Storygame Genre
Changeful Tales
“Changeful Tales” is a blog series where I rework my dissertation into more bite-sized, readable, and visible ideas.
Game genre is a frustratingly inexact concept, as many have observed. Designer Ernest Adams, for instance, calls this problem “genre muddle,” speaking to the many contradictory spectra we use to categorize games, and formally identifying four: audience, setting, theme, and purpose. When we talk about a horror game (theme), a casual game (audience), a Wild West or space game (setting), or a serious game (purpose), we shift naturally between different, non-hierarchical, overlapping ways of cataloguing.
Nor are these the only ways of dividing the space of game genres, obviously: whether arranging games by their platform (“PC”) or company (“Nintendo”), shared mechanics (“shooters”) or interface elements (“point-and-click adventures”) or required skills (“bullet hell”), we are constantly moving between different kinds of distinctions when we put games into categories. This happens in other media as well, of course, but the space of games is so broad that this muddle can become a problem when we try to speak and think critically about them.
Steam, for instance, gives games a single top-level category. This includes a grab-bag of different approaches to genre, from market size to number of players to shared mechanics to subject matter. While Steam has experimented with various kinds of non-hierarchical tags over the years, the primary genre remains crucial for the kinds of games its users browse, purchase, and think of as similar to games they’re already playing.
There are issues with this. Nearly all narrative games, for instance, are lumped into the categories of “RPG” or “adventure,” and these games are often wildly at odds with the way those labels are used in other contexts. My game The Ice-Bound Concordance has elements of “simulation” and “strategy,” but it’d probably better find its target audience if listed as “adventure” — though it’s not an adventure game by any stretch of the definition. Nor is it an “RPG,” the only other story-centering option. Maybe “Indie,” although that implies all sorts of assumptions about how much I should charge for it. And let’s not get into the angst of making a category selection like this when you’re submitting your game to a review site…
This arbitrary bucketing has a real effect not only on which games we can find to play, but on how we consider them similar and different. For example, despite the fact that games about managing sports teams have made major technical advances in social simulation, narration of dynamic stories, and drama management, these games are rarely studied alongside other kinds of procedural narrative games simply because most people making each kind of game are rarely exposed to the other. Much of the design work in these two communities is therefore mutually unknown, to the detriment of all. (A nice exception is this free GDC Vault talk by Peter Garcin, if you’re curious.)
Even surface-level genre divisions have marred our ability to study shared systems and mechanics. Despite being largely similar in their underlying structure, text adventures, graphical adventures, and narrative puzzle-platformers have rarely been studied alongside each other. And yet these genres contain many of the same core elements, such as exploring a fictional world as part of uncovering a story, and coming to a new understanding of that world that allows one to advance — a very different kind of puzzle-solving than is found in pure logic puzzles. In an upcoming book on adventure games, my collaborators and I look at a wide selection of games across many “genres” that have several critical factors like the above in common, but have rarely been considered together as part of the same tradition: this kind of analysis is still surprisingly rare in game studies.
Given the problems with genre, how can we make useful distinctions between different styles of storygame?
One approach is to zoom out and abstract the problem up to a less hierarchical, less exclusive level. In literature, we might say a book is operating in a certain mode (such as the comic, ironic, or didactic mode) which doesn’t preclude someone else (or myself, in a different lit class) from interpreting it as part of other traditions as well. Literary modes are a “critical term usually identifying a broad but identifiable literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre.” Interpreting a work as an example of a particular mode can offer insights into the intentions of its creator and tools for understanding its aims and how it goes about advancing them, without being quite as categorical or imperfectly precise as genre.
But for a genuinely useful solution, we also need to zoom in, looking at the specific mechanics, design choices, and implementation details that make one storygame experientially different from another. When speaking about storygame’s design, it’s perhaps less useful to know whether it’s a “graphical adventure” or a “text adventure” than to learn something about how its narrative systems actually work.
Take a Twine. It might have a completely linear structure of nodes with no choice points. It might, instead, have ten thousand nodes and fifty thousand links. It might hide nearly all of those options behind a single link two-thirds of the way through the piece, or make them all easily accessible from a central hub, or be richly interconnected throughout. The lexia in the piece might be completely static, completely procedurally generated, or do something in between such as templated text; the structure of the links might likewise be static or dynamic.
But we don’t learn any of this from the label “Twine,” and we don’t have a commonly accepted set of alternative labels to use either. Even more surprisingly, outside of a few experts you often don’t even find this kind of information in a review — let alone in the marketing, where every single one of the above structures will unfailingly be described with a phrase like “your choices really matter!”
Solutions often arise to differentiate works from each other within particular communities of practice, though these rarely cross over or become mainstream. The hypertext and gamebook communities have terms to cover the above situations, but they’re not the same terms and they’re not widely known outside their respective niches. Or consider the Cruelty Scale for parser IF, invented by Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) in the mid-1990s: this metric assigns a game one of five possible rankings based on how seriously the wrong input can screw up your chances of winning. A “cruel” rating means the player can take an action that makes the game impossible to win, without notifying the player that this has happened, making anything you do after that point completely futile. (Many early text adventures were retroactively given this rating, such as Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein you must feed a certain dog a certain cheese sandwich at a certain early moment or be unexpectedly killed by an alien battle fleet much later, in service of a joke about the arbitrariness of cause and effect — it’s very Douglas Adams.)
While some players enjoy this sort of thing, others find it an obnoxious waste of their time (especially when not softened by Douglas Adams prose). The Zarfian cruelty rating became a widely used metric among IF fans specifically because it revealed in a single word a vital aspect of a game’s structure, which might well impact one’s decision to play it at all (and how close at hand to keep a walkthrough, if one does).
These early Changeful Tales posts are in part about defining a particular vocabulary for interactive stories that lets us speak more precisely about how they work. The way I use storygame itself is part of this precision, as is distinguishing expressive input from control schemes that don’t give the player as open a space of interaction. Returning to the graph with which I began this series:
…we can think of this as working towards a way of discussing interactive story structures with words that’s as immediately clear as this graph. In my next post, I’ll introduce another useful concept, narrative logics, that provides another analytical tool more useful than genre.
