In this blog post, I will consider the practice of categorizing videogames by genre, and by focusing on Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022), I will conclude that videogame genres can confuse or mislead potential consumers and have the following two flaws. Firstly, genres themselves can overlap and not describe the type of game fully. Secondly, genres do not necessarily capture the qualities of games.
To elaborate on my first point, Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022) is categorized in multiple ways by different sources. On Steam, it is given the labels “Action, Adventure, Indie, Strategy” (Steam, 2022), whereas a quick google search will tell you is it a “Roguelike, Indie, Fighting game” (Wikipedia, 2022). In my playthrough, without prior knowledge of the genres, I would have described Cult of the Lamb as an adventure and construction game, due to the main goals being gathering resources, whether that be through collecting natural resources or killing enemies and opening chests, and building your cult, as both an area and a number of followers. I wouldn’t say any of the genres above miscategorize Cult of the Lamb, but they could certainly confuse potential consumers who are looking for a strictly ‘fighting game’ or a ‘construction game’. There is also no emphasis on which genres it falls into more i.e. does the fighting aspect take up 90% of your time, or it is the construction? Cult of the Lamb is not the best example of this, as the story is not necessarily ‘fixed’, and you can choose how you focus your time (whether that be fighting or building your cult), but this idea may be more applicable to games which have more of a rigid story structure.
This leads to my second point, do genre labels show the essence/qualities of a videogame? Yes, Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022) does have a range of construction mechanics, so it is a construction game, but it is vastly different to Planet Coaster (Frontier Developments plc, 2016), which is also a construction game where you can build and develop theme parks. Cult of the Lamb could be described as ‘gorey’ or ‘satanic’, something children should stay away from, whereas Planet Coaster is more ‘cheerful’ and ‘relaxing’, hence being child friendly. They are vastly different games, but fall under the same genre. My point here is, each genre has a huge variety of games, and just because you like a certain genre, does not mean you’d like all of the games in it, and hence shopping by genre could also be potentially confusing to consumers.
This brings me to the question, if you don’t categorize videogames by genre, how do you categorize them, or is categorization in general flawed? The concept of genres is easy to criticize, however, it is useful in roughly grouping games, and if a consumer reads into a certain game further, past the genres, i.e. by reading a synopsis or developer description, they can make their own opinion about the game. I think my main issue is that genres can mislead consumers based on first impressions, but at the same time, I’m not sure how this could be done differently.
Feel free to comment if you have any solutions to these issues, or if you have any other opinions!
I think the more and more nuanced specifications of game content classification are a better alternative than merely stating a genre name that is open to misinterpretation. Similarly to how one would describe a dish, you would list all the commonly occurring features of the said game using brief flags. For example, some common user-defined tags for Rimworld on steam are: “Colony Sim, Base Building, Survival, Strategy, Management, Sandbox, Moddable, Open World, Procedural Generation, 2D, Sci-fi, Indie, Tactical, RPG” while Cult of the Lamb has another set of user-defined tags that share some similar components with Rimworld, but differentiates itself with the more action-oriented gameplay and modernist rouge-like level generation vs. Rimworld’s open world exploration based colony management gameplay. Allowing consumers to define and tag games from a pool of keywords creates a standardized environment that is far more nuanced and user-friendly that the traditional genre classification of videogames.
You raise a great point here. I think it is fair to say that video game genres are social constructs. If we look at the development and evolution of other social constructs, say sexuality or sexual identity, we can see that some ‘positions’ within these constructs are considered legitimate and some considered deviant depending on specific social and historical contexts (Foucault, 1978). Society has come a long way (though more could certainly be done) in recognizing that it is simply not the case that a certain sexual identity can be illegitimate. Thinking along the same vein, as society and video games develop and evolve in tandem, new genres will surely emerge. Perhaps there will be more ‘hybrid’ genres. It may even get to a point where there are so many distinct genres that it no longer matters what genre a game is. The genre that the developer/players give to a game may be so distinct that it practically serves as another name for the game. Conversely, as technologies such as the metaverse develops, perhaps all video games become hyper-realistic and converge to the simulation genre. Who knows? Personally though, I don’t pay too much attention to what genre a game is insofar that if it is a good game I will like it regardless of whether it is a walking simulator or a AAA FPS.
Foucault M. The history of sexuality: An introduction. London: Penguin; 1978.
Cult of the Lamb is a rather complex game to categorize because it heavily leans on the two genres of “construction” and “fighting,” but I don’t think this tricky genre categorization is necessarily something that will confuse consumers. You raise a good point that genre can be rather broad, with games that can be incredibly different from each other (such as Cult of the Lamb and Planet Frontier), but we have so many genres that genre itself has essentially become a tag or label system. We know that filtering based on one tag will get us a lot of results, not all of which we will enjoy, but the more we add, the narrower our selection becomes and the more likely we are to find games that would pique our interest. The larger issue, at least in my opinion, with the labels used by Steam and Google is that neither set seems to touch on the construction-style of the game. I think this is more a fault of whoever listed the game rather than the genre system as the labels are incomplete, so to speak.
Your ideas about classifying genre and what genre Cult of the Lamb truly is. I think that labeling anything over a single category is highly limiting. You could even define the original Rogue by calling it an exploring and fighting game but at the same time, splitting it apart makes it feel vaguer, much like the way that Steam and Wikipedia described the game. It becomes even more complicated when Cult of the Lamb is a more flexible game where the gameplay is more focused on the choice of the player and not the designer. Genre’s simplicity makes it flawed because it lacks the depth of a game, but at the same time, it usually gives enough context for the game’s mechanics and allows the player to explore the game on their own.
Very interesting blog post, and I agree that categorizing video games by genre can be problematic. I myself am generally against the idea of labelling something. I know this is a very general topic, but what I mean is that labels can often be very reductive and create pre-existing notions. You might be able to call the film Nope “horror,” but thematically and aesthetically it’s so much more than just that label. Moreover, you wouldn’t want audiences conflating Nope with other horror films. What I mean is Nope is very different than something like The Conjuring. And this hearkens back to your example of how Cult of the Lamb can be very different than other games in the same genre(s). Ultimately, genre sometimes does seem to be an obstacle in the way of the average consumer trying to find a game to play.
I think your brief aside comparing Planet Coaster and Cult of the Lamb is interesting—it’s a great example of two games in a genre can not appeal to the same person. However, the specific note about child-friendliness caught my attention and now I’m going to latch onto that. When I was younger, I feel like outside of books, age ratings dictated my consumption of media more than genre. My parents would always visit Common Sense Media before we watched any movies. I liked comedies, but Common Sense Media said Mean Girls was too sexual. I liked fantasy animation but Common Sense Media said Princess Mononoke had too mature themes. And so forth.
Alas, I couldn’t find a page for Planet Coaster (though I did find a reddit post* from a parent asking if it was okay for eight year olds), but there is one for Cult of the Lamb.** (Interesting aside: the Themes & Topics side-scroll lists “Magical and Fantasy” and “Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires” for the game). One key aspect of Cult of the Lamb is the juxtaposition of the cute animals and the extreme violence, but the first parent’s review rightly declares “Good but extreme themes”. On the flip side, the first kid’s review is titled “Don’t let the cult themes scare you!”, so some discord between the parents and kids. My point is that I’m intrigued by level of age rating as another… category of sorting video games. Obviously, ratings operate differently than genre, but the layering of rating on top of genre as another way of categorizing is interesting. Furthermore, age ratings are so intensely political. But the interaction of the two I feel like adds something to this specific comparison you bring up, but I’m intrigued beyond construction games having different age audiences and how genre and age group interact.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetCoaster/comments/7t9om1/whats_the_minimum_recommended_age_to_play_this/
** https://www.commonsensemedia.org/game-reviews/cult-of-the-lamb