative this may sound, you get my point.
A while back REZ was quite a bloggable game. And it may be a bit old hat to bring it up again, but I stumbled across this fascinatingarticle by Douglas Brown on its recursive interactions between visuals, audibles and references to other art.
“Abstract: Douglas Brown’s Rez: An Evolving Analysis dives into Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s ‘trance shooter’ to reveal how the game’s recursive dynamics – between sight and sound, rhythm and novelty, abstraction and representation – work to construct the player’s spatial and temporal experience.”
Just watch this Girls’ Generation (SNSD) performance from the Special Force ProLeague final in South Korea. Girls’ Generation are a manufactured 9-piece girl-group who sing sickly sweet songs about, well, love and boys. But the group’s initials are GG. Totally rad.
The second song, Gee, yields an unparalleled amount of catchy-ness:
Although I don’t really agree with Amanda Kloer’s post at End Human Trafficking, she points out some interesting moves made by the seller of infamous Rapelay, BGamebox. Apparently they have recategorized said game as a ‘Platinum’ game and not a ‘Rape’ (‘ryoujoku’) game. The company has gone further and renamed other games in hopes of making them sound less ‘bad’. As Amanda Kloer points out, Gang Raped by the Entire Village: Girls Covered in Milky Liquid is now The Trap Set by the Entire Village: Bodies Covered in Milky Liquid.
The article as a whole, however, has a notably old-world approach. Kloer holds that the media is a pervasive and insidious force. As she says, the aforementioned games ‘train players (often young men) how to rape and abuse women and train them as sex slaves’. This I disagree with. They they might attract rapists (or those with a rape fetish), but they don’t train them. See this article for a discussion about the issue RE Rapelay.
