Rethinking Genre in Computer Games: How Narrative Psychology Connects Game and Story

When it comes to computer game genre classifications, we are still forced to navigate a terminology jungle, having to simultaneously consider the game platform, the narrative, the game world milieu and, last but not least, the mode of gameplay. With multiple terms in each of these subcategories the norm, the plethora of descriptive words makes the taxonomy all but impenetrable. And yet a clear taxonomy system is important in order to make further progress in game studies, as well as enabling the new denizens of the gaming workforce—the “nontechie” screenwriters—access to the theoretical underpinnings of writing for games. By way of making sense of the genre profusion and rendering it wieldy, it is prudent to first address one of the sources of this current genre state—the gameplay–story schism. While this debate has already begun losing steam in recent years with abstRact