Game Styles, Innovation, and New Audiences: An Historical View

Costikyan's paper argues that games have always been organized into genres defined not by theme but by shared core mechanics, and that new genres, once discovered, drive a wave of imitation and, in turn, attract new audiences. He traces this pattern from prehistoric folk games, where only two genres, binary-lot gambling games and track games, appear to have arisen independently across many cultures, through the 18th-century emergence of designed games such as Carrington Bowles's track-based A Journey Through Europe in 1759, to the mid-19th-century boom in quiz, fishing, parlor sport, and mad-libs style games enabled by multicolor printing. The paper extends the same analysis to hobby gaming, including miniatures wargaming, board wargaming with Tactics in 1953, role-playing games with Dungeons & Dragons in 1973, and collectible card games with Magic: The Gathering in 1993, and to digital games, identifying "Ur-games" such as Colossal Cave, Donkey Kong, Doom, Dune II, and MUD1 as the pioneers of their respective genres.

The author's coverage is primarily Anglophone, a limitation he acknowledges, and the evidence is drawn largely from historical scholarship and published game catalogs rather than systematic data. Its historical claims rest on secondary sources such as Parlett's Oxford History of Board Games, Hofer's and Malloy's collector surveys, and Orbanes's study of Parker Brothers, along with the author's own earlier work and online timelines.

The central conclusion is that genuinely innovative designs, which discover new "peaks" in gameplay space, are the most valuable contributions a designer can make, and that the largest commercial successes typically arise from new genres rather than refinements of existing ones. Because rising development costs have made publishers increasingly reluctant to take such risks, the author warns that this aversion to experimentation may threaten the industry's long-term health.