WILL Talks GAMES: Defining Genres

Why is it that games have their genres categorized differently than music and movies do?  It is an interactive medium, but that means it has more potential than others as a form of entertainment, expression, and creativity, not less.  So why is it that we categorize games' genres in such a shallow manner?  To discuss a matter such as this, it'd be best for me to explain how we view games in comparison to other mediums, and from there, the real issue at hand will be rather obvious.

Video games were always something we "played".  You "watch" a movie, "listen" to music, "read" books, and now we're "playing" games.  Everything about video games, down to how we phrase our relation to them, comes down to the fact that they're interactive forms of entertainment.  Decisions are made and actions are performed by our own discretion in a video game.  Did you press the A button to make Mario jump?  Maybe you aimed down a sight and shot a player across the map who was bad-mouthing you over an online conversation?  You made an active choice; you interacted with the software.  that's how you "play" video games.  That seems obvious though.  Of course - when you interact with a game, you're playing it.  Like...duh, right?

The point I'm trying to make here is that it's well-known by everyone and their dog that games are to be played.  In the same vein that you stare blankly and eat popcorn at a movie, tap your foot to a good song, or scan your eyes in front of a page, you're flinging your thumbs on a controller or fingers on a keyboard to play a game - the main difference here, is that your actions operate the medium, in the case of video games.  In other mediums, the actions of the spectator accentuates it.  Actions during a song or movie are manifested by our own emotions; our ties with the culture we're viewing bring out feelings from within us.  And games can definitely invoke emotions in the same way, don't get me wrong - but to what degree, to what end, and for what reasons?  You could say a game has our tapping our foot to the music, but that's the music in the game bringing out those emotions, not the game.  What kind of emotion does "playing" invoke?

House of the Dead is defined within the "Rail Shooter" genre, meaning
 the game progresses at its own pace while all you have to do is shoot 
and keep up.  Pokemon Snap follows the same mechanics, only you take
 pictures of Pokemon instead of killing zombies.  Is it a Rail Shooter as well?

Video games are defined by their mechanics and gameplay.  This sounds like it makes a lot of sense - you "watch" a movie, so obviously what you see is going to invoke emotion for a genre, and you "play" a game, so what you play should differentiate them.  Why aren't game genres defined by the emotions we feel?  There are two pretty simple answers:

• from a designer's perspective, letting a video game take direction and inspiration from a gameplay mechanic is much easier than taking it from a story element or emotion.  It seems standard: just as Mario games are built around a rising difficulty curve in the field of running and jumping, Schindler's List was built around telling the story of a man's efforts to rescue Jews from labor camps, which in turn accentuates the context of sadness.
• The game industry is still extremely young.  Just twenty years ago, games were just barely learning the basics of how to tell a cohesive story.  The infancy of games was to display gameplay; the beginnings of every other medium was tell a story.

Yep, these are the same category of game too, apparently.

This all seems as though it's making sense, but what happens when games that seem completely different are suddenly lumped into the same genre?  Take for example, Call of Duty and Wii Sports.  The boxing game in the latter is from a first-person perspective, and when the command is input at the right time, a projectile (fist) is launched at your opponent with hopes of defeating them.  Sound familiar?  With this being considered, it's actually correct to say that both Call of Duty and the boxing game in Wii Sports are both "First-Person Shooters", but it's just...not, right?  You aren't shooting or killing in a boxing match on the Wii, you don't have to reload, and you aren't even using a gun of any kind.  It doesn't make any sense to say that Wii Sports is an FPS, but under this system of defining game genres, that's 100% legitimate.

Only one genre in video games truly defines itself in the way other forms of art do: Survival Horror.  These games, despite their gameplay mechanics, point of view for the camera, or similarities to other unrelated games, retains one defining feature: a Survival Horror game is built around making the player ration their resources, to feel helpless, and to scare the pants off of the player.  The success of a horror game is completely dependent on how scared, nervous, and paranoid it can make the player.  The preference for the genre is completely justified (saying you don't like shooters because you don't like to "shoot things" is pretty close-minded and disregards every game that does that), and there are factually better horror games and factually worse ones; another thing that's hard to gauge among other genres.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent...nah it's fine, 
I didn't wanna sleep tonight anyway.

The current method of defining video game genres is hurting the industry as a whole.  An ineffective system bestows ignorance, and our current gaming scene reflects it.  The existence of this flawed system makes designers close-minded, usually making the same game over and over again, despite venturing into other "genres".  This system confuses the consumers too - why do you think there are so many shooter games on the market right now, Reader?

We could also use Portal as an example: it's a game that has a completely different tone and overall experience solely because of the context in which you're shooting - it's categorized as an FPS, but I definitely don't think of shooting when I play.  In Portal, you aren't shooting bullets, you're shooting two-way portals that you can use to solve puzzles and advance.  People loved the Portal games, and I think that proves that defining games based on gameplay mechanics causes franchises to stagnate and start throwing out the same game over and over again, because the consumers think that, in order to feel competitive and like their adrenaline is pumping, they need to specifically play an FPS game.  See?  Even the public agrees that games should be put into genres based on moods, even if they are met by resistance from flawed genres.

What a trippy game...plays like a shooter, but feels like a puzzler.

Perhaps the answer lies in a combination of these ideas: maybe our existing game genres should take an extra step and define through emotions and gameplay.  Who would be opposed to "Grimdark Platformer" or "Modern RPG"?  That tells us, the consumers, a lot more about what we can expect from the games that would be labeled as such.  I still don't feel that that's a perfect solution.  To be honest, I'm not sure exactly how we can fix something that's been embedded into the community for so long.  All I know is that it's hurting the industry a little at a time; it adds up after a while, I can be sure of that much.  If video games are to further evolve and really gain respect as an artistic medium, then more liberties should be taken into our focus on feeling and appreciating the game itself in the same way we find and hold meaning in the books we read and the songs we hear.  Maybe the closer we get to that next step, the clearer and more obvious the solution to our little genre issue will be.

What do you think?  Does the interactive element of video games affect how we categorize them?  Is this current system flawed?  How does this different genre categorization affect games developmentally and commercially?