Game Genres, pt. 4: Chris Crawford's Taxonomy of Games (1984)

Continued from part three.

The first two genre systems I analyzed were developed by manufacturers for purposes of marketing and informing consumers. The third genre system was developed by an expert player based on experiential analysis of each game. This fourth genre system is the first (that I know of) developed by a game designer and programmer, someone who understands the mechanical and technical underpinnings of digital game's systems and creation.

Chris Crawford's "Taxonomy of Computer Games"

The Art of Computer Game Design (Crawford, 1984)

Chris Crawford wrote what is now considered the first "game studies" text with his pioneering book, The Art of Computer Game Design (1984). Chapter two of the book describes his "Taxonomy of Computer Games," his attempt "illuminate the common factors that link families of games, while revealing differences between families and between members of families" (pg. 19).

Crawford explains that we game designers can "learn a great deal about game design by establishing a taxonomy of computer games." A well-constructed taxonomy would "suggest previously unexplored areas of game design," and, "reveal underlying principles of game design" (pg. 19). Crawford does not consider his definitions to be definitive, he admits that "a number of games do not fit into [his] taxonomy" (pg. 29), but it serves as an early effort to study and understand this then-new aesthetic form.

Crawford states that a taxonomy "is only one way of organizing a large number of related elements" and that "[constructing] several alternate taxonomies may be a useful way to examine the common traits of computer games" (pg. 29). This is exactly why I am undertaking this examination of early game genre systems and will incorporate all the information from these blog posts into my personal game research database.

Crawford broadly groups most games into "Skill and Action" games ("emphasizing perceptual and motor skills" (pg. 19)) and "Strategy" games ("emphasizing cognitive effort" (pg. 19)).

Skill and Action

• Combat Games ("direct, violent confrontation" (pg. 20))
• Maze Games (including Maze Craze, Dodge 'Em (driving game, but in a maze), and Pac-Man)
• Sports Games
• Paddle Games (covers the "PONG-based games" (pg. 28), what is otherwise called the ball-and-paddle genre (like in Video Games (Len Buckwalter, 1977, pg. 33)))
• Race Games (standard driving games like Night Driver, but also includes Dog Daze (1981), a game where two players (as dogs) race to be the first to "tag" fire hydrants that appear on the screen)
• Miscellaneous Games (games that Crawford couldn't decide how to characterize, including Donkey Kong, Frogger (or Preppie in the book's first printing), and Apple Panic (an unlicensed Apple II clone of the arcade game Space Panic))

Strategy

• Adventures (text adventure and graphic adventure games)
• D&D Games (CRPGs)
• War Games (like Computer Bismarck and Crawford's own best-selling Eastern Front 1941)
• Games of Chance (includes craps and blackjack. He states that these games "have not proven very popular" on computer and "show the folly of mindlessly transporting games from one medium to another" (pg. 37). I recall casino skill games like blackjack and poker being fairly ubiquitous during the 1980s. Perhaps their popularity was due to the string of strip poker titles published once home computer graphics reached a certain level of fidelity.)
• Educational and Children's Games (includes classic mainframe computer simulation games like Hammurabi and Lunar Lander, as well as Warren Robinett's pioneering Rocky's Boots, designed to teach kids about logic gates)
• Interpersonal Games (an undeveloped category at the time of writing, but one that would include Crawford's unpublished Gossip (1983) and later games like The Sims, Facade (2005), and probably the entire dating game genre)

It is a sign of the times that Crawford's Miscellaneous Games category shows he had difficulty classifying early platformer games like Donkey Kong and Apple Panic. This was still a fairly new concept and earlier titles (like Space Panic and Crazy Climber) were often referred to as "climbing" or "ladder" games. Crawford describes Donkey Kong as "like a race game with intelligent obstacles" (pg. 29) and Apple Panic as "like a maze game in some ways and like a combat game in others" (pg. 30). He concluded that he would need to "wait for other developments" (pg. 31) before refining his taxonomy. Donkey Kong was only the first button to include a jump button, and the platformer genre would quickly evolve to be a dominant game mode by the late 1980s. Looking at the games now, I am tempted to personally classify platformer games without jumping (including games like Lode Runner) into the category of Maze Game.

Crawford realized that his taxonomy would soon be obsolete due to the faced-paced evolution seen in the computer game industry. His Interpersonal Games category is a sign of that, a prescient game categorization for a portion of the game industry that hadn't even developed at the time of publication. 

Game Genres, pt. 2: Mattel Intellivsion's Networks (1979)

Continued from part one.

Another early attempt at categorizing digital games into specific genres was taken up by Mattel Electronics to organize their own line of game cartridge titles, which appears to have begun with the system's test market launch in late 1979. Note that this appears to predate Atari's own "contents" system of genres by at least one year.

Mattel Intellivision's "Networks"

Example of different game boxes for different "networks," Intellivision Catalog (1983)

Mattel's take on game genres is that each game belongs to a specific "network," capitalizing on the Intellivision being an "intelligent television." Each Intellivision game cartridge comes in a colorful box matching the color of its home network. This system of color-coded networks appears to have been designed from the earliest days of Intellivision: game cartridges were color-coded even during the early days of test marketing. The system evolved over time, with new networks like Space Action Network and Arcade Network added later.

• Major League Sports Network (high-quality sports games with unrivaled graphics set Intellivision games apart from their Atari VCS competitors. Mattel shows their love for licenses with NFL Football, PGA Gold, NHL Hockey, and other sports licenses.)
• Action Network (most arcade-style games are in this network. Note that Space Action is a spinoff from this network.)
• Gaming Network (casino-style games, many with a "Las Vegas" moniker at the start of their title. Note that Horse Racing falls under this network rather than Action Network.)
• Strategy Network (mostly games based on classic board games, with the addition of Don Daglow's Utopia, one of the first examples of a real-time strategy game. ABPA Backgammon uses a license from the somewhat obscure American Backgammon Players Association.)
• Children's Learning Network (only two games released were Electric Company Word Fun and Electric Company Math Fun in 1980. Interestingly, the TV show Electric Company had ceased production in 1977, but Mattel used the strength of licensing to lend an air of legitimacy to their software titles.)
• Space Action Network (this network is an offshoot of the Action Network. Two early games in this category, Space Battle and Space Armada, were first published in the red boxes of the Action Network.)
• Special Intellivoice Cartridges (games designed to use the Intellivoice voice synthesis hardware module released in 1982.)
• Arcade Network (only Vectron was added to this short-lived network. Later arcade game ports like Burgertime were released without a network classification)

Like Atari's system, Mattel's genre system is designed around marketing needs and informing a population of consumers. It serves as another data point of how early digital game manufacturers organized their own individual works as they saw best.