I find very interesting the discussion about gender in games. I am writing my PhD about RPGs, and this is a theme that I study. In this regard, I follow Stenros’ concept of gender (who is based in Fiske’s theory). Stenros determines the concept of genre as: “a cultural convention, which strives to build some kind of an organisation to the huge amount of texts and meanings, which are recycled in our culture by agreement of both the producers and the audiences” (Stenros, “Genre, Style, Method and Focus”, 2005: 168). This is collections of themes (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Cyberpunk, etc.). I consider appropriate to differentiate between game mechanics (which indicate as playing), and the thematic units (which determine the gender conventions, shared with other art forms).

Great, I’m always looking for critical input and feedback on game genre studies. I hope I can make my research on genre concepts (at least a few parts of it) available in English some time soon (would be a good chance to practice my English).

I think that in film studies the impression that genres have some kind of eternal existence was heavily influenced by early studies on the Western genre (like André Bazin) and structuralist theories. Later approaches like the studies by Steven Neale or Rick Altman set the record straight by offering a more dynamic and rather historical approach that also considers the input from the audience and the changing cultural contexts. I find it quite interesting that for example games like “Red Dead Redemption” refer to cinematic settings that aren’t typical for the traditional Hollywood Western but rather the revisionist Western and this choice also affects the gameplay.

I think there is still a lot of interesting work to be done, for example in regard to multi-player formats that can appropriate and completely redefine the original setting by creating new forms of play, in my approach I focused only on single-player game genres from the 1970s until the late 2000s.

It sounds like an interesting approach. Like I was also alluding to above, other media/art forms may give more of the impression that genres have some kind of eternal existence, so looking forward to reading more.

http://www.bigshouldersmedia.com/blog/2015/1/6/video-game-genres

Andrew @ bigshouldersmedia

What do we gain? It’s a quite developed theory of how art forms change over time and what expectations they bring, but the question is how well it maps to video games.

@Richard Interesting way of teaching it. I think that genre theory in general works well to describe sets of expectations and the like, but video game genre just seems to be (even more) fluid and ill-defined than genres elsewhere.