Video game genre
video game term; categorization of video games
A video game genre is an informal classification of a video game based on how it is played rather than visual or narrative elements. This is independent of setting, unlike works of fiction that are expressed through other media, such as films or books. For example, a shooter game is still a shooter game, or a puzzle game is still a puzzle game, regardless of where or when it takes place. A specific game's genre is open to subjective interpretation. An individual game may belong to several genres at once.
History
Early attempts at categorizing video games were primarily for organizing catalogs and books. A 1981 catalog for the Atari Video Computer System uses 8 headings: Skill Gallery, Space Station, Classics Corner, Adventure Territory, Race Track, Sports Arena, Combat Zone, and Learning Center. ("Classics", in this case, refers to chess and checkers.) In Tom Hirschfeld's 1981 book How to Master the Video Games, he divides the games into broad categories in the table of contents: Space Invaders-type, Asteroids-type, maze, reflex, and miscellaneous. The first two of these correspond to the still-used genres of fixed shooter and multidirectional shooter.
For home computers, two publications established a small number of categories based on the best-selling software in the early 1980s: Softalk, which ran its Top Thirty list from 1980 to 1984 with the genres of strategy, adventure, fantasy and arcade; and Computer Gaming World, which collected user-submitted rankings.
The public source identifies “Video game genre” as video game term; categorization of video games. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Video, game and genre.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q659563. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1980 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Video game genre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.