March 14, 2012 Eric Swain Game Issues, Recent Posts A Clarification of Genre: Action Please read the previous entry – Introduction – as this post will be building off of the foundation stones and concepts put forth there. That post also contains some clarifications for how I will be writing this series. And now to the first Super-genre on the list. Action The key to understanding the Action Super-genre is understanding the commonalities between so many genres that we think of as Action games. Where does the platformer intersect with the shooter with the racer and so on? | more
March 12, 2012 Eric Swain Game Issues, Recent Posts A Clarification of Genre: Introduction Several months ago, I tried to explain some of the problems I saw with the discussions of video game genres. These conversations around what are Adventure game and RPGs keep popping up every couple of days in posts and all over twitter and I wanted to address some concerns with what I saw taking place in these conversations. I didn’t convey my ideas well at the time. Also, spawning off of this post I realized that while people debate genre there is a lot of annoyance at these debates at the perceived uselessness of the idea of genres. | more
November 14, 2011 Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts The Supergenres of Action, RPGs and Adventure Games I wrote a piece for Gameranx asking the question, ‘What is action/adventure?‘ This is part of the larger question about game genres, one that’s been discussed at length over twitter and several posts have come up as well with regards of what certain genres are. As much as the genre debate is generally one of semantics, or in the case of Action/Adventure pigeonholing, I feel there is a necessary undercurrent of philosophy and focus behind the question of what they are that is generally lacking in the current discussion. | more
