{"id":29074,"date":"2015-10-19T17:33:12","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T22:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29074"},"modified":"2015-10-19T17:33:12","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T22:33:12","slug":"experienced-points-the-survival-horror-genre-is-a-mess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29074","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: The Survival Horror Genre is a Mess"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My column this week is about how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/video-games\/columns\/experienced-points\/14818-What-is-a-Survival-Horror-Game?utm_source=latest&#038;utm_medium=index_carousel&#038;utm_campaign=all\">the genre label of Survival Horror is completely meaningless<\/a> and nobody agrees what these games should be.<\/p>\n<p>Although, this isn&#8217;t the only dysfunctional genre in the industry. In fact, I&#8217;d say every time we see someone call a game an &#8220;X clone&#8221;, we&#8217;re seeing an example of a genre without a proper name. People still sometimes call Torchlight a &#8220;Diablo Clone&#8221;, despite the fact that this genre is old enough to vote and features many disparate titles. <\/p>\n<p>An example of a good genre label is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shoot_%27em_up\">shmup<\/a>. It&#8217;s easy to remember<span class='snote' title='1'>It&#8217;s short for &#8220;shoot &#8217;em up&#8221;.<\/span>, it&#8217;s a unique word, and there isn&#8217;t a lot of &#8220;is this game a shmup or not?&#8221; confusion along the margins. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure why some genres got useful names and some didn&#8217;t. Perhaps it&#8217;s that the medium is just growing too dang fast. It took movies over half a century to go from technological novelty to cultural ubiquity, and games covered the same distance in about 20 years. Maybe we&#8217;ll have more useful genre names once the medium settles down a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My column this week is about how the genre label of Survival Horror is completely meaningless and nobody agrees what these games should be. Although, this isn&#8217;t the only dysfunctional genre in the industry. In fact, I&#8217;d say every time we see someone call a game an &#8220;X clone&#8221;, we&#8217;re seeing an example of a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}