Core Post #3 - Dan Hawkins

 

Recently, I got into an argument with some strangers on the Internet on the nature of genre. It was in an RPG discord filed under the “Other media” subchannel. In increasingly aggressive tones, we went back and forth on the value of genre; the other posters believed (foolishly, in my opinion) that an understanding of genre is either unrelated to or actively impeding one’s understanding of a particular text. I strongly argued the opposite, that understanding the forms and function of genre elevates how we interpret and approach media. Being an internet discussion, I eventually gave up and nobody was convinced of anything other than each other’s idiocy.

In light of that awful interaction, I enjoyed Jason Mittell’s “Television Genres as Cultural Categories.” I’ve spent a lot of thought on how genre operates in videogames, which I believe is in some ways even more convoluted than the problems with television genres that Mittell describes. There remains the industrial element of genre construction: the size, structure and relationship to publishing of a game developer all affect its monetization practice, narrative and mechanical scope, platform and controls—all of which in turn affect a game’s genres. The plural of genres is an additional complication -- games tend to have two axes of genre: the textual genre that describes the content, aesthetic, and style with which we are more likely to be familiar (science-fiction, romance, mystery, etc). This genre is then interpreted by the other axis of genre, the procedural genre – the categories of mechanics, systems, and logic that form how the game is actually played. Platformer, first person shooter, 4X Strategy, Visual Novel, puzzle are all formal categories that affect the mediation between the text and the player. To give a random example, Halo and Mass Effect are both sweeping science-fiction epics told through action, but the former’s genre of a first-person shooter causes it function radically different than the latter’s role-playing game form.

Personally, I find Mittell’s arguments for understanding genre as “Cultural Practice” and “Situated within Larger Systems of Cultural Hierarchies and Power Relations” to be especially persuasive. Particularly in videogames, genre is almost inseparable from not just the cultural but the industrial processes that created them. Metroidvania, Souls-like, Rogue-likes, are all understandings of genre that derive from specific works by particular developers. In some ways, the distance between the culturally understood genre and the industry that created it is far smaller than other mediums. We don’t typically conceive of television shows as being “Lost-like” or “Thrones-like”. While I think that Mittell’s conception of genre as an object of analysis itself is useful, I think it needs to be re-examined and modified to be applicable to games.