Video Game Taxonomy

When Holla Forums manages to finish college. Memes aside, I took a sight at it and seems ok and in line with what I believe it's important. It's a pretty high level description of a game, which is nice, but we also need visual disctinctions.

I don't think it's useless, it makes it easier to find games you'd like. With RPGs for example, the label is so fucking broad it conveys no information to whoever wants to try the game.

After thinking a bit I came up with this 3 parameters the games should be categorized in to accomplish the task that you've set: goal, challenge, message(they bear the resemblance of, but are not directly related to ).
Is it a one playthrough game, is it mmo, is it some kind of arena or simulation, does it feature modes that ravish the player with it's own gameplay to the best of its ability?
What task to accomplish does the goal imply? How many and what tools the player is given to achieve those tasks?
Is it a narrative driven game or the opposite? How much thought and what thought was put in the design of pretty much everything in the game?

For example:
MMO-like arena pve funtime
unlimited time-waster dream
extended singleplayer action horror b-movie
unlimited collect-a-thon land
mp arena pvp competition
mp arena tvt competition
singleplayer action horror sci-fi

There is an obvious question "How do we resolve the conflicts of understanding the description terms?", for what I have the answer "I don't care, I've just had an idea."

did someone say Style Savvy?

I usually just categorize games as a general genre and then add 'with X elements' or 'X-like' which is not very efficient.

The system is pretty bad(shit) in that it requires a lot of prior videogame knowledge to know what means what. There's also examples where you can't tell someone about a game without explaining exactly what it is…

I still don't know the term for walking simulators. First person visual novels? Light adventures?
What about tower defense where there's no towers but two bases and you send troops at the other one until you win? Strategy, resource management, and timing are all involved in both but there's no easy way to differentiate.

The problem is that videogames are so new that new genres keep appearing. MOBAs weren't a genre until just recently and now there's tons of subtypes and mixed genres with it.

Is this something you really want, though?
A natural consequence of properly indexing what things are is that you end up having guidelines on how to make a certain gametype.
This looks good at first since devs have something to start with and players can find something familiar in different games from the same genre, like jumping over holes in platformers.

But this can quickly led to staleness as Devs stick to the formula and never really improve because anything not in the rules isn't even considered.

For instance, consider "The Ubisoft Game", which is a type of genre Ubisoft has released several games in like Asscreed, Shadow of Mordor and Watchdogs. It's essentially the same game that plays mostly the same way and there's little innovation in between.
Even when new things are tried like in Shadow of Mordor, they are not given the development they need because they are completely secondary compared to the genre.

Another example is perhaps Open World Sandbox but for very bad reasons.
It's a genre that has devolved into something truly hideous all because it's Devs following the bad examples of other Devs.
And although anyone could make something different at some point, most won't even try because, despite being defined by very bad rules, that's what the genre is.
At least BOTW breaks the mold a bit, even if it still needs improvement

You underestimate our autism.

A proper taxon system would necessarily makes genre names very long and exhaustive, and would need to focus on one characteristic. I don't see, for instance, how aesthetic or hybrid can belong to the same system of categorization. It would make more sense to focus solely on influences, to fit the taxonomy system. Like Dishonored would be a species of the Thief genus. It would describe where a game and derivatives stand. However, that would probably not be very attractive to anyone.

When are we going to get games with actually deep and intricate animal breeding mechanics?

Dishonored is an action game with optional stealth.

That's not specific enough. It has optional stealth MECHANICS, but most action games can have "optional stealth" if you can avoid enemies at all.

Wrong, it's a stealth game with optional action. Most of its mechanics serve the stealth route. You just have the option to fight your way through if you're bad.

That's why taxon systems have different levels, like In OP pic, where you don't even get to bears until you're at the 3rd most specific level.

What I'm more interested in, though, is vidya lineage, which is also important since that's what taxonomies are based on.

realized something interesting reading this, that games would best be described more by a kind of simplified genetic code.

ultimately, most ubisoft games ARE the same fundamentally, with only a handful of distinctive traits that are primarily just in appearance.
And yes, it would "allow" such things, but considering that we can already generalize games into tighter groups (thief-like, doom-clone) and looser ones (Stealth, MOBA, 4X), the true tools for such guidelines have always existed, and people have always tried to copy greatness. This kind of categorization is pretty autismal, but ultimately it could be somewhat useful.

In regard to what I mentioned above on genetic code, I reckon something like this:
Deus Ex [Deus Ex-Style] [Stealth] [RPG] [Inv Management] [Semi-Closed World, Hub] [Dialogue-Heavy] [Empowered Character] [Atmospheric] [Vents] [Hacking] and so forth.

So really just sufficiently many tags that are widely agreed upon does the job, where eventually you only refer to your specific kind of featherless biped, vaguely standardized and perhaps shortened to hexadecimal or alphanumeric groups.

I guess tags are really… memetic code, if you will.

First distinction in the line of Domain would be between games, puzzles and activities. The demarcation being that games being actual games, while the other two is just rearranging shit (or playing eye spy) or things like solitaire and minesweeper. A win state and rules, but not particularly true game play.

You know, that reminds me of something, what is a loss state? Let's just use Mario as an example because Miyamoto said, during the development of NSMBWii something along the lines of "Mario is a game where if you die you go back to the beginning". But "going back to the beginning" is incredibly loose, even in this one series. If you lose a single life, you go back to the beginning of the stage, unless you hit a checkpoint (visible or otherwise). But when you lose all your lives then things get fucky. In the first game and probably J2, you went back to the start of the game, but if you used a code you just went back to the start of the world. In 3 you went back to the start of the world automatically. But in the 3D games and some other later titles, the only difference between losing all lives and one life is losing a checkpoint and going back to the hub world. And if we want to get very loose in what is considered "Mario" we have the billion pound elephant in the room of Wario Land 2. This is a game where you cannot die. Your only punishment for getting hit is knockback, losing coins, or possibly gaining a "power-up" that could just as easily fuck you over as help you. In this, going back to the beginning is going back to the beginning of a sequence because you fucked up and got hit. I should note that Wario Land 3 is similar but has one Game Over possibility against the final boss, which is odd.

Then I have a similar question about does it count as a loss if there's not punishment for progression. As an example, in normal gameplay when your health reaches zero in Wonderful 101, you start over exactly where you left off with full health, but at the end of the stage it tanks your rank. It punishes you but you can't actually have your progress impeded unless you rage quit.

I guess my question is, what is loss?

Steam has tags users can add onto a game on the store, allowing clients to see the defining aspects of a game at a glance. It seems this idea of defining genre has been somewhat realized already.

Unlike in arcade games where you can get a "game over" and have to shove in more quarters, most modern games DO NOT HAVE a "loss state", only a "setback state".

I can think of one exception, which is Minecraft Hardcore, where the entire game world is erased should you die once.

The one singular permadeath game you can think of is fucking autismcraft?
How old are you? You shouldn't be posting here.

Caring so much about categorization is literal autism.

"Permadeath" in a game doesn't matter if nothing is actually lost.

There is no difference in loss between a game with permadeath deleting your character and autismcraft deleting your world you retard.

you guys use the term taxonomy then go off of the most cosmetic things about a game rather than their structure. rather than focus on the structure that games developed around you go and nit pick with minor features and storytelling mechanics.

IN seated i propose we look at it from a more structural from a programming perspective. the basic diversion is games focused around a character and those that are not. so dividing games based off of character control and command. FPS's, platformers and fighting games going in the first and rts, puzzles and the like going in the second. further dividing the "character controll" games ferther into categorizes based on basic mechanics and layout. first and foremost being sidescroller and non side scroller. fighting games being lumped into 2D platformers and 3rd and first person games being lumped together at this point. all of this being based off of the input of the player on the game not some cosmetic or gameplay feature.

How about Day Z then? That was popular enough. Losing gathered didn't stop people from playing it.

Yes, and?

I don't think that there's a NEED for the system to be redone so that's why it hasn't happened. As a gamer, it's easy to figure out what a game is like from some key-words. No idea how it works for casuals/newcomers though.

Movies are generalized into things like "Action, Comedy, Horror" and it doesn't affect how people talk about movies or find movies that they like.

I wouldn't be opposed to having a better system if there was one to be had.

This might not be of direct help to you, but consider the following:

Within every game is a set of mechanics. These mechanics are designed to present skills, and challenges which can only be overcome by those skills. These skills are always new skills which did not exist previously, and exist only within the rules of the game, which is what makes each game unique. This is true of all games, even ones which are walking simulators, because they're abstractions of real skills, however strong or weak.

Because games exist within the same universe as us, and abide by the same physical laws as the humans that made them, all games are abstractions of the challenges we face as a result of physical laws, and the skills that humans have developed to overcome them.

Therefore, all man-made challenges can be de-abstracted into their most basic form and put into a chart similar to OP's, and therefore, all games can be meaningfully labeled based on which skills they appeal to, with each skill given some kind of weight based on its importance to the core gameplay. This would actually open the possibility of charting all games in how they relate to one another in terms of mechanics. It wouldn't necessarily tell anyone which games they would enjoy, but it could potentially be an approximate guide.

Tokyo Jungle. A variety of factors impact breeding and building new generations.

Wrong because all 2D platformers are puzzle games with the goal to move the character where he doesn't receives damage.

Can we all agree that the domain would at least be Game?

No, domain would be Media. Kingdom is Game

Yeah, that would make more sense.

That difference is the difference in series. That's why you play Mario instead of Kirby or vice versa. If you find other games are too similar to one or the other, that's because you're talking about straight Mario clones or something. This is the whole reason you would divide games by series at all.

That's because Pokemon is just a JRPG that happens to have monsters. Monster Rancher is a monster raising game and not an RPG. Digimon is a series that has entries in both genres.

Explain RPG to me

A game where you raise your character's stats. Other games borrow this mechanic a lot, which results in hybrid genre games.

Games centered around character progression for success through managing different abstractions of their ability and making varying interactions to test the player's skill in building their character(s). Typical abstractions include stats (like says), equipment, skills, and social standing. Interactions used to test these include combat (primarily), dialogue/NPC interaction, puzzles, and exploration.

Any game that you play a role.

Honestly, this is a trivial issue, but an issue nonetheless. The differences between a roguelike and a roguelite (and even roguelikeslikes) are so vast that all 3 need seperate genre labels. What does roguelike even mean? How far can you stretch the definition until it no longer is a rogue clone? Defining an entire genre of games by one game is counter productive and needs to end.

wait, bugs are animals?
i thought insects were basically alien species.

I don't think this works. While you can point at an example of one game that invented or popularized a genre, you can't point at a genre and cleanly shove it into a category. Games borrow mechanics from other genres all the time.

What if I made a game that stapled RTS, cart racing, and platforming together into one package? What if I took gameplay aspects from other completely unrelated genres? What if I use multiple hybrids?

No, that would be viruses.

When God made Adam, Adam named the animals by their kind. We're doing God's work.

See the Berlin Interpretation.

I actually want to know
How would we define what we currently define as rougelikes?
Something where it can distinguish between games-like-rouge such as Stone Soup and not-really-like-rouge-but-it's-random-and-has-permadeath-so-I-guess-it-has-something-to-do-with-rouge-games like Binding of Issac

Whether games are "abstractions" of physical problems or not is completely unrelated to whether games are subject to physical laws in any sense or whether their mechanics can be decomposed into how much of each kind of skill is required of the player.

Your syllogism is unnecessary, the major premise is wrong and the conclusions don't immediately follow from one another. In order for a game to be an abstraction of physical laws, it would have at least to represent these to some degree. Which is to say that they would have to be somewhat realistic, but that is not necessary.They can be completely abstract, and make no reference at all to physical reality (as an example, take mathematical games such as nim), or represent alternative models of reality (any 2D game, for instance).

Furthermore, games don't exist in the same sense that physical objects do. Instead, they exist as a set of problems symbolically encoded in set of rules to be implemented and possibly solved through computation. In so far as they exist through symbols, they can exist in a variety of different symbolic representations without any change in the underlying game. Therefore, just as nim is still nim in whatever language I may program it, nim is still nim if it is programmed in a universe with four dimensions as well as a universe with eleven dimensions. Therefore, there's not a single unique set of physical laws which might correspond to any single game. This information is not recoverable from the game. Thus, no game can be said to be an abstraction of some particular set of physical laws.

The only way in which games are constrained is that, in order to be playable, they need to be computable in practical time. But this doesn't imply anything about whether the problems presented in the game are abstractions of physical problems or not.

A year or so back we had a thread similar to this where a bunch of anons shitposted about setting up a project to try and create a full chart for this shit, sadly nothing came of it.

See

Anyone ever try that tool that sorts your steam library? I never got it to work.

I thought insects were basically just macroscopic viruses, considering viruses in textbooks look exactly like spiders.

Easiest way to do this would be to work out the taxonomic levels first, with program traits in mind (eg. text-based, mouse-use, joystick, 3d, 2d, cells, "open world") so relationships can be easily drawn between two titles that share the same genre, mechanics etc. but not, for instance, the same creators.

Perhaps a video game taxonomic chart would look something like:
Game>Mechanics1>Dynamics1>Genre>Sub-Genre>Title

1= borrowed from
though I felt Aesthetics would be an inappropriate classification due to the fact that it would separate what are otherwise related titles.

Hell, take it up another level and come up with a concrete, all-emcompassing definition of "game". That alone would make this difficult to pull off.

So can we finally make Souls Like a genre?

Come on, it's like you aren't shitposting.

This project is doomed to fail. Consider, for example, taxonomy in the field of Biology - even *that* is a gigantic mess, and some of the smartest people in the world are working on that!