 Okay, so I guess this is supposed to be a video game genre, someone was supposed to moderate, but I guess that's nobody. Wait, wait, another panelist! What? Are you moderating? I am. You're moderating. Done. That's a lot of thoughts. Let's see if everyone introduced themselves. Let's just start. They have been important now. One guy, I do stuff. Yeah, we give you another chair. Can somebody have us a chair? Okay. I'm far from leaving the station. I'm busy moderating here, so. I'm Jeremy Pesner. I'm a veteran magfester, mag of five. Anyone in the house have been here that long? No. Good for you, guy over there. So I'm currently a graduate student at Georgetown University where I study a number of technology factors across the spectrum of human-computer interaction and technology policy issues. As I said, I've been coming to magfests for quite some time. I'm pretty familiar with the crowd and the way things work around here. I've also been involved with the gaming intellectuals panel for a number of years. As you see, I wore my professional outfit for the occasion. I don't need a microphone. This is not easy to pass back and forth. So I'm rim. I do a radio show along with Scott called Geek Nights. And we lecture widely at conventions like PAX Dev, PAX Australia, PAX East, PAX Prime. I quite see a pattern there. On game design, game theory, practical game theory, theory of games. Everything related to game theory in some order we talk about. And by day, I design interfaces and I'm the product manager for a financial software company for global equities and options trading and that sort of thing. I'm Scott. I'm the other host of the events podcast. He's with me. No. Don't listen to it. Don't listen to him. I have a computer science degree and my Steam account is way older than your Steam account. And that is why you should listen to what I have to say. You win an achievement. Yeah. All right. I'm Dr. Sean Cashman. I'm a professor of communication at Pfeiffer University down near Charlotte. I teach about games. I study games. I love to play games. And I'm going to pass that on. All right. I'm Vince Viamonti. I am a music composer, audio designer at that game company. And I also teach video game design over at the University of Southern California. Okay. Since I'm the de facto moderator, I guess we should get started. Who wants to, let's put the soles of the chopping block first. Well, I mean, okay. So the panel is what video game genres. Right. So I guess we know what a genre is. It's kind of, it's right. Do we? Do we want to discuss that first? Sure. All right. All right. Discuss that first. What's the genre? A miserable pile of secrets. To me, the way we use genres, and this is what bothers me. So I guess I'll go to the chopping block. You can wreck me up. So basically, genres in gaming specifically are nothing more than a list of mechanics that we use to describe a game. First-person platformer, third-person shooter, massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We list some of the mechanics that we believe are core, and then make games that fall into not the list of mechanics, but to the basically sort of set of mechanics that were in the first game we gave that label to. So MMORPG to me, it doesn't mean massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It means, wow, Asheron's called Meridian 59 Clone, and we call it an MMORPG. Well, I think my thoughts on genre are fairly well-rounded, but it's almost ludicrous the way we approach genre in video games. Right. You look at something like, yeah, in first-person shooter, right? We have no other medium in history to handle. Microphone? Where? So, take something like first-person shooter. We have no other medium in the history of humanity, which is defined by something like camera aim on, right? We don't talk about films by films which use MP5 lights, right? Or films which use lots of close-ups. And in fact, even our label, such as first-person shooter, is often a callus. Right? Nice thing done. I'm glad the bottom wasn't over there. So, you can take something like Mass Effect, right? Truth is, in Mass Effect, you spend the majority of your time third-person shooting. But we all know it's not a third-person shooter. Really, there's something at the heart of these genres. There's an emotive core to these genres. They actually mean something like a drama or like a romance. There's an emotive core. There's a reason that we go to these specific genres. And that's how we know that something like Mass Effect is a role-playing game, even though that's not how you spend most of your time, right? Or a portal, right? Most of us think of it as a puzzle game rather than a first-person shooter. Even though what you're doing the entire time is shooting in first-person. And so even though we label these by mechanics, that's not actually what they mean to us. And we really need to re-examine these definitions and find ways to define them by the emotive reasons that we as players go to these genres in order to move forward as an industry. Oh, dear. Do we need to do that? I come from the music world. You know, I'm a musician. I learned piano performance when I was a kid. And everyone accepts that massurcas are massurcas. And everyone accepts that fugues are fugues. You know, what is a fugue? A fugue is something that fugues, where you have multiple voices and subjects going between them. And those are low-level mechanics in music. And we keep on identifying piece after piece great pieces as just by these low-level mechanics. So at the same time, does music not have a much longer history than video games so that these genres are able to become very well-defined and we have a lexicon of sort of expert-agreed-upon language that has stood a long, long test of time as opposed to gaming, I mean, video gaming barely existed when I was born. Yeah, also if you consider a fugue, right, is someone who likes one fugue, is that person going to like fugues in general? Yes. Right? You think so? Yes. Right? But somebody who likes hip-hop is like a genre, it's like a categorization to help people discover new things that are similar to other things that they might also enjoy, right? So if you label, say, something a first-person shooter, like Team Fortress 2 and Tribes 2, right? They're both labeled as first-person shooters. But if you like one, you might not like the other. They're crazy different, right? You know, it's in music, like rock. Yeah, okay, rock songs, you might not, you know, it's such a broad category, right? In a more narrow category, like black metal. If you like black metal, you're probably going to like the other black metal band down the street, too, because the category is actually pretty well behind. This is probably good tense for me to jump in for a second. First of all, we'll take questions near the end. So we'll reserve about maybe 10, 15 minutes for those. But the way that I sort of consider genre in this medium, you know, many people would consider genre from a perspective of film studies in English, you know, wrapped up in the face of critical theory and matters like that. But I think in the case of this particular question, it might serve to use a cognitive approach as the one that is used in the discipline of human-computer interaction. In one-way media, such as music and film, the expression of the piece does not change from viewing to viewing. It is always the same. And although different people will interpret it differently, the process of the medium is constant, is same, is unchanging. In games, however, that is very much not the case. And in fact, they're very much defined by the interaction between the player and the medium itself. So I think that examining a cognitive approach, quite literally, what parts of your brain does this game engage to sort of help define genres? How many may choose to define first-person shooters versus puzzle games? They do tend to engage different thinking processes, different modalities, different ways of sort of examining and reviewing your environment. And so one way, for example, that I think this can be shown, for me at least, who thinks that first-person shooters and third-person shooters are different genres? Okay, so we get a few people. Yeah, maybe a few people here and there. I'll tell you from my experience, I like playing third-person shooters. I don't like playing first-person shooters. But why is that? Really the only difference, as James mentioned, is the camera angle. But why? Because your interaction as the player with the space and your avatars entirely reconstituted simply by the changing of the angle. And because of that, I'm able to see my environment a lot better. I don't have to turn the character in order to see the enemies and the objects in my area of sight. It's just already there. Similarly, House of the Dead and other sort of rail shooters sort of again sort of alter that interaction with your space. And I might consider that a different genre than the traditional first-person shooter for that reason. Now what's interesting is I don't have that same experience. To me, like when I play games, a first-person or third-person shooter feels pretty much the same to me as just a matter of how I interface. And I actually like games where I can choose between them depending on the situation. But they don't feel different to me as a player on any fun level. And that's why I think genre is sort of not born out of anything inherent in the medium. But inherent is sort of the sum total of the interaction between the particular game and the particular player. I'd have to agree, actually. And this is a good opportunity for me to jump in. As a rhetorical scholar, genre is a rhetorical term. For me, and the way that I approach genre, is that genre is a term that we use. It's something that we create. Something that we, a concept that we as a group of society and collective create to understand something. We say, okay, these things over here, they share something in common. We recognize and we go, oh, well then we're going to categorize that. We're going to call it a genre. And these genres are fluid. They change over time. They have sub-genres. There's all sorts of categories to them. But what's really key is how do these genres come about? And I think some of our speakers here have talked about that. Why is it we label these as first-person shooters? Who called it the first-person shooter at the beginning? And who puts it on the box and says this is a first-person shooter? So that's a question we should definitely consider. Who's creating these genres? Is it the company that's creating it for us? Or are we the gamers creating these genres? And the companies are spoiling them. We'll see it. So as a designer, there is a real practical value to genres and to... We need a semantic language to talk about games. And it is largely companies and marketing departments and media personalities who have defined these genres because we need a way to categorize. We need a at a glance look that can be provided to the consumer to quickly delve into what this product is. But I think we can do that in a way that's more beneficial. There's a lot that we've done. There's a lot that is in some ways holding back the medium by thinking about a first-person shooter as simply a first-person shooter. Well, I think going back to what you were saying which is where do these genres come from and almost every video game genre I can think of goes back to one game. You think about platformers. You go back to Mario or maybe Donkey Kong actually. You think about RTS. You go back to Dune 2. And you think about FPS. You go back to Wolfenstein 3. It was always one game that just was repeated. People repeated on that theme and they cloned it and they modified it and they made variations until there were so many variations until that one idea that it became a genre. There were so many clones. Originally it was a Wolfenstein clone, a Doom clone, but then when there were enough of them it became a genre. You don't see the Dig Dug genre because no one's really made variations of Dig Dug. So what genre is Dig Dug? We've made up this arcade genre to clump all those together because in the early days there weren't genres. The first one might have been the Space Invaders. Galaga was maybe the first one that was repeated on. Space Invaders. I think that's a very good point. To go back to Vincent's point about genres throughout history, a lot of music came out of the time of the Renaissance when they were very much focused on this new conception of arts in our world and defining this structure and this logic and reason that defined this art that was at once beautiful and recognizable, had patterns. It was a methodology that gave birth to a lot of the classical genres as we knew them. As we see later as the development of rock and other rock metals throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s those rules weren't necessarily there. So all of a sudden we had the Beatles taking from Jimi Hendrix and we had rap music and all of those things were sort of taking and borrowing from one another in a much less structured and defined manner. As a result, they become less well-defined and much more blurred. Well, even in rock, even in rap, every time that we expand the genres to the point where they're functionally useless in subcategories, grunge, punk so that can't stand, right? We don't have that explosion where we just blow out a genre because as humans we have a need to subcategorize, to have that quick understanding. So I wonder to whom this categorization is important is going back to music if you were going out to listen to some music back in the 1600s or 1700s you might not care that you're listening to sonatas or fuchs, you'll probably just care oh, is it opera seria or opera bupa is it serious or is it funny? Here in games this is a medium where if you're really involved in it you're playing the games and that's very different from just being a spectator and to whom are these genres really important? Is it the player or is it the spectator and maybe those are some different needs and we have to categorize in different ways, low level or high level or whatever. For example, tribes too and tribes as in very similar games on the surface people would put them in the same genre whatever that is, maybe a large scale three dimensional we make up some genre for that type of game, but yet they're so different in the way they actually play out to me, I would almost put them in completely separate genres like new metal versus new black metal versus new black death metal versus new black few death technical metal and in a few seconds we'll be very into bed so do we just have a tree that goes down to where at the end every game is in its own uselessly specific genre and different people just kind of go to whatever level of this tree they desire? These genres are important and I think what happens is there's a lot of people who if you're a person who creates something think about Bill Gates, whatever you think about Bill Gates if you think Bill Gates what defines him, you don't say Bill Gates, the guy who likes Porsches even though he does and has a lot of them you say Bill Gates, the guy who created Windows or whatever, he created something when you have not created something that is big that you can define yourself you define yourself you specify who you are by the things you consume so if you are someone who plays FPS or RTS you're like I am Scott, FPS player so if you define yourself according to this category of the group of things that you enjoy that are all similar then it matters a lot to you what that means and what other people think it means because then if you apply that label to yourself that's what people think of you if I say I'm a bronie it matters what people think of bronies what does that word mean to them versus what it means to me and I'm going to jump in here too as well and why genres are useful well a genre doesn't exist in isolation you don't just have the dig-dug genre and dig-dug there and nobody else can get in there a genre exists because there are other things that connect to it because they are so similar to something that they share, something that helps us to understand them and that's the real key behind genres it does something for us now who's using it we talked a little bit about that the industry is using it a little bit but so are critics, critics use them all the time every time I read a review the first line on a video game review is what kind of game it is this is a third person shooter and then they rattle off what makes it unique and what makes it different but they also compare it and that's really where genre becomes unique is the comparisons and I think that what we really talked about earlier was that we don't like those comparisons the way we're comparing it now because we're using mechanics to understand video game genres whereas with say film or books we're using narrative elements so we can look at cowboys vs aliens and go it's western and they got aliens so we got sci-fi and it doesn't matter how they film it they could film it from somebody's perspective or they could player which project they really wanted to hideous if they could or they could film it like Michael Bay style and everything blows up it doesn't matter it really doesn't, it's not going to change the genre at all but with video games that matters is there a better mechanic perhaps or a better way in which well I've noticed a subtle distinction between the way video gamers juggle and classify their games versus tabletop gamers and the tabletop gamers will almost always refer to specific other games in combination they'll say oh this game is power grade plus calis this game is munchkin plus poker they'll like just list actual games they almost never talk about genres and only super hardcore people talk about genres in the video game way like I'll say oh it's an open auction whatever kind of game with a drag but then I'll explain it to anyone else who isn't hardcore oh yeah it's like calis but add some stuff more and more I have a theory about why that might be the case with games like tabletop you have as we talk about we're sort of defining games by face elephants, by mechanics by perspectives in tabletop games you have fewer of those and so the ones that do tend to innovate in a serious way will tend to stick out if you start to talk about games that are a combination of two specific other games I mean how many different types of video games are there unless there are stuff that are unless there are particular games that are very well known and very famous, if I start to talk about a game as a combination of two other ones probably not everyone in this room would know what I was talking about and so I think it also serves to sort of go back to what I was saying before how sort of mechanics are a proxy for the user experience for what the gamer is doing or what the gamer wants to be doing are you the type of person who likes to solve puzzles are you the type of person who likes to press buttons in a very defined sequence in order to do something, you're the type of person who likes to react quickly to stimuli on the screen, those I think rather than, you know, starting to those base elements, rather than trying to use mechanics as a proxy for them, might be more effective in sort of trying to categorize genres if we go back to Dig Duck, what kind of game is Dig Duck will you go around and you try and stop enemies that are trying to do something and it requires a lot of yeah, yeah, I think that's what it's about you know so should we have a cathartic violence genre yeah so I actually, I mean, we joke about something like that but to me, really we do have to consider the core reasons that we go to these and I don't think I think cathartic violence may be too specific but there are a number of games that we play to feel powerful, right there are a number of games that we go to play to escape our daily lives, right to enter a different world there are fundamental needs, and I actually believe you can break down these fundamental needs into a fairly small handful, maybe two dozen categories that we can attach to pretty much every game that so far has come into existence so yes, I actually do think that we should talk about what the motive reasons we approach these games for and cathartic violence may be too specific but not by much but then there's the differential experience I mean, I play Hotline Miami a very ultra-violent, minimalist game that came out recently that I'd recommend you all try out but to me, it's a deconstruction of late 90s violent action movies so to me, it's purely the sort of deconstruction of a genre exercise with really good music while someone else might take it as a very cathartic, powerful violence fantasy I took it as a robotron shooter that's more advanced, I still have robotrons that's how I saw it I think that's BS, it's not robotrons, it's robotrons so in the second case we're getting to mechanics definitions again, right, but in the first case I mean, I agree you literally gave the two that we had just talked about, right, it's a fantasy and it's a very specific fantasy and it's a and in some ways it's a powerful and so I mean, I think that there are a limited number of these that we can go through the list and look for why we why we want to go to these things and as long as we make those reasonably broad, I mean it's an exercise in finding the right semantics, which is always very, very difficult we say we keep trying to go away from the technical definition of the genre, right, but it depends on which mechanic you're talking about where the camera is, that's not a mechanic that really defines the genre but the skills being tested, that is a mechanic that makes it a different kind of game, right, so what if we took the Hotline Miami and we use the exact same game, mechanically speaking, push the same buttons to win, everything like that instead of it being about this violent, you know hitman, right, we just change all the pixels to make it be about dinosaurs, right, is it now a different genre? I mean I believe the mechanics would still deliver on the powerful section but in general, right, we have games with nearly identical mechanics that we view as radically different, right and so to me while as a designer and a very mechanics and systems first designer, I would like to be able to argue in favor of mechanics, I actually think that we can deliver anything through mechanics you can find a way to deliver on any emotive core through the mechanics of your choice just like you can through any literary style or musical style, right and so I actually do think that the mechanics are secondary but some mechanics are better at delivering on specific emotive sets just like certain musical styles are better at delivering to your process oh, Ralph Hunter if these were easy questions, we wouldn't be up here so I found a question if you're thinking yeah, alright, looks like we can fill those silents with the question how much time is here, hold on we'll riff on these questions and see where it takes us So, how would you, I mean the reason that I think the video games are defined by mechanics more than the mode of reasons we play, up till now have been because most games have relied upon mechanics to enforce play rather than giving you any emotional reaction at all. You would play Tetris for hours but without even thinking about any kind of story or narrative. So this is actually perfect. So, we talked about a word in far too limited a sense, right? We think about these emotions, joy, anger, sadness, right? But there's a much greater spectrum and I don't know if you know what I mean, I've seen the episode we did on it but I referred everyone to the mechanics and aesthetics paper which came out that day to go now, where they bring stuff down. What you said right there, without thinking about any of this stuff, they talked about this mechanic of submission or abrogation where you as a human being want to kill time. We actually all have a time's desire to simply tune out, right? That is an emotive need we actually have, documented emotive need and that's exactly what that aspect of Tetris or the jewel provides us, right? You can play a round on it and just let it all go. And so I think we have to think further than simply our standard set of sort of interpersonal emotions to really what needs these days to play. So the killing time genre, that sounds like just about every smartphone game out there. That might be the genre of Angry Birds. I've never played one of those games except when I was bored and waiting for something. Okay, in front of me. Yeah. That's, you know, defining games by the emotion or the thing we want to have fulfilled is an interesting idea but we don't define anything else in that way. We think about those things but we don't think of it solely like that. We don't say, oh, well, maybe the fireplace is an anime you want to watch when you want the thing about killing yourself. Well, anime is a specific problem in which people mistake the medium for a genre, right? You know, anime, there's so many genres of anime, right? But because of just the perspective and the marketing, especially outside of Japan, people think of anime as a genre, right? Which is the same, right? Exactly. It's the same way as people think of, you know, like RPGs, you know, tabletop RPGs as a genre. No, it's a medium. There are so many genres of tabletop. Great story for that. I used to work for Blockbusters when they existed and they had an anime section. You know, we'd have romance. We'd have all this stuff. We had an anime section so you would find Pokemon right next to a rock sock doji, which had children's, you know, cockfighting with Mark or porn. So we got very careful when we say, you know, the medium is a genre on its own. Now, I also think we do describe media the way you said we don't. Look, if we say film noir, film noir actually is a very specific emotional characteristic. It evokes very specific responses. It's a fairly narrow genre despite the fact that people use the term broadly. I mean, a film noir movie, they're almost all the same. Well, there are certain people arguing film noir was a movement and not a genre. Or a style. But think about romance. Romance is the easiest example. We talk about lots of things, you know, but romance novels or comedy comedy. And that's the specific emotive need you're going for. Usually the same is actually true with drama or action. These are specific emotive needs you're going to feel when you go and say, I really feel like an action movie today. We know what action means in an emotive sense in a way that we don't with FPS. A film noir hero is always the stone cold womanizing drinking guy who pushes himself to the edge. And I'm going to get that fantasy, either being him, opposing him, all your, I guess, all the things you're getting out of the movie are centered around that core construct. So we define the genre by that. And a few other things, and occasionally camera angles and lighting, those are all secondary to the stone cold main character, the typical film noir, seductress, female who comes in, the secretary, all these different characters coming to play. And it sounds like this inconsistency in genre development, how one thing is considered a genre for these reasons and something is considered a genre for those reasons, works well in support of James' idea. The idea that, you know, no matter how these things developed or came into being, they all sort of served this particular emotive or motivational need. Sort of goes back to what I was saying about the interactions between the system and the player. So really that might just be the best way to describe what's going on for you, the viewer, the player, rather than what's going on for it, you know, the stuff feeding information to you. Because at the end of the day, you're the one who matters. All right, the red shirt. So like in other media, books, films, music, whatever. I would say that generally speaking, John Stigelman's, the Madagelman's content of, you know, whatever it is you're watching, your book, movie, whatever. But then with games, I would say the word genre, as we talked about, is more of a technical elements. And basically it's kind of a two part question. What? Or if you guys can guess, why is there that gap between, you know, the way genre works and also what's using genre more as we do for other media for games? Would that help with the gaming industry? Get into the first question. And I think it goes back to what we were just saying, the fact that what is going to evoke a specific response or a motion fulfilled emotive need in you, the player. For stories, for story based mediums, such as film and books, the story elements are what they have. For games all of a sudden we have this, all of a sudden this entirely new dynamic, the mechanics, the technical, stuff that enables you, the player, to accomplish something and to feel a certain way in so doing. So the really question, just again, I think in terms of trying to think of genre in terms of the elements embedded in the media itself, it is ultimately going to run into all these inconsistencies and confusions. I think it's better to think about what effect does this have on the viewer? Honestly, I think the disparity is just that gaming is a very new phenomenon. I mean, we've had chess in certain kinds of abstract games for thousands of years, but there was, in most literature from ancient times, you won't find any descriptions of genres games are just referred to as games. Generic words are used to refer to games. Rules are never very clearly coded. Something recently, we have designed games as opposed to games that evolve and only recently we even have video games. I think it's just like how music evolved, we just haven't evolved the lexicon yet and I think it's just going to happen naturally. I just think that because we're so connected it's very easy for us to see the fact that we don't have a lexicon yet and we can't just wait a hundred years for it to sort us out. I think it's also that there, we've talked about gamers, right, we're one big community, we all sort of come together, but really many of us are quite different in a lot of people, you know, and it covers an entire great scale, but I'm just going to give you the two hyperbolees, right, is the person who likes games and that they really like the theme, like you make a game and it's a western and they're like, oh my god, that's so awesome, they get off on the cowboys and the horses in that part, right, you take the exact same game and the exact same game, replace those cowboys and horses with spacemen and they don't like it anymore, right, even though it's the exact same, you do the more of their enjoyment from those thematic story elements and you know, surface level, you know, stylings and things of that nature and then you have another person who gets off on the game part and they wouldn't care if it was black stick figures everywhere, right, because what they're doing in the game, they're so into it, right, you can take Starcraft and Warcraft 3, it's fantasy and sci-fi, there might be someone who only likes fantasy, they only like Warcraft, another person who only likes Starcraft doesn't like sci-fi, he's playing really really fast with his fingers, he likes both, okay. And this is reflected actually in the academics as well, for many years academics refused to admit that video games could have narrative elements, we said they don't tell stories, people experience them and people don't experience stories, made no sense. But the argument is still raging in certain small corners. As to the second part of your question, how this affects the industry, to me our problem with genre has clearly had already a profound effect on the industry, discussing these things with other designers, I've come across this problem, this fallacy of seeing genres as mechanics, which has led to the downfall of whole genres, right. I believe the adventure game genre and the horror genre have both sort of, by the way said died, not because there's anything bad about those genres, right, not that we've no longer have the human need that those things provided, but rather because people started just pulling the mechanics and not realizing how those mechanics filled the need that people were going to those genres for. This is very evident if you see most modern horror games. Or look at a crazy example, a massive game, we talk about massive games, they're all either an MMO, or there's something on the planet side, there's still a lot like an MMO if I was that PSC or whatever. Why do we make a massive game that's the battle of Endor over and over again, 10,000 people at a time. Once it's stateless, there's no leveling up, it's just everyone's in a TIE fighter, go for it, it takes four hours. Right, and the harm to the industry is that publishers especially don't want to invest in anything risky, so they go they want to, they say you're making something crazy different than it's been done before, we don't want to put our money in that incredibly sinky ship, right, we want to put in something we know has worked many times over, so there hasn't been a game like TIE fighter in a free space shooter and how long, right, no one's going to put a zillion dollars into making one of those. Well, first of all, I just need to pull the room, how many people would play the battle of Endor over and over again? There we go. You're not going to be a Luke Skywalker guys, you're going to be that guy on the Death Star with a tar going, do you? No, I'm going to be a tar, I'm like Perceptor. You know everyone's just going to work plays the Ewoks. So interestingly about that Konami has been trying for the longest time to patent the music game genre and you look at it from the it's got things such as having a display that says whether you've got it to a timer or not, things like that and so a lot of little games they must know you're within the group and kind of push down other things like that. I just said it wasn't awesome. I don't remember at what point did you draw a line or something to talk about at what point was the game? With that lawsuit, I just did a ton of research on this for a lecture we did at PAX very recently. We talked to the history of DDR in 20 minutes. In the group, in the end it was settled because they couldn't really the case was pretty indeterminate but it came down to the mechanics were not really the problem where they go after them they went after them for the dressage and the game itself and the fact that in the group was selling upgraded kits to turn a DDR machine into an in-the-group machine had they not done that and had they not used a lot of very direct and blatant stylistic elements it would have been totally fine by every legal reading I've seen. I'm not a lawyer. The machines were identical. They put lights up at the top they had the same size speakers down below it was the same exact deal so they got in trouble in that way with four arrows and you step onto music and it didn't resemble DDR in any way or if you made deep mania where there was the buttons and the spinny thing, right? DJ Hero didn't really get in trouble, right? The question of what's patentable is a ridiculous question we get to spend an entire semester on. In fact, I just did. But so I think it's sort of important to sort of in that question it's sort of important to tease out the intellectual property questions with the questions of games and in fact that's another reason these things sort of work inversely towards one another in software and games especially you want to be able to quantify something to be able to define it to be able to for the purposes of law and society to be able to point it out over and over and over again whereas in the creative works you want to be able to sort of not see these things as so fixed and see them as more fluid and reconstitutable. So I'm actually giving a much shorter answer. Mechanics just aren't patentable. Wizards of the Coast has owned the copyright to trading card game for 20 years now. We've seen how few trading card games there are. There are example after example of this, right? Look at the iPhone store and see how many games there are out there like Angry Birds, right? Angry Nerves Angry Pigs Angry Birds Mechanics at this point in time are not copyright is not enforceable on mechanics so it becomes somewhat less of a concern it's like the dude who copyrighted the word edge, right? Irritating people will try it but in the end that will be true of any definition of genre and we're going to have one and no copyright is going to succeed on it. Okay, the red shirt I was thinking the main difference between like video games or any kind of game in other media is the interactivity and so for that the genre prescription that defines in what way you're interacting with media that's kind of the difference there. The problem is that interaction is not a universal concept. As we sort of have been talking about people people are going to react to different things differently. I mentioned this thing earlier on about the first person versus third person thing. For me that's a very big difference for others not so much and you know so that can often times change the gaming experience depending on who the person is. Interaction is a two way street and when we're not talking about this game or itself may be changing from person to person every person is different and they're going to bring different conceptions and different ideas to it. In fact when we talked about you know in fact to go back to that question of whether a reskinned game with the exact same mechanics is appealing to one person or another. I remember reading this one view for the Metroid game for the Wii or maybe wasn't that but it was one of those well known series and I think they said if this were a new series all on its own these mechanics flaws would be less forgivable, would be more forgivable and I said wait how does that make sense? It should be a good game or a bad game depending no matter who it is but you know when you put these characters in this world on top of it it brings all these preconceptions and different ideas to it that dramatically changes the objective interaction that you'll bring to it. This is kind of related but I sort of toyed around with the idea of if we lived in a world where we didn't really have genres but there were these really strong walls that existed between the systems Wii, Xbox 360 arcade stick with three buttons, stick with six buttons and just going back to music you do kind of have that divide there. There are people who are pianists and there are people who are violinists and actually the music that arises out of that is quite different because of the capability of the system the Wii you get very different input into it unless we have a very different output but that's probably the developer's honestly but there is something there with how people interact with the violin or even a conductor in front of an orchestra where you have that capability. Well let alone when we talk about music and gaming improvisational music, jam sessions is that not a game? You're playing a set of rules, a set of genres and you're playing long or someone else you have a mutual sort of like sacan but in a way it's a game you're trying to show off to each other and to your audience in the confines of a particular space. If you miss a note you play out of key, you get a bad accidental then it's almost like you've missed a note in that sense of revolution. I have one thing before we go to some other questions here is the dangers of jam. And this is something we kind of talked about at least when we get to the industry when we have a video game that does very very well Call of Duty does very very well what we end up seeing in the industry is they will label it as a genre and then every other game that comes out looks exactly like Call of Duty. Call of Duty. So the problem is that usually this is the problem with choosing genres by mechanic there are plenty of places where I've consulted at plenty of places where I've worked at where you're only presented to checklists we for our market portfolio need a third person shooter and then there is a checklist for what a third person shooter is it includes these things that Gears of War also had I have literally gotten a design doc back in the day so we actually did the design docs I had a design doc back at one point with Justin Redman on the front looks great guys but can't make him more like Gears of War nothing else no other time and so this is the problem with genres right genres are inherently a box that we're limiting ourselves to that box becomes much stronger well visual novels are a genre that really doesn't exist in America except in very indie projects in Japan there is a common genre I think they're going to explode here eventually because people are going to discover them but we don't have those we have adventure games which are very pretty solidly distinct the visual novel is almost more like a really interactive choose your own adventure book is a visual novel any kind of game though that's a good question and this is when the genre thing reeks this whole panel last year I tried to define the definition of a game it took about an hour to come to it obviously the biggest we all know the biggest cause is the box of genre that publishers put you in is there risk, adversity, new things and such but one of the secondary reasons that you get this box of genre that people don't think about too often is if you want to make a game that is different from previous games that is a lot more working and coding if you just want to make another first version shooter the box is loaded up and it's a lot less laborious to do so the cost of production are decreased I mean it's kind of true but kind of not like you look at most of the indie games today that are radically different cost way less that's because those are smaller games that don't have the potential to make even Minecraft didn't make as much money it made tons of money but it didn't make as much money it's like the biggest games but on the other hand it made a ton of it's called duty cost a ton less than that so I mean I think it's it's also in terms of how we think about it although you're right, the tools being built are in some ways being built around a dollar Unreal Engine is very specific and very hard to leverage out its first personness our genre is not also sort of pushing as you said there's a list of requirements for a game to be a third person shooter that seems to require they have to be a triple A game they have to have certain levels of graphics that's a checkbox that you don't have with indie games Minecraft didn't need to be 1920x1080 with 120 frames per second and like voxel shaders 3D cameras but those would be a lot of different kinds of games I think about binding advice binding advice is a pretty good game I liked it but it's totally different from everything but because it wasn't built on existing tools there wasn't some sort of engine you just get a binding advice engine it doesn't have joystick support and these sorts of things are lost because the indie games choose not to build those features that is part of the reason that their costs are significantly reduced a big company couldn't put out a game without all those necessary features setting your resolution properly full screened up words indie games themselves aren't becoming a genre so a lot of people talk about the indie versus the triple A titles so indie is becoming a movement and it's unfortunate I think one reason what's the famous comic I'm gonna make an indie game that's unlike any game that's ever happened before pixel art 2D platformer so there can be an inherent danger in that but I think one reason that the indie games move in is exploding is because people are getting tired of these repeated clone movements the idea that this next FPS looks absolutely like the last FPS within the indie movement there are in fact all sorts of familiar genres but they are able to sort of be more different in ways that these publishers would not necessarily let a larger title be isn't that true, isn't anything stuff true though with almost all the media we're talking a lot more now about indie movies indie comics indie music than we were a few years ago that's true but I never hear of and there are definitely independent film festivals but I still believe that in those and I wouldn't know if there's anybody here to let me know but even in those festivals I believe that there are they still talk about film genres again for all the reasons we've discussed about why film is and I might be more adaptable to genre than say games are so in the orange shirt so instead of calling them like limited ammo third-person puzzle shooters why do you think survival horror specifically is kind of a scene being labeled by mechanics or even down well so I would, oh do you have a I saw you dying to get into the last, do you want to jump into the last one then I can answer this one okay well I got to refresh alright what was I saying, oh we were talking a lot about industry and publishers I was going to mention in Japan you go to the big magazine which is Famitsu and every issue for the last two and a half decades they have a table of all the genres that exist and it's gone up to the point where they have 27 different 3 or 4 letter acronyms there and it's actually really troubling, every game has that genre so I was involved in the game Flower and it had to have a genre attached to it by Sony Japan and they were really pushing us to give it a genre and in the end someone over there said it's a Zen simulation game Z.SLG actually Zen.simulation like game is what they call it I would say the genre okay we have a genre that's great cool we're not alone you should have just been like it's a third party third person platformer no platforms there was one big platformer but you've hit on a really good point here is that we co-opted a genre from other media in times and games when we just don't know what to do Survival Horror it's the Resident Evil games if they're person shooters in some way or another but we don't call them that, we call them Survival Horror or sports games you can have a first person baseball game if you want to have the baseball bat we wouldn't call it a first person shooter we call it a sports game so there are times when we borrow from other media for whatever reason in terms of trying to understand these genres and we have a quite I think this is the problem with using the mechanics is that it doesn't always work and so sometimes we go oh we'll borrow from film here and well I think I've noticed, I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but I've seen quite a few people who failed in the film industry went to school for film and tried to do film and did not make it and they went to video games and they applied their film knowledge to video games and this is where you get those video games that are nothing but cut scenes a lot of the time Zeno Saga on Day of Kojima real quick to address the Survival Horror question Survival Horror was one of the only genres in video games to have been labeled by its motive core when it began because we understood horror we understood it from other things and it was also one of the only genres out there in the broadest of senses most video games deliver fun Survival Horror games do not deliver fun it's engagement it's an emotion that you want but being scared is different than fun and we on some level fundamentally understood that we were able to label it that way from the outset in a way that we haven't been able to with other genres but did we not then ruin that I think tank controls limited ammo, third person shooter with cut scenes and maybe quick time events I think that actually points to a more mechanistic side of things in games that we might consider true survival horror like clock tower your mechanical capabilities were limited you could move but we looked ahead to Resident Evil now you can do all the things that you would in a normal first person you can shoot, you can jump you can't jump can you you have all these elements that make it similar to these other games Survival Horror was essentially one thing that allows it to be called Survival Horror is that you are mechanically powerless I was on Pac-Man Survival Horror A couple of Survival Horror games I think give you a surprising amount of power that actually many people issued the label Survival Horror that actually was split for things like Clive Barker's Undying where it was a very good first person shooter if you talk to some people and for other people a very good horror game but not too many people actually do that I think many developers close themselves in even as there was success pushing this horror emotion in other ways with other mechanics I think it's one of those things where we have to just talk about the difference between the trappings of horror and again they might of course consider a lot of the modern Resident Evil to be survival horror and these are not about surviving they're about conquer but I mean in a lot of the other ones you were disempowerment it was a disempowerment fantasy whereas modern survival horror in the Resident Evil sense is a empowerment fantasy which a blown up zombies were way weaker than you so I think there is a difference I think we should step away from the land by now the best survival horror game I've ever seen is a tabletop RPG called Dread and I bring this up the mechanic of that game is not dice but is a jenga tower and you get a pull every time you take an action think about the structure of a survival horror movie or the feeling of fear there's a monster out there you're doing actions in the fantasy because more and more and more precarious if you make a pull and fail your character dies in the book says in the most horrific way possible then the tower resets the tension resets think about every horror movie you've ever seen tension builds, climax and then you back off a little bit but not all the way and then you build again and climax it follows this progression that is survival horror to me and the mechanic of a jenga tower somehow enabled that better than any video game I've ever seen so is jenga tower part of the genre survival horror? alright we've got about 8 minutes left so if you have a bad question put your hands out I'm kidding we love you all let's see here in the grey sweatshirt no sorry the light grey sweatshirt specifically the mechanics are the fact that you put first person shooters as looking through your character's eyes and doing actions and at the same time you have games like Skyrim and Marvel which are exactly the same mechanics as a first person shooter but they're not because that's not the right you've been saying the words mechanics right and it's like camera angle it's a mechanic in one sense but it's not it's not a mechanic of the game itself it could be depending on the game like in hotline miami being able to move the camera versus not being able to move it is a huge deal and a big part of that game it is but it's not the difference in terms of the experience between half life and marwin this is when I think we have to talk about the actual experience even if you spend the whole time as a archer in Skyrim, sure there are leveling systems but there's also leveling systems in Call of Duty right and so I think that there is something underlying these genres that we can all identify right there's a reason that you know Skyrim is not a first person shooter even though it has a lot of that stuff that we're already doing so now we need to find labels that actually fit that well a lot of it is simply what skill is being tested right in Counter Strike the skill that's being tested is how precisely can you click in Skyrim it doesn't matter how precisely you click it matters how big the number is in terms of right so James I think you might be reaching a little bit far when you say yes we know about Skyrim when we play Skyrim that is not a first person shooter that is a very learned skill that we've got there that takes years and years and there are many people here who say that they're game players that probably might look at a screenshot or even a small video of Skyrim and say oh that's a first person shooter so maybe we need to skin her box a bunch of children and play games and ask them to tell us what genres they are so it's actually it's actually really interesting when we get down to the core reasons I've been actually running a lot of tests recently taking the just the MDA list of basic and motive reasons we go to things and the human tendency I get about 90% hit rate for people who identify the same things in various different games it's just like the fact that we can all identify even if you don't like sports you can go to a football game and you know what parts are the most exciting you may not find them as exciting as the person next to you but pretty much everybody can agree on what are the most exciting parts of that football but you see me banging on the glass and screaming at the top of my lungs something's going on and so there is actually a bunch of stuff it's not as we have this big argument in video games you guys all know that I'm the first person to argue video games as an art right but it's more of an outing rate it's a science and an art and there are some ways that we can scientifically look at these things and you do find commonalities near universal results right they're not universal this is an art as well but there are ways that we can identify that there are there are pieces that we can find across the board and yes we've been trained with this terminology right so we're going to use this terminology but if you look at these things there are commonalities that we'll agree on with that point about sports though I'm really curious to see like if someone who didn't know the rules of football went to a football game right they would know which parts of the exciting parts because everyone was cheering what if they were there alone would they still know this third and one with one second to go is the exciting part would they still know I meant at PAX they had this huge Dota setup no it was League of Legends when people were screaming and cheering I didn't know when exciting things were happening because the game was a part of me I don't know how to play that thing but other people would be screaming and cheering and I could look at the screen and say okay that's sort of what it looks like when an exciting thing happens but it was really understanding so if I had been there alone I might have just been sitting there taking a nap so we have different baselines for excitement this is just a quick aside we have different baselines for excitement you if not knowing the rules for shopping interestingly may have had a very low bar for how exciting this was even at its most exciting points but you could probably I would guess that if I asked you after that experience you could probably identify that the team fights were more exciting than them sitting in the shop buying stuff this may be false but we could all identify we would all draw the same graphic excitement we would just put where it is on that excitement access we would do that in different places and I find that fascinating because I think there's a lot more that we can break down about design because of this true commonality of things like that but I know we have almost no time to get some more questions and on that note actually what I'd like to do for the last round is I'd like to do a rapid-fire question call on maybe four of you guys and have us answer personally on the situation no semi-colon green jacket you mentioned earlier about survival horror breaking away from fun to the scary different emotions do you think there could be that at some point all the genres we have as a multiple majority there might become sub-genres of new words that we might come up with or do you think we'll just extend downwards rather than going back up yes, next question I think we're going to go downwards as sub-genre and music I think that's just how it's going to evolve it's going to look like metal there's only two genres in literature tragedy and comedy and so we could boil them down we really want to dark green switcher what you said earlier about how with survival horror it's essentially when you're powerless even though technically I don't know if this would qualify as survival horror but when you look at the new walking dead game there you were completely empowered and it was a different dynamic where they would say oh well you want to know what it's like to be the leader of all these people on the zombie apocalypse here's four pieces of food there's ten people who don't have fun trying to make everyone happy it almost seemed like that one kind of twisted that emotion and made it that you had all the power and yet you still felt as if not more powerless than when you were trying to conserve ammunition for walking dead x but we can have a whole conversation I don't know how many of you guys would play walking dead and I highly recommend it I believe they actually successfully bring back the adventure genre because they found a lot of the motor reasons to that but there were great different hardware moments right that's what we really got to do why don't we get Whitehead Whitehead so how do you think that hardware is actually hardware in one system so you know the actual design of the show yes depends but not for long I think consoles are going to disappear it's going to be commodity hardware running commodity operating systems and then our games are going to be separate designing for a test screen is radically different than designing for ocean controllers it's radically different than a keyboard the input and the output devices are what matter it's definitely an HCI question I can't see what that shirt is it's a red bow tie on no, I got it behind you forget you we'll settle back gamer guy do you think the difference in genre terminology between film and video games but that feels the fact that in film a lot of the genre terms came out of the academic press things like the 80s cinema in France and a lot of the terminology we used in games was about the commercial press I think it's just a factor of video games are too new it was amateur filmmaking for a long time it became academic later we need a hundred years for academia to become as entrenched it wasn't until critics in France really said films in art form that they started really thinking about it in that way people used to film clocks because that was just amazing to them that they could see time progressing from the past 40 years let's look at the last question but let me emphasize that we'll all stick around but afterwards everybody including the guy in the blue shirt should come up and talk to us you mentioned the difference between third person and first person and shooters that also exists in a racing game where you drive cars or any other car game do you see there being a split between first person like car games and third person I mean you know you directly in virtual racing is the first one where you push the button to change the camera right? it's the same genre you press you're still testing the same skills turn the wheel precisely, step on the pedal precisely I don't think racing games are popular enough right now to have a pure divergence between simulation and arcade I think those are the only splits we've got right now ok with that we're going to shut it down let's give our panelists a hand I'm going to stick around up here I think it's big for us all and I said we'll be here all weekend