Reading 03

Image source.
Photo of different images from various games of different genres.

Reflection

Hello and welcome back to my blog! For the reading this week we have to continue on with our research and had to read four academic papers and write up annotated bibliographies! I ended up reading three academic papers for this week, as four was just not manageable for me. I struggled to find papers on Games Genres. I picked this topic thinking I know what a genre is so, therefore I'll be able to do it but not looking too great. I might be just looking for the wrong things, who knows. Overall, I'm really confused as to what I'm meant to be looking for in the articles as my topic seems broad and none of them seem to be answering the questions as to what a genre is. Hopefully, as the weeks go on this becomes easier as I really struggled this week and I'm not really looking forward to continuing it. The first one I read was "An Operational Study of Video Games’ Genres". It wasn't too long and was easy to understand for the most part. The second one I read was Video Game Genre as a Predictor of Problem Use. Cyberpsychology, Behaviour, and Social Networking, I found this one more difficult to understand what exactly they were talking about. I'm still not sure it'll be competently useful for my research. Finally, the last one I read for this week was An Introduction to Videogame Genre Theory. Understanding Videogame Genre Framework, I got the gist of this one quicker I think. The language used wasn't too difficult. The author talked about Daniel Cook which I've seen a few papers talk about him so far so I think I'll have to look up his work to see what I can find! Overall I am struggling with this and I really hope it gets easier, I kept putting it off because it was stressing me out and then I became more stressed as I was leaving myself short to complete it. I'm not sure if they're even long enough but hopefully next week I can improve on them.

Annotated Bibliography

Qaffas, A.A. (2020) An Operational Study of Video Games’ Genres. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies. 14 (15), pp. 175-194.

In this article Qaffas, A.A presents their study on the most successful video games of the last thirty-four years. It explains how they all fall into only sixteen genres. The author explained that they have looked at the evolution of the sixteen most popular game genres and they've analyzed it. They note how some genres are becoming more popular now than ever before. The authors show the evolution of game genres through charts and how many games there were falling into the genres. In the conclusion, they make recommendations for game designers and entrepreneurs and how they can profit from the more popular genres. Also how other researches may go about future research about game genres. This would be useful for my research as it can be used to show popular genres.

Elliott, L., Golub, A., Ream, G. & Dunlap, E. (2012) Video Game Genre as a Predictor of Problem Use. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. 15 (3), pp. 155-161.

In this article, the authors discuss their study on problematic use for specific genres such as first-person shooter, action-adventure, role-playing, and gambling games. More specifically they talk about the impacts Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games(MMORPG) games have on people. They state they are more addictive due to the dopamine released during play, saying it's the same as the high you would get from drugs. The authors say that MMORPG is the new highly addictive games. These games have a never-ending feel to them. They got 3,380 people to take part in their study. This would be useful to my research to show the bad side of gaming genres and how they affect people.

Cășvean, T. (2018) An Introduction to Videogame Genre Theory. Understanding Videogame Genre Framework. Athens J.Mass Media Commun. 2 (1), pp. 57-68.

In this article, Cășvean discusses different forms of genres. She states that although there are many genres, they're becoming a thing of the past, and instead games will have multiple genres, therefore, creating new ones. Cășvean says that once a game has a certain genre attached it makes it easier for people to pick it up once they've played a game of the same genre before. So saying you've played a first-person shooter, then therefore you should be able to play the majority of other games that fall into the category. She also questions if the genre of games is a marketing plot just to sell games or is there a framework behind it. Cășvean states that there are two definitions for a genre that suits the research she has carried out. She says "the game genre is "a recurring type or category of text [...] defined by structural, thematic and /or functional criteria". She goes through the industry's point of view of genres.

Link to the google docs with my annotated bibliography