When we were talking last class about how to classify video games, I was thinking to myself "Why are video games being treated so differently?" The central question offered to the class was whether video games were a genre or a medium, but here's my question to everyone else on here, couldn't you say the same about every other form of media used in telling a story?

The way I see it, video games are very similar to other forms of narration. For comparison's sake, I'll use movies. There's action movies, comedic movies, romance movies, horror movies, etc. Now, for video games, there are first/third person shooter video games, role playing video games, simulation video games (think the Sim series or Lemonade Tycoon), survival horror video games, etc. Both movies and video games have "prefixes" added onto them to classify them.

Now, obviously the actual apparatuses used in each are different: movies use projection screens, video games used televisions and various different controllers. The same can be said about novels, comics, and I'm sure all of the other methods of telling stories that we haven't talked about yet. Novels use books to tell the story, and novels obviously have sub-categories just like video games. Comics? Same idea.

I guess my first point in making this blog would be to sort of put the idea out there that "genre" and "medium" seem that they could be somewhat interchangeable. Granted, there is an obvious difference in the definitions of the two, genre is a classification of the story, whereas medium is how the story is told. My second point, in that, would be that video games are really like every other form of story-telling we've studied.