For an Understanding of Video Games Genres through the Discourse of Players

This doctoral research proposal, presented at DiGRA 2023 by Surinx François-Xavier of the Liège Game Lab at the University of Liège, examines how video game genre labels such as FPS, TPS, survival horror, and puzzle are created, propagated, and legitimised. The central argument is that generic classification is no longer governed solely by developers or the press, but is co-produced by players, whose collective discourse now carries substantial authority. Unlike literary or cinematic genres, which are relatively stable, video game genres remain actively negotiated, making them a live site for studying how categories emerge.

The study proposes a corpus drawn from five internet-native formats: wikis, posts, forums, evaluations, and tags. The researcher justifies these formats by their prevalence in written player communication, their accessibility, and their non-scholarly, non-journalistic character. Three titles serve as discursive targets: Resident Evil 4 and Portal, whose genre classifications are contested, and Wolfenstein 3D, an archetypal FPS used as a comparative baseline. Corpus construction proceeds in two steps, beginning with genre labels from wikis and Steam Tags and extending to other formats, restricted to French-language contributions. The method is a manual, semio-rhetorical analysis examining argumentation, narrative structure, co-construction of viewpoints, and the discursive ethos of participants, supported by a quantified Excel framework tracking argumentative patterns.

The stated practical aims include assisting the Bibliothèque nationale de France in managing a database of more than 20,000 video games, and developing a player-grounded classificatory model that could serve users better than industry-imposed standards. The author also anticipates that the findings will illuminate how gamers participate in the hermeneutics of the medium. The proposal is presented as exploratory, with the taxonomy of macro-categories expected to evolve as analysis proceeds.