Part Two. The Genres of Games

People need a way to talk about the kinds of games they like to play, and game retailers like to display similar games together. The concept of genre helps them do this. A game’s gameplay determines its genre. Games can have identical settings and yet belong to different genres, so a medieval role-playing game belongs to a different genre than a medieval war game. Similarly, a construction and management game can be set in any location and time period, but it is still a construction and management game. For more information about how the concept of genre differs from such issues as setting, audience, theme, and purpose, read the Gamasutra article “Sorting Out the Genre Muddle” (Adams, 2009).

In this part of Fundamentals ...

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