Setting and Genre are user interfaces
When most people talk about the setting of a movie, or its genre, I think it’s safe to say that few would call these “user interfaces”, the way you might talk about a button or slider in an app. Calling a movie’s setting or genre a “user interface”, you might reasonably say, is very weird. And you’re right: it is weird. But I also think it’s accurate—and useful.
A piece of media (like a movie or video game) is something we interact with—even if the media is entirely digital, and even if the interaction is ostensibly passive (like watching).
Since we interact with media, by definition they have interfaces that shape that interaction.
In the canonical text on user interfaces, The Design of Everyday Things, author Don Norman defines the essential concepts of interface affordances and signifiers:
“An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support and, therefore, affords sitting.”
“Knobs afford turning, pushing, and pulling.”
“Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible.”
“I call the signaling component of affordances signifiers.”
“Signifiers can be deliberate and intentional, such as the sign PUSH on a door, but they may also be accidental and unintentional, such as our use of the visible trail made by previous people walking through a field.”
(I prefer the term “signal” over “signifier”, as it suggests an intended recipient.)
Anyway: how do physical properties of objects like chairs and knobs relate to conceptual properties of media like setting and genre?
Well, I’d argue, plenty.
What is setting?
Humor me a moment, and let’s define setting. The dictionary definition’s not bad:
the place or type of surroundings where something is positioned or where an event takes place
the place and time at which a play, novel, or film is represented as happening
I’ve emphasized “type of surroundings” because people often get stuck on “place and time”, which is usually less important. For example, a fantasy “type of surroundings”—with dragons, knights, and wizards—is more important than the particular “place and time”.
Settings are usually composed of expressive characters, items, costumes, and environments (which might include creatures, structures, etc.). In music, a setting might be the instruments or scale.
The term “setting” is sometimes used interchangeably with “theme” (e.g. “a fantasy-themed movie”), but I’ll use “setting” since “theme” is often associated with conceptual themes or meaning.
Regardless: how is a media’s setting a user interface? The setting provides a familiar vocabulary of elements—what designers call “mental models”—which allow you to understand (“mentally grasp”) what those elements are, and how they relate to each other. The setting “affords” understanding. Its elements are affordances, and their presence signals the setting.
To take the previous example: a piece of media might signal a fantasy setting through the presence of a wizard, a magical sword, and a princess. These elements, in turn, must be recognizable through their own signals.
For example, a wizard might be signaled by “an old bearded man in a long robe”. This allows you to understand the wizard as a familiar element and bring your existing mental model (wise, powerful, casts spells)—which can then be reinforced or subverted.
For a setting to be understandable, its elements must be coherent, and the elements themselves must be recognizable through their own signals.
Game designer Sid Meier often talks about why he tries to leverage familiar (often historical) settings in games rather than inventing entirely new settings and elements:
Because the player can bring to a historical topic a LOT of information that they already know, and it’s important to reinforce that information for the player.
If they run in Genghis Khan in a Civilization game, he’s going to be kind of angry and aggressive. That makes the player feel “I kind of get where he’s coming from”. You know, you don’t have to explain it in a massive Civilopedia.
Or, if you’re building a game about railroads or pirates, there’s a LOT that the player can bring to a topic like that that they already know.
You can see Shakespeare follow a similar strategy in most of his plays, using historic or mythic settings (e.g. “the moors of Scotland” or “ancient Rome”) that are familiar to his audiences—and therefore understandable—while still providing a whiff of novelty.
However: although a setting might tell you how to understand a world, it doesn’t tell you how to interact with it, how you’re supposed to feel about it.
Which brings us to genre.
What is genre?
It seems obvious—but isn’t, necessarily. The dictionary:
a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.
It’s a start. As a form of media matures, it becomes necessary to organize it into useful categories. So: genres.
But!
The temptation, often, is to categorize media based on superficial aspects—such as setting—and then refer to its setting as its genre. Such as a movie’s genre being “fantasy” or “Western”. But I would argue that it’s critical to keep the concepts of setting and genre separate.
So what, then, is genre?
I would propose that the most consistently useful way to categorize media is by how you interact with it—which, for many forms of media, is how you’re supposed to feel about it.
Aristotle, famously, did this in Poetics, organizing theatrical drama of his time into comedy and tragedy, and in this regard he basically nailed it: comedies you’re supposed to laugh at, and tragedies you’re supposed to cry at. Comedies “afford” laughing, and tragedies “afford” crying.
Dramas that afforded “laughing” and “crying” to audiences provided a useful social purpose, such as a bringing people together (through catharsis) and affirming shared cultural values. As a result of this useful function, comedy and tragedy were codified into genres and perpetuated. (Aristotle’s third genre, “satyr plays”, obviously did not survive over time.)
In the context of another media, early cinema, I think it’s fascinating that some of the improvised terms writers used to describe genres—such as “laffers”, “weepies”, and “horror”—described your literal physical reaction. The terms may have been condescending, but they were fitting.
Likewise, many music genres also describe your literal physical reaction: rock, blues, easy listening, swing—or lofi hip hop beats to study/relax to.
Nowhere is this “genre-as-how-you-interact-with-it” classification more prevalent than in video games, where genre almost always describes how you will play the game. For example, a “team-based multiplayer first-person shooter” or a “third-person, open world action role playing game”. Each of these descriptors has come to signify very specific meanings for how you will play the game (your “possibility space”, or “verbs”), but not necessarily their setting. Although some of these terms might suggest a possible setting, they’re by no means definitive; a “shooter” suggests a setting involving guns, but really could be anything with a projectile action (e.g. a bow, a firehose, a “portal gun”, etc.).
Genre evolution
Over time, as the quantity and variety of media has exploded, more genres (and subgenres) have emerged and become codified; and in each case, they usually articulate more specific types of interactions or intended emotions.
Movie genres, for example, now include romantic comedy, adventure, thriller, epic, science-fiction, slasher, on and on, each with different and more specific “ways you feel about them”.
It can be helpful to look at the process of genre speciation as a kind of natural selection: pieces of media develop mutations, some of those mutations give them competitive advantages in their ecosystem—allowing them to fill cultural niches and thrive—and suddenly new genres are born.
I’ve heard movie executives convincingly argue that the romantic comedy and horror genres became established because people on dates needed something to watch. Romcoms & horror—with their respective romantic triumphs and heart-racing scares (and, often, illicit sexuality)—served the emotional needs of people on dates better than other genres.
As designer Tony Fadell has astutely observed: “A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience.”
As new forms of media are created and their audiences have specific needs, new genres will develop to fulfill those needs. And the genres that are most fit for their environments survive and reproduce.
Genre signals
When a genre becomes popular, naturally there’s demand for more of it. After all, when people encounter something they like, they usually want more things like it. They want the familiarity of the things they like—but just different enough that it satisfies their desire for novelty. This tension between the comfort of the familiar and the desire for novelty means that genre serves a similar function as sequels or brands.
It also means that genres need signals so that people can recognize things as specifically “of that genre”.
Importantly, these genre signals need to exist both internally within the media—so that you know when to laugh, cry, scream, etc.—and externally, in whatever form you might first perceive the media; for example: the poster, book cover, movie trailer, or even the title itself.
An example of internal genre signals is how comedies signal when you’re supposed to laugh through conventions that have become more sophisticated over time: from the pantomime gestures, slapstick, and other broad signals that had to be readable in a large theater, to more subtle microexpressions, shot design, and editing cues in motion pictures.
Likewise, other genres have their own internal genre signals (conventions, tropes) across different forms of media.
In terms of external genre signals, your first encounter with a piece of media—even in promotional form—critically tells you how you’ll interact with the actual media. Or at least, it should. Recognizing these genre signals probably informs your decision whether or not to interact with it.
Historical examples of this practice, I think, are telling. In Shakespeare’s time, every day before a performance, the Globe Theatre would raise a flag—visible across the River Thames—with the color of the flag advertising the genre of the play to be performed: white for comedy, black for tragedy, red for history (epic).
This is probably one of the clearest and most literal examples of an external genre signal. Audiences could decide, across a physical distance, if they were in the mood for the experience on offer.
While external genre signals have become more sophisticated over time, it’s only just barely. There are still ubiquitous patterns of “red-and-white” Hollywood comedy posters, use of the Trajan typeface for horror movies, blackletter typefaces for heavy metal logos, and countless other blunt-force genre signals across media. Although these types of genre signals may seem crude and inelegant, they are also—crucially—extremely effective. Particularly when you consider that people might be scanning dozens or hundreds of book covers or streaming titles. Often the window to make an impression is a fraction of a second.
However: when an external genre signal succeeds in catching someone’s attention, an implicit negotiation begins to take place. This negotiation is what screenwriters call “the contract with the audience”.
The contract with the audience
When a piece of media signals that it is of a certain genre, and the audience recognizes this and agrees to interact with it on those terms, this forms part of the contract with the audience; a contract to fulfill, among other things, the expectations of the advertised genre.
And that’s the critical part: the media must deliver what it promises. A title is often the first external genre signal someone might perceive, and there is genuine wisdom in using the title to deliver “exactly what it says on the tin”.
In the screenwriting guide Save the Cat, author Blake Synder explicitly designates part of his screenplay structure for fulfilling “the promise of the premise”—though the concept applies just as easily to other media.
To take the example of Shakespeare (yet) again: boy, does he deliver what he promises. There’s plenty written about the genius of his prose, but I’d argue that an underappreciated aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is simply giving people what he says he will. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a tragedy more bloody than Titus Andronicus, a comedy more wacky than The Comedy of Errors, a history more epic than Henry V.
Violating the contract
Where media often falls into trouble is by “violating the terms of the contract”. Either by not fulfilling the expectations of the signaled genre, by not (or poorly) executing internal genre signals, or by not clearly signaling what genre the media was to begin with.
Most of Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays” contain exactly these kinds of genre violations. The Merchant of Venice is “a comedy” about whether the romantic lead will have a pound of flesh extracted from him, etc.
Famously controversial endings often come from similar misalignments, such as the ending to the TV sitcom Seinfeld, where all the beloved characters are sentenced to prison (a hilarious concept, but an emotional rug-pull). Or the original ending to the mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which the main character, rather than winning a climactic battle against monsters by piloting his giant robot, instead overcomes inner demons through thoughtful introspection.
When settings are used as genre signals
A complicating issue for my strict separation between setting and genre is that sometimes—especially when a genre is first becoming established—a setting will be used as an attempt to signal a specific genre. For example, in the early days of film, the “Western” setting initially signaled the “action” genre, and the “space” setting signaled the “science-fiction” genre.
However: as a particular setting-genre fusion becomes popular and established, inevitably new media will start to experiment by disentangling the setting and genre; e.g. the “Western” film setting is eventually separated from the “action” genre for use in other-genre movies like High Noon (noir), Blazing Saddles (spoof), and Ravenous (horror).
There are many other movie examples of this kind of “initial fusion” of a setting-genre and its “eventual separation” such as space/sci-fi, cyberpunk/noir, monster/horror, fantasy/epics, and so on. A similar phenomenon occurred with the modern “superhero” setting, which was initially shorthand for the heroic epic genre, before Marvel famously began experimenting with other genres from movie to movie.
Once a setting is fully separate and distinct, signaling a genre often relies on other, often aesthetic cues—such as music, cinematography, or art direction.
Why does this matter?
It’s a fair question.
In my career, I’ve often seen media creators—whether it’s filmmakers or game developers—start by creating a piece of media, and then only once it’s almost finished really consider questions like:
- How will people understand this world? (What is its setting, and how is it signaled?)
- How are people supposed to interact with it? (What is its genre, and how is it signaled?)
- How can it be marketed? (How can it be externally signaled so that people will want to interact with it?)
It’s almost never a good idea to work backward from a completed work to then try to figure out its setting and genre. It’s a recipe for frustrated marketers (“Who is this for?!”), and more frustrated (or uninterested) audiences.
I’ve also seen instances where media creators confuse “setting signals” and “genre signals”, or believe that the presence of one type of signals will result in the other type being automatically assumed. This isn’t the case! People need to both understand a work, and know how to interact with it.
To be clear: I’m not arguing to exclusively use cliché settings and heavy-handed genre tropes. But I am arguing that settings and genres need to be recognizable, grounded with familiar signals. Works should absolutely contain novelty—but be strategic about how and where novelty is introduced. Familiarity without novelty might be cliché, but novelty without familiarity is confusion.
When creating a work, it’s a good practice to think hard about setting and genre: how they’ll each be signaled to the audience, both internally and externally. Without these, a work can be hard to understand, and hard to interact with. It can be confusing and—literally—“inaccessible” due to lack of perceived affordances.
Settings are user interfaces which afford understanding.
Genres are user interfaces which afford interaction.
They are different concepts—but both need clear signals to succeed.
