Method and sources

What a genre is, and why classifying them is hard

In video games, a genre is defined not by the theme (fantasy, war, sport) but by how it is played: what the player does and what challenge they face. Mark J. P. Wolf (2001) put it this way when he proposed a list of 42 genres based on interactivity, and Thomas Apperley (2006) argued that genres should describe interaction rather than visual representation.

Even so, genres are fuzzy categories. They blend, change with technology and are used by the industry to sell games. Dominic Arsenault (2009) shows that they evolve through imitation and innovation, and Clarke, Lee and Clark (2017) explain why classification schemes fail: they mix different purposes (identifying, searching, selling, teaching). GameGenres does not try to settle that debate. It offers a classification that is citable and useful for teaching, explicit about its choices.

The classification we use

• Backbone: the Multilingual Video Game Genre Taxonomy by the University of Washington GAMER Group (Brigham, Disher, Bloom and Lee, 2021). It is a thesaurus with hierarchical terms (genre and subgenres), relations between terms and scope notes, derived from the Video Game Metadata Schema. Each entry names its corresponding GAMER term.
• Our own extensions: some genres in wide use today (such as metroidvania or soulslike) are not in that taxonomy. We add them marked as an extension added by GameGenres, with their source.
• Traits kept apart from genre: perspective, time (real time or turn-based), game mode and presentation are recorded as facets, following the facet analysis by Lee et al. (2014). A game therefore has one gameplay genre and, separately, its traits, without inventing compound genres.
• Definitions: we write them ourselves in Spanish and English. We do not copy GAMER’s scope notes or text from other databases.
• Mappings: each genre links to its Wikidata equivalent and, where available, to Wikipedia, Steam, itch.io and the OLAC vocabulary. We use these databases as a starting point, never as the source of truth.

How we date history

No date appears without a source. A genre’s origin year is that of its first recognised game according to the historical literature (Kent, 2001; Wolf, 2008; Donovan, 2010; Williams, 2017) or, failing that, a linked reference source. Where there is debate (for instance, whether the first platformer is Space Panic or Donkey Kong), the entry explains it.

Linked games

We only link to legal sources, in this order of preference:

1. Games published by their authors, free or open source (itch.io, js13kGames, PICO-8, IF Archive).
2. Free official versions.
3. Preservation archives such as the Internet Archive, only for shareware or freeware.
4. Ad-supported portals, only when there is no alternative and always flagged.

We never link to ROMs or unlicensed abandonware sites. Every link records the date it was checked; links are checked automatically every month.

Our demos

Each full entry includes a minimal game we made with Kaplay, a simple and readable JavaScript engine. Each demo implements only the mechanics that define the genre, in roughly 100 to 250 lines, divided into sections that the entry explains one by one. The code is written in English, the usual working language of programming and of Kaplay’s documentation; the explanation of each section and the in-game texts are in both languages. The demos are deliberately generic: simple shapes and neutral situations, so that nothing distracts from the mechanic.

Licences

GameGenres’s text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and the code under the MIT licence. Linked games belong to their authors.

How to cite GameGenres

Ojeda Copa, A. & Lab TecnoSocial. (2026). GameGenres: video game genres. https://gamegenres.labtecnosocial.org/en/

Bibliography

• Aarseth, E., Smedstad, S. M., & Sunnanå, L. (2003). A multidimensional typology of games. Proceedings of DiGRA 2003 Conference: Level Up. https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2003i1.66
• Adams, E. (2014). Fundamentals of Game Design (3rd ed.). New Riders.
• Apperley, T. H. (2006). Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game genres. Simulation & Gaming, 37(1), 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878105282278
• Arsenault, D. (2009). Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 3(2), 149–176. https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6003
• Brigham, E., Disher, T., Bloom, H., & Lee, J. H. (2021). Multilingual Video Game Genre Taxonomy (Version 1.0). GAMER Group, Information School, University of Washington. https://gamer.ischool.uw.edu/files/2019/09/MultilingualThesaurusV1.pdf
• Clarke, R. I., Lee, J. H., & Clark, N. (2017). Why Video Game Genres Fail: A Classificatory Analysis. Games and Culture, 12(5), 445–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015591900
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• Donovan, T. (2010). Replay: The History of Video Games. Yellow Ant.
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• Heintz, S., & Law, E. L.-C. (2015). The Game Genre Map: A Revised Game Classification. Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 175–184. https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2793123
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• Lee, J. H., Clarke, R. I., & Perti, A. (2015). Empirical evaluation of metadata for video games and interactive media. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(12), 2609–2625. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23357
• Lee, J. H., Karlova, N., Clarke, R. I., Thornton, K., & Perti, A. (2014). Facet Analysis of Video Game Genres. iConference 2014 Proceedings, 125–139. https://doi.org/10.9776/14057
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