HOL Genre 2.0 - The Whys and Wherefores
 

The original HOL genre system was inadequate for its purpose and had a number of glaring problems:

- Too many games were categorised as simply "Action". This genre doesn't tell us much about the game and so has been removed (although Action Adventure and Action Strategy have been included).

- Certain genres in the old systems were actually themes; namely "Educational" and "Adult". For example, an educational game might be an adventure, a puzzler, a colouring book or any genre. Both have been moved to Theme.

- Some genres included multiple types of games. For example, the "Adventure - Point and click" genre included what is traditionally considered a point and click adventure (e.g. Secret of Monkey Island) but also other types. "Shoot-'em-up - First Person Shooter" included both Doom clones and Operation Wolf games.

- The top level categorisation was too wide. For example, the "Shoot-'em-up" genre contained far too many games and wasn't particularly useful without further categorisation.

The new genre system attempts to solve these problems and add lots of new features.

Please note that the genre system still needs a lot of work. Rather than continue to develop it offline I decided to make it live (thanks to RCK for implementing in the HOL) and then update it.

Therefore, it is incomplete, subject to change and there may be lots of mistakes!

Categorisation is of course a subjective exercise and there is no single "correct" way to do it. The genre system aims to be a practical method of making sense of the thousands of Amiga games but it will never be perfect or acceptable to all.

The first step was to group similar games and try to build up a list of detailed sub-genres. This was necessary before the next step which is to combine any duplicate sub-genres and split others.

Please use the following threads to discuss each aspect of the genre system:

Categories and Sub-Categories
Dimension
Person
Scroll Type
Viewpoint
Quickmatch
Theme
Origin