Sure, it can be confusing, but by breaking down the game mechanics, we can start to understand how developers and publishers categorize their titles.įor example, if you’re an instant gratification type of gamer, action games are probably best. Game categories or genres, then, can also have subgenres, and many games fit into multiple genres! The game’s designers created a sandbox-like environment where players could even avoid the main story altogether and focus instead on exploring the simulated world.There are many different types of video games, and typically, they're categorized by their characteristics or underlying objectives-not by the type of gameplay they contain. In contrast, Bethesda’s popular Elder Scrolls RPG series, the most recent of which is Skyrim, focused on consequences to actions rather than an overarching morality system. In this game players could choose to follow the “light” or “dark” side by making choices that helped or hurt in-game characters. One of the better-known games to focus on moral elements was Bioware’s Star Wars-based roleplaying game (or RPG, a hybrid of adventure and combat games) Knights of the Old Republic. As the art of game design developed and the representational abilities of computers increased, players of the adventure genre came to demand more sophisticated stories and moral choices. The original text and Atari Adventure games had bare-bones stories. These and other changes affected adventure games in unique ways, as well. Players of the adventure genre came to demand more sophisticated stories and moral choices.
In the PC gaming realm, the development of the mouse and keyboard combination allowed for an even greater number of player inputs.
Current consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have controllers with a directional pad, one or more thumb-sized joysticks, and a series of triggers and buttons that can be combined to create a large number of different player inputs. The NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) controller had a four-way directional pad and two buttons: more inputs meant potentially more actions one could take in a game. The classic Atari joystick had a directional control and a single button. Second, controllers gradually developed into the modern forms. Perhaps more important, modern gaming PCs have dedicated chips for rendering video, allowing for graphics verging on photorealism. Modern PCs have hard drives measuring in gigabytes, onboard RAM averaging four gigabytes (one gigabyte is approximately a trillion kilobytes). Graphics could only be displayed at a resolution of approximately 160 by 228 pixels in 128 colors. The Atari 2600 had no hard drive to store programs, virtually no RAM, and ROM (read-only memory) game cartridges with only two to four kilobytes of memory. First, they took advantage of gaming hardware’s increasing capabilities. With the advent of computers and consoles that could render video, adventure games, and all other video games, began to develop in similar ways. took advantage of gaming hardware’s increasing capabilities. Text-based games worked around the limited RAM (random-access memory) in early computers by focusing on story and setting at the expense of graphics. The player read text descriptions of a cave and typed in simple noun-verb commands (“go north” “take lantern”, etc.) to navigate through the cave and interact with its denizens. The first of these was Adventure, designed by Will Crowther and enhanced by Don Woods. Instead they used text to create worlds for the player to explore. The earliest adventure video games were, in a sense, not video at all. This essay will focus on games in the adventure/roleplaying genre in which players take the role of one or more heroes on a quest of some sort. So the best way to approach this topic briefly is to select a genre and survey the main trends. There have been millions of games created in the 50 years since creation of 1962’s Spacewar!, the first true video game. The topic of how video games have evolved over the years is massive. How have video games evolved over time? Answer