Game Genres

Yesterday Stephanie led the kids in a discussion about game genres and they categorized all of the new games we added to the wall last Friday. Stephanie did a great job by beginning with a question about what genre meant and helping everyone get a kind of hands-on definition (it's kind of like a category or the way there are different kinds of books you can read someone said). At first they wanted to keep expanding the genre list, but she asked a lot of questions about similarities and differences of characteristics and they instead developed a taxonomy with six main genres and several sub-sections with some of them. For example, they decided on a sports genre that includes a sub-genre of racing and an action genre with a sub-genre of first-person shooters. With a little prodding, they were pretty good at articulating how an Adventure/Quest was different from (though sometimes has similarities with) an Action game. They also talked about how sometimes games incorporated many of these genres (puzzles/strategy, quest/adventure, action, rhythm, sports, cards, simulations) and they didn't fit neatly into on. Although, as we discussed on Friday, I don't think this schema itself will be particularly useful to either us or them, it did push the kids to think about games from a more critical perspective. It gave them a bit of terminology to work with and hopefully provided them with a renewed sense of being game consultants rather than just game players (though they might prefer the latter). A couple of them were clearly not engaged in this discussion, but I wonder if they were taking any of it in. It will be interesting to review the video closet entries by everyone to see how they responded.