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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres,
but their similarities caused people writing magazine articles to group them together, under a single term “action-adventure”but they were often grouped together. You can think of it as “either or”, rather than some weird neologism[Edit: i can’t back up the statement that they were merge by magazine writers, that’s just where i first saw them merged]
That’s actually not the case. Action adventure games are neither adventure games nor action games. Adventure games refer to text adventures. “action adventure” then is an adventure game, but that isn’t turn/text based (hence “action”). Similarly, an “action game” is something like pong.
It’s just an unfortunate name due to the weird history of game genres.
I deleted most of my comment because what i had written was basically nonsense.
The main point that i was going for is that “action adventure” isn’t a useless category, since it’s a hybrid of two separate genres.
You can have non-action adventure games. Something like A Short Hike comes to mind. It didn’t need to turn/text based explicitly, but that’s common.
You can also have action non-adventure games. You mentioned pong, but this could be anything that requires real time responses and control. Beat-em-ups are common.
Action-Adventures are hybrids of the two: real time inputs with discovery elements