When used in relation to video games, the term “genre” primarily functions as a descriptor of the types of interactive play present in the text—e.g. role-playing, shooting, driving, etc. Games’ systems of interaction often become the main identifiers by which they get categorized. While a plethora of genres defined by narrative and theme are represented in video games, this classification is often secondary to the ludic (gameplay) genre because the structures and types of play vary widely between representations of a thematic genre. For example, sci-fi games can take the shape of platformers, puzzle games, first-person shooters, racing games, interactive narratives, and many more. While said games may borrow from similar generic, aesthetic, and thematic iconography, the play experiences may significantly alter the ultimate pleasures, emotions, and meanings being created through the player-game interaction.
This overlap of thematic and ludic genres creates a complication for the application of genre and adaptation studies to video games because questions of adaptation and iteration must also consider the impact of player input on the generic experience. In examining the centrality of player input on genre expression, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar 2018) serves as an example which seeks to adapt the Hollywood Western into the format of an open-world, third-person action game. The game’s generic alignment begins even before the world has loaded, with loading screens displaying daguerreotypes of animals, landscapes, and wooden buildings, calling attention to the environment which the player will inhabit as the play.
When the game finally loads, the screen usually shows the player’s avatar, outlaw protagonist Arthur Morgan, in a relaxed pose: crouching to observe a flower, looking at a distant mountain, observing a sunrise at the edge of a forest clearing, standing outside of a saloon, or other such calm poses. The game immediately calls attention to the character’s place in the Western landscape before handing the reigns over to the player. At this point, the game’s digital assets have loaded and the various programmed systems—meant to create the illusion of a living, breathing Western landscape replete with townspeople and wildlife—are fully functioning. If the player does not input commands to the controller, however, the game will continue to run its Western procedures, but doesn’t yet allow its systems to affect the character.
To illustrate: during one play session, I sat to observe what the game would do without a player. It was nighttime, and Arthur sat crouched observing a flower. In previous play sessions, my actions as Arthur caused him to incur a bounty; though I hadn’t interacted with the game yet, its world kept moving and eventually bounty hunters arrived to gun Arthur down and collect their reward. Three men on horseback arrived and began to open fire. The game’s logic is designed with the intention of creating dynamic Western moments which feel unscripted and natural. Ideally, such bounty hunters would catch the player unawares, recreating the thrill of suddenly having to deal with a gunfight against a Western backdrop. But, up until the point that the player makes their first controller input (for example, making Arthur walk forward) their avatar is invincible. As a result, the men proceeded to fire endless amounts of ammunition into Arthur’s person for twenty minutes as I watched and took screenshots to capture the passage of time. When the sun rose, I decided that enough time had passed, and as I pressed the left stick to begin walking, the game spurred Arthur to “life” and began to process the damage of each shot—the Western shootout finally bearing its intended weight and consequence with a player at the helm.
In the scene which I’ve described, a threshold between what the game is attempting to accomplish in its creation of a Western world and what it is actually able to accomplish without the player’s participation is revealed. While the systems and procedures of the game may call upon events, scenarios, and iconographies which invoke the Western genre and give the illusion of a self-sustaining Western simulation, there is a limit to the game’s expressive potential in the absence of the player’s actions and reactions within the generic Western setting and scenarios. As games scholar Clara Fernández-Vara states regarding the player’s performing role within games, “The game designer does not have direct control over the experience of the player, particularly because the game needs the input of the player to become a performance” (Fernández-Vara 6). Until the player is present to participate in the world, the systems of the game (in this case the dynamics which construct the Western iconography in Red Dead Redemption 2) have little payoff and don’t invoke the full implications of the actions and consequences associated with the game’s thematic genre. As such, the game’s themes and systems are unable to come to their full generic fruition.
The player is not only necessary to the game’s generic functions, but also to the direction that the game’s generic expressions take. While some have called Red Dead Redemption 2 a gamification of the revisionist Western, the game employs generic elements of various Western subgenres including the frontier Western, the cowboy Western, the outlaw Western, etc. This is true not only in the game’s worldbuilding, but also in the variety of gameplay activities and opportunities afforded to the player within the open-world framework. Within this generically broad structure, the player is the able to choose what sets of iconographies they will be interacting with during their play session. Whether the player has bounties to capture, cards to play, cattle to herd, fish to catch, or a train to rob, they can decide at a moment’s notice what sub-genre of Western they will be performing through their interactions. As a result, the overall generic expression of the Western as gamified in Red Dead Redemption 2 is difficult to track as it oscillates, sometimes jarringly, between various generic modes as the players engages with, enacts, and performs different versions of the Western.
To conclude, tracing the application of well-established genres into video games requires additional considerations beyond the adaptation of iconographies, tropes, and themes. As players are central to the performance and expression of genre in interactive play, one must examine how the game’s systems function to create generic meaning, what role the player fills in the enactment of those meanings, and how the player is able to ultimately shift and manipulate the intended generic expression through modes of play. If Red Dead Redemption 2 can teach us anything about studying genre in video games, it’s that genre can be difficult to wrangle.
Works Cited
Fernández-Vara, Clara. “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.” Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, 2009.
Red Dead Redemption 2. PS4 version, Rockstar Games, 2018.
