A conversation during the Christmas party I attended in 2021 sparked a series of thoughts and discussions about games afterwards. Someone asked me to recommend some games since they had never played many and were curious about them. I responded that it's akin to giving someone a movie recommendation without knowing what genres they favour. Or similarly, recommending restaurants without knowing what kind of foods they enjoy or any dietary requirements they may have. It's possible to do the equivalent of recommending a BBQ meat-focused restaurant to a vegan or a salad-focused cafe to one who prides themselves on their unhealthy meat intake when talking about games. I don't want to be that person who gives the wrong advice and accidentally shuts down another's interest in a topic.

When it comes to games and my own tastes, personally, I've both narrowed and widened them over the decades. In my late teens and early twenties, I enjoyed FPS and engaged in competitive multiplayer via MMOs, enjoying the fast-paced action and constant engagement. However, now I don't see a point in running around and clicking things quickly or feel any desire to compete with others -- I'd much rather collaborate. On the other hand, I never really appreciated platformers, card games, and action-adventure games on any deep level until I grew older (or, in the case of the latter, experienced the Souls and Monster Hunter series). But I have enjoyed strategy and simulation games since I picked up my first one around the age of 8 and, to this day, spend too many hours in city-, base-, and park-builders. With the rate games release these days, there's always something new to explore regardless of the genre.

Another thing I've discovered with age is that when I encounter something new and intriguing, such as a fresh twist on a well-known mechanic, my appreciation takes a different form. When I was younger, I would feel a rush of excitement and dive into the new thing, eager to experience it as much as possible. Now, while I still feel enthusiastic about all discoveries, the sensation is more akin to eagerly pulling out a magnifying glass than rushing out the door -- I'm always keen to wrap my head around how they function and their impact on the game systems as a whole. For example, how does this new thing change how we play the game? Does it add or detract from managerial tedium? Does it encourage or discourage toxic behaviour between players? What new interactions can I create from this? And so on.

Anyway, I digress. The conversation at the party continued with me enthusiastically talking about how there are so many different types of games that it seems a little crazy to group them all under the one umbrella category of "game". On the one hand, the media in which games exist are plentiful. From the physical realm of simple dice and card games to more complex board games with tens of pieces or even games requiring no set pieces. Meanwhile, in the digital realm, we have games on mobile, consoles, running as standalone apps or in browsers on computers, and so on.

On the other hand, there are as many genres for these games as letters in the alphabet. The tricky thing, I stated, was that while we have genres such as those I listed a moment ago, they're often so well-defined and loosely adhered to that many games legitimately cross over multiple genres. Then games start taking elements representative of other genres into themselves, usually because those elements prove extremely popular, and we perceive such popularity as proof they are good. Such as when the stereotypical RPG levelling progression found its way into every other genre conceivable. When this constantly happens, the lines become even more blurred.

That being said, games aren't unique in their strategy of taking components from other genres and making them work in their own. For an example outside gaming, look at how pop music has evolved by folding elements from different popular genres into itself. For instance, pop took the 808 from R&B in the late 90s/early 00s and has taken influence from various electronic genres over the decades.

There's nothing wrong with games changing things up; sticking to well-defined genres can be pretty restrictive. So when creative masterpieces emerge, going against the norms of their genres to create intriguing and sometimes thoughtful experiences, it's excellent for gaming as a whole. Ultimately, categorising by genre may frankly be a mistake. It might not add value but rather exist as a continuation of the Victorian era obsession with categorising and grouping everything in existence. Trying to fit things into neat little categories in the real world never works out well. While the more freeform concept of giving a game multiple tags which describe it may be the way forward.

I can't claim to know the solution to these things, but I think we do need a running dialogue that takes games more seriously. This ties in with one of the projects I'm slowly (but surely) working on, where the definition of a game is the first thing we addressed. On the one hand, it feels like elitism to claim one thing is a game and another thing is not. But that's assuming it's an insult or otherwise derogatory to claim something isn't a game, as though that somehow lessens its legitimacy. If anything, I believe more and more that we need to accept that there are a myriad of interactive experiences out there that are as legitimate, if not sometimes more so, than "games", but shouldn't be called games. At least not in an academic sense.

The obvious thing to mention here is the interactive story - the clearly linear progression through a series of events that is predetermined to end in one of multiple manners, with gameplay elements facilitating the narrative. These could include anything from a text-based choose-your-own-adventure story turned into the digital format to a 3D experience where the player acts out the character's decisions themselves -- walking around, talking to NPCs, and trying to find interesting details in each scene. So while the player may be promised that "choices matter" and the story is "rich", ultimately, they're trying to make their way through a story that's already written.

The tricky thing is that many games that don't consider themselves interactive stories have a linear narrative that attempts to increase the player's emotional investment or make the world more immersive. These games include every type imaginable, from the deck-building rogue-lite to an open-world action-adventure, and team-based autobattlers to turn-based tactical role-playing games.

Here we recognise the influence of the tabletop RPGs and the cRPGs that blossomed from them in the 90s and the more recent blend of epic narratives from movies making their way into games. But the linear story in games seems like something we now take for granted. So one of the questions I'd like to address in the near future is how much does a game need a story, if at all? Are we so used to following stories that we struggle to honestly write our own, given a chance? How do we reconcile the myriad experiences that fall under the "game" category and our attempts at matching idealised genres to actual games?

But that's getting quite specific. Overall, I think there is value in taking a step back for a moment to look at games as a whole, what it means for something to be a game, and what elements make a game great. Or what makes a game terrible, for that matter. Hint: the more I dig, the more I find it has to do with profit incentives and misguided attempts at giving players what they seemingly want because we use sales and hype as a metric of intrinsic desire and value.

Regardless, this is a daunting undertaking that will likely receive more criticism than not, but it's also exciting to ask these questions. We can begin thinking about the opportunities we've restricted ourselves from envisioning this entire time due to our lack of questioning what's happening right now and what is normal. The ocean of possibility with games and their like is gigantic, yet it feels as though we've spent the last half-century in the shallows thinking we're always creating the next best thing, but not genuinely questioning if we are.