interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
I hate when people do that. like no, just because you play a role in a game doesn’t mean it’s a rpg. though honestly genre names are so horribly named. like wtf even is an “action adventure”? aren’t most games adventures where there’s action?
Correct. But the genre names usually have a history how they originated. Problem is, while the games changes, the names of genres did not. It’s a mess. To be honest, it was a mess from the beginning, but it got worse over time.
I personally see “genres” like tags grouping a game in a few words. With the possibilities and variety of games of today and the ancient genre names of the past, classifying games based on a single genre name does not workout always, especially with terms as broad as Action/Adventure. We even have genres or “game types” named after games titles, such as “Metroidvania”, “Souls-like” or even “Breath-like” (yeah, some use that term too…).
Some even classify GTA as a racing game; it’s ridiculous! But on the other hand, sometimes genres are descriptive of what the game is about to a certain degree “Fighting”, “Racing” or “MOBA” are examples of useful groups. That does not mean games can’t be classified in multiple groups (hence why I said it makes most sense to use these like tags).
the fact that people started using “breath-like” as a genre just shows botw isn’t a zelda game. if it were sufficiently similar to other zeldas, they’d say zeldalike but they don’t.
Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres, deleted
or “simulation” games. like every fucking game is a simulation!
or “music” games, what game doesn’t have music?
Most games aren’t simulations. The difference between a simulation and a game that isn’t a simulation is that… the game is usually way more fun, and a simulation is usually very difficult to play. Take racing games. Cars handle way differently in racing games than in real life, which someone will find out if they try to drive a race car simulator and find themselves quickly spinning out. (Hopefully they learn it on a simulator. I’ve seen people learn it in real cars; it is an expensive lesson.)
so it’s a simulation of a car that works a bit different from real life
Nope.
The opposite of simulation is arcade, “simulation” meaning “as close to real life as we can get it” and “arcade” meaning “let’s optimise this for gameplay instead”.
Don’t try to dictionary your way around genre descriptors that’s not how they work.
The classical action adventure is something like King’s Quest. The genre roots in Colossal Cave and its golden days weren’t action but puzzle adventures, things like Monkey Island.
If you look at the definition of the genre yep RPGs usually are adventures, but not all adventures are RPGs. Also you can’t takes those things too seriously as strictly speaking e.g. Tyrian qualifies. In the end genres operate pretty much on a “I know it when I see it” basis and have quite fuzzy borders.