Genre Absorption, or How Games are Like American Politics

Richard Hofstadter famously compared third parties to bees, in that they sting once, and then they die. His point was that third parties work as platforms that promote a single issue, which gets absorbed by a major party when it gets popular. I see something like that in gaming.

Cast your mind back to ten years, and specifically to two genres: shooters and Western RPGs (these are the genres I am most familiar with). Start with shooters. To take a granular approach, I remember three popular types of shooters: standard, multiplayer focused, an tactical. Standard shooters had a lengthy campaign, linear objectives, and diverse, often hierarchical weapon and enemy types. Multiplayer was often radically different from the single player experience. Tactical shooters were heavily single player focused, had stealth elements, non linear level design and objectives, non hierarchical enemies and weapons, and gave the player low health and heavy weapon restriction. Multiplayer focus often had no true single player and had fairly diverse but heavily balanced weapons.

Now, there is something you might notice there: These genres do not exist anymore, because they were folded into the standard shooter. This arguably started with Call of Duty (although I admit I have probably forgotten several precedents) which synthesized the lessons of Halo, took several cues from tactical shooters, an applied them to a bombastic, set piece heavy shooter in the mold of Medal of Honor. It also had a superb multiplayer that was fairly similar to the main campaign. It was excellent, and got deserved praise. And copied. Cover based shooting and regenrating health were added. Until now we have a "standard shooter" that represents a synthesis of what were once highly distinct subgenres, an those subgenres are only present in throwback games.

In RPGs something similar happened with the distinction between strategic RPG and skill based Action RPG, which has now largely eroded. What are the biggest RPGs of the past several years? The Witcher, Fable Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Gragon Age. The last was meant to be an intentional callback to old style RPGs, but still adopted a third person, rather than isometric, approach.

Is this bad? Maybe. The loss of subgenres has eroded the diversity in gaming and weakened the ability to innovate by taking elements from other genres. on the other hand, this appropriation means that the average shooter today is probably much better than the average shooter ten years ago.

Something to think about, regardless.