VIDEOGAMES GENRE TAXONOMY

Abstract

This paper concentrates on the notion of videogame, which is a popular activity for children and adults alike. The presented article looks at the problem of classification of videogames in the aspect of their hierarchy and gamers’ activity. The author investigates game as a special human occupation from the point of view of its philosophical understanding and communicative orientation. The author pays special attention to the extra-linguistic factors of videogames popularity with an accent on their origin, evolution and perspectives of development. The work gives a detailed critical survey of the existing approaches o the game and its understanding in different fields of knowledge, including linguistics and psychology. The topicality of the article follows from the general interest of modern linguistics in the research dedicated to multimodal communication, on the one hand, and from a lack of investigations analysing the communicative content and potential of videogames, on the other hand. The objective of the paper is to work out a new genre taxonomy of videogames basing on the cognitive essence of gameplaying as a specific form of human activity. Thus, the author focuses on the notion of game in general and videogame in particular, analyses the main peculiarities of computer games, considers their various genre classifications, and builds up her own videogame genre taxonomy with an idea to make up for the drawbacks of those suggested before. The new videogame taxonomy rests on the two basic principles of computer games, i.e. their interactivity and possible narrativity. Hence, all videogames can be labelled as narrative (telling a certain story and having a certain plot) or non-narrative (telling the players no story). Within each of these groups, there are singled out kinetic games, mind (or mental) games, games of mixed type depending on the form and degree of their interactivity. The suggested taxonomy allows easier singling out narrative games for the purpose of analysing their ludonarrative in the future. As a prospective follow-up of the research a comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal components can be carried out within the three types of narrative videogames. Hence, their role in the videogame’s plot-story can be defined.