Defining Genre in Video Game Historiography: Structural, Discursive, and Sociocultural Definitions

This paper argues that video game genre definitions fall into three types and that a sociocultural approach best serves historical research on games. Structural definitions, which locate genre in the inherent organization of games and their play, are common across the field's history but struggle to account for the divergent meanings players and critics assign to the same titles. Discursive definitions, which treat genre as a way of using and relating texts rather than a set of texts, capture the role of time, place, and identity in shaping classification, yet they detach genre from the games themselves and so are of limited practical use. The paper proposes a sociocultural middle path, defining genre as a set of games classified together by one or more social groups, drawing on Wendy Griswold's cultural sociology.

On this definition, genres are fluid: a title may join or leave a genre as classifying communities change, and the same game may belong to different genres for different audiences. The classifying process itself, whether it appears on game packaging, in promotional copy, in developer interviews, in Wikipedia entries, or in user-applied Steam tags, becomes an object of study in its own right. The author outlines a method that begins with genre labels in a given historical moment, traces their discursive history backward until continuity breaks down, follows the discourse across social groups and regions, and links these findings to the games themselves and to wider contextual influences. Such analysis can reveal that defining traits of a genre were once peripheral, or that early labels carried different intertextual associations.

The paper acknowledges that comprehensiveness is the approach's main limitation, since the volume of relevant data can overwhelm analysis and force a trade-off between depth and breadth. Researchers can mitigate this by prioritizing particular questions and consulting or conducting complementary studies beforehand. The approach is presented as a viable means of exploring the multifaceted history of video games.