RPG Taxonomy

[skuphundaku]

Initial proposal:

The "What is an RPG?" dilemma has existed ever since RPGs have been identified as a genre. Trying to list all possible combinations of design decisions and label each one individually is a fool's errand. In order to find a definitive answer to this problem, what is needed is to define what are the criteria used for classifying RPGs and then, for each criterion, decide what are the options. I would propose:

1. Perspective:
a) subjective (first person or over the shoulder third person)
b) objective ("isometric")

2. Number of player characters:
a) single player character
b) party-based

3. Timing
a) fully turn-based
b) turn-based combat and real-time exploration
c) real-time with pause
d) fully real-time

4. Focus
a) story-focused (focused on storytelling)
b) exploration-focused (focused on exploring the game world)
c) adventure-like (focused on non-combat interaction with the game world)
d) combat-focused (focused on combat interaction with the game world)

5. Game world type
a) open world
b) semi-open world
c) linear

6. Character system
a) classless
b) class-based

7. System type
a) probabilistic
b) deterministic

Starting from this, you notice that you already have 2x2x4x4x3x2x2=768 possible combinations, which means MUCH more possible sub-genres than anybody tried to define. If each option is considered a tag, then each game gets tagged appropriately and that is the end of it.

At that point, anybody could filter a list of games by the tags they're interested in and extract the information that they find relevant/useful

Only after all of this is done, people can give the familiar names to existing combinations of tags or create new names for newly identified popular combinations of tags.

Now, what I want with this thread is to refine this taxonomy so that we can create a database of games, tag them and use this as the definitive reference of the RPG genre.


UPDATE #1 (11/26/2012):

Given the received feedback, I updated the proposed taxonomy:

1. Non-combat perspective:
a) first person
b) over the shoulder third person
c) bird's eye view third person
d) perspective projection
e) parallel projection
f) top-down

2. Combat perspective:
a) first person
b) over the shoulder third person
c) bird's eye view third person
d) perspective projection
e) parallel projection
f) top-down

3. Non-combat camera:
a) fixed
b) adjustable

4. Combat camera:
a) fixed
b) adjustable

5. Non-combat timing
a) fully turn-based
c) real-time with pause
d) fully real-time

6. Combat timing
a) fully turn-based
c) real-time with pause
d) fully real-time

7. Non-combat/combat transition
a) seamless
b) perspective change
c) camera change
d) timing change

8. Number of player characters:
a) single controllable player character
b) single controllable player character and AI controlled party
c) fully controllable party

9. Focus
a) story-focused (focused on storytelling)
b) exploration-focused (focused on exploring the game world)
c) adventure-like (focused on non-combat interaction with the game world)
d) combat-focused (focused on combat interaction with the game world)

10. Game world type
a) open world
b) semi-open world
c) linear

11. Character system
a) classless
b) class-based

12. Character evolution mechanic
a) xp-based (you perform actions->you earn XP->you evolve your characters using XP)
b) use-based (Elder Scrolls/Dungeon Siege-like, you perform actions->the skills used to perform these actions increase)
c) item-based (you don't earn xp or increase skills by using them, but the player character evolves by acquiring new, more powerful items)

13. Skill learning mechanic
a) unconstrained (the player character can add new skills at will, the only requirement being mechanical, i.e. enough xp is available etc.)
b) constrained (the player character can't add new skills at will, needing to find various NPCs/items in the game world that can teach him new skills)

14. System type
a) probabilistic
b) deterministic

 

[Captain Shrek]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...at-constitutes-good-games.76382/#post-2282498

But still the idea you present is good and I will come up with a better argument.

 

[made]

You're overthinking this. It's much simpler and reliable to define RPGs using the following system:

1. Are there dungeons and/or cellars in the game?
a) dungeons everywhere oh god its heavan :D
b) there no dungons wtf am I playing

2. Are those dungeons and/or cellars populated by rats, preferably of the giant variety, for you to kill?
a) yes, many rats!
b) no rats in sight
c) no rats but plenty other critters, does that count?

You notice that there is an infinite number of possible combinations but only one (a+a) makes for a true RPG. Other combinations may seem like RPGs to the untrained eye but they are just watered-down popamole wannabes. Don't be a newfag and mistake them for the real deal.

 

[skuphundaku]

You have to understand that, lacking non-troll feedback, I'm still going to go ahead with my plan and create this database based on the Jaesun 's Official Codex top 50 and felipepepe 's Console top 50 lists. I would have preferred it if Jaesun didn't added that "for PC" requirement, thus splitting the two tops and making any analysis of the whole RPG landscape impossible under the circumstances. What I want here from other Codexers is to get your feedback about deciding on the criteria and the available choices for each criterion in such a way that everybody agrees with the taxonomy.

 

[skuphundaku]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...at-constitutes-good-games.76382/#post-2282498

I understand what you're trying there, but your approach is more subjective, taking into account what the gamer is looking for in a game and what he might see in a game ("... is in the eye of the beholder" kind of thing). On the other hand, I'm trying to identify a canonical set of design choices. I don't care about what the gamer is looking for/might see in a game. I care for identifying objective design choices that can not be disputed. Only after having this canonical set of design choices, one could come and affix names to various combinations of design choices, thus eliminating the cognitive bias introduced by each gamer when defining RPGs based of what each one considers important.

 

[Excidium]

What a pointless effort.

 

[skuphundaku]

What a pointless effort.

What a pointless post.

 

[Groof]

6. Character system
a) classless
b) class-based

I think you at least want something to distinguish between games where you learn skills by using them and games where you gain, ah, one kind of experience. So like, Fallout is classless/xp, and Elder Scrolls is (pretty much) classless/learn by doing.

(Obviously a ton of tags and things you can add here, and you might not want to go overboard. But, like all personally, I consider "game flails about, trying to figure out what my character(s) should become" a bigger deal than "classless".)

 

[felipepepe]

I like cross-analysing data like this, and IMHO having a plit between consoles & PC RPGs will provide some interesting info.... and I would even add launch date of titles to the list.

 

[skuphundaku]

6. Character system
a) classless
b) class-based

I think you at least want something to distinguish between games where you learn skills by using them and games where you gain, ah, one kind of experience. So like, Fallout is classless/xp, and Elder Scrolls is (pretty much) classless/learn by doing.

(Obviously a ton of tags and things you can add here, and you might not want to go overboard. But, like all personally, I consider "game flails about, trying to figure out what my character(s) should become" a bigger deal than "classless".)

I'm thinking of adding this as a new criterion instead of merging this choice into the "Character system" criterion:

TENTATIVE:
#. Character evolution mechanic
a) xp-based (you perform actions->you earn XP->you evolve your characters using XP)
b) use-based (Elder Scrolls/Dungeon Siege-like, you perform actions->the skills used to perform these actions increase)
c) item-based (you don't earn xp or increase skills by using them, but the player character evolves by acquiring new, more powerful items)

#+1. Skill learning mechanic
a) unconstrained (the player character can add new skills at will, the only requirement being mechanical, i.e. enough xp is available etc.)
b) constrained (the player character can't add new skills at will, needing to find various NPCs/items in the game world that can teach him new skills)

 

[skuphundaku]

I like cross-analysing data like this, and IMHO having a plit between consoles & PC RPGs will provide some interesting info.... and I would even add launch date of titles to the list.

Of course, release dates and other info like that is going to be a must. Fortunately, that is easily obtainable after we have the final lists.

 

[Karmapowered]

By all means, do get the ball rolling.

There are so many attempts at producing, if not an exhaustive, a pertinent classification of cRPGs all over the web at the moment that it should be proof enough that there is a strong demand in the matter.

• Mobygames cRPGs' classification is shit.
• Wikipedia cRPGs' classification is shit.
• Institutional gaming websites' classifications are biased in the best case, idiotic in the other, hence shit.
• Most user websites' classifications are incomplete, if not outright very subjective.

All it takes to start is a database plugged into a website somewhere. That would be the hardest part to set up, and maintain.

Feed it with a list of games that you can fetch from about anywhere, and a workable list of tags. Their granularity should be of the atomic level : simple, clear, indisputable. A bit like what you, and others, have started to collect here on the Kodex.

Have your visitors contribute with their input to the tagging over time. At the beginning, offer a maximum of freedom with the games added, and the associated tags.

Gather a proficient team among your community, then start moderating. Based on the frequency of the tags, it should be a breeze to weed out the bad crops. At the end, you should be able to provide the same kind of repository that vndb.org provides for visual novel type games : valuable information that allows each and everyone to browse cRPGs according to their priorities, wants and needs.

If your database is at least of semi-decent quality, you should be able to gather good traffic to your site, to sell ads, to make it more or less social a site with votes, comments, etc, if such were your inclination.

It can be done, it has been done, as illustrated above. I daresay that it only requires a modicum of intelligence to realize the validity of such a project. I am not pretending that this will lead to the holy grail of settling all the disputes once and for all about what a cRPG is (or should be), but it definitely should get us a step closer to establishing a perimeter around such a definition.

Whatever you do, and henceforth intend to achieve, don't listen to the naysayers. Please. You know the drill : haters are gonna hate, and yaddada yadada. They should be background noise at best at this point, and remain at that level because they couldn't ever come up with anything better than potsmoking and stroking their virtual dicks over forums all day long.

 

[dnf]

I don't necessary agree that there exist 764 rpg sub-genres out there but fell free to prove me wrong...

 

[skuphundaku]

I don't necessary agree that there exist 764 rpg sub-genres out there but fell free to prove me wrong...

I didn't claim that all those combinations exist in the wild. Some of them may not, but I can neither confirm nor deny that conclusively at the moment because the database has not been created yet. After we get the ball rolling, it may turn out that, indeed, some of the combinations haven't been tried yet. But that's the beauty of such a system: you would be able to use it to extract any information that you deem relevant and not depend on the others' ad-hoc classifications.

 

[Telengard]

The major pitfall that I have seen most people run into is: the old definition of RPG is one part of an old marketing classification system. The idea being - once you define a number of genres, people can step into a store, read the genre name on the box, and have a general idea of what they're getting if they buy that item.

The old system has, of course, been pissed all over by modern marketing techniques. And all we have now is just a big mess. So, trying to define RPG without rebuilding something of the overall structure of a good, solid classification system usually becomes an exercise in futility, as people start falling into an endless nitpicky debate about where each particular game should go - the RPG category or the Not RPG category.

If you get at least a solid number of broad-based categories rolling again, you can then send each game to its best proper category as you have defined them, and any debates can then trend towards being about which category a game fits best in, instead of endless arguing over What are the RPG factors that this game has, are those real RPG factors, and is there enough of those factors in this game to make it an RPG.

That way you have a readily useable and - most important - visible means of determining which games will be going on your list.

 

[Bulba]

not all of those 764 combinations are rpgs... some of them fall in to different genre

 

[Groof]

I'm thinking of adding this as a new criterion instead of merging this choice into the "Character system" criterion:

Sure. (And I only quoted that part because it was the bit that was closest to what I wanted. Not because it should necessarily go in there.)

And kind of on that note, and less concrete and more meta-nonsense. You said "something something considered as tags". But each category seems to contain mutually exclusive things. Which seems somewhat "stricter" than just a bunch of tags to me (although many tags would be mutually exclusive anyway, this still seems more "organized").

But, if it's "just tags", I don't know that i like tags like "classless". Like, you don't need to tag something as "not having X", so long as you can search for things that do not have the "has X"-tag. As it is, if you have to select one thing from each category it obviously makes sense to have all the "not X" choices there.

I don't think I'm going somewhere terribly specific with this. Mostly just saying that it is probably a good idea to consider pros and cons of different approaches and so on. Like, is it more useful to group things into categories of multiple mutually exclusive things, or is it more useful to have tags for different "features" that games do or do not have? Which way requires less shoehorning?

I remember http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHeta_YZ0oE as being worth watching. Not super-comfortable with vouching for it, as I watched it years ago, but... I think it's at least amusing/worth one's time, and possibly a little useful.

Other stuff to think about: Where does stuff like RoA (first-person-y exploration, isometric-y combat) fit into the perspective category?

 

[skuphundaku]

The major pitfall that I have seen most people run into is: the old definition of RPG is one part of an old marketing classification system. The idea being - once you define a number of genres, people can step into a store, read the genre name on the box, and have a general idea of what they're getting if they buy that item.

The old system has, of course, been pissed all over by modern marketing techniques. And all we have now is just a big mess. So, trying to define RPG without rebuilding something of the overall structure of a good, solid classification system usually becomes an exercise in futility, as people start falling into an endless nitpicky debate about where each particular game should go - the RPG category or the Not RPG category.

If you get at least a solid number of broad-based categories rolling again, you can then send each game to its best proper category as you have defined them, and any debates can then trend towards being about which category a game fits best in, instead of endless arguing over What are the RPG factors that this game has, are those real RPG factors, and is there enough of those factors in this game to make it an RPG.

That way you have a readily useable and - most important - visible means of determining which games will be going on your list.

Yes, exactly! I do neither want nor need to pull any genres out of my ass and I don't care for any "classic" definitions of RPGs. For all I care, people can add Call of Duty and Quake to those lists. What matters is that, after the lists are complete, each game is tagged correctly. After that is done, you can create your own definition of what is an RPG by creating your combination of tags. Everything that doesn't fit that mold is not a RPG by your standards. This way, people would have a solid starting point for debate, instead of endlessly bitching about things when, in fact, they start from completely different premises and they're, essentially, speaking different languages.

This idea of using a number of criteria, each with multiple tags, is that the criteria are orthogonal to each other, only the tags in some of the criteria being mutually exclusive. Using the old paradigm of genres, you have a number of mutually exclusive genres. When genres started to inter-pollinate, then a massive clusterfuck of genres and sub-genres was created, with RPGs being particularly hard hit by this phenomenon.

 

[skuphundaku]

I'm thinking of adding this as a new criterion instead of merging this choice into the "Character system" criterion:

Sure. (And I only quoted that part because it was the bit that was closest to what I wanted. Not because it should necessarily go in there.)

And kind of on that note, and less concrete and more meta-nonsense. You said "something something considered as tags". But each category seems to contain mutually exclusive things. Which seems somewhat "stricter" than just a bunch of tags to me (although many tags would be mutually exclusive anyway, this still seems more "organized").

But, if it's "just tags", I don't know that i like tags like "classless". Like, you don't need to tag something as "not having X", so long as you can search for things that do not have the "has X"-tag. As it is, if you have to select one thing from each category it obviously makes sense to have all the "not X" choices there.

I don't think I'm going somewhere terribly specific with this. Mostly just saying that it is probably a good idea to consider pros and cons of different approaches and so on. Like, is it more useful to group things into categories of multiple mutually exclusive things, or is it more useful to have tags for different "features" that games do or do not have? Which way requires less shoehorning?

I remember http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHeta_YZ0oE as being worth watching. Not super-comfortable with vouching for it, as I watched it years ago, but... I think it's at least amusing/worth one's time, and possibly a little useful.

Other stuff to think about: Where does stuff like RoA (first-person-y exploration, isometric-y combat) fit into the perspective category?

I am thinking whether the choices in each criterion should be mutually exclusive of not. For example, I listed "b) turn-based combat and real-time exploration" in "3. Timing". Maybe timing should be split into "Combat timing" and "Exploration timing" and make the option in each of them mutually exclusive. On the other hand, "4. Focus" and "#. Character evolution mechanic" would be pretty well suited to being multiple choice because having hybrids is very probable in these cases. Making these criteria have mutually exclusive choices would mean changing the criteria themselves to something like:

#. Story focused
a) yes
b) no

#+1. Exploration focused
a) yes
b) no

#+2. Adventure focused
a) yes
b) no

#+3. Combat focused
a) yes
b) no

#+4. XP-based
a) yes
b) no

#+5. Use-based
a) yes
b) no

#+6. Item-based
a) yes
b) no

This would be workable, but a bit unwieldy.

 

[felipepepe]

You should just add tags bro, like BG2 [party-based/classes/RTWP/isometric], do not reatrain yourself with pointless excessive definitions.

 

[Groof]

This would be workable, but a bit unwieldy.

Maybe. I think I'd rather write it something like this though:

[ ] Story focused
[ ] Exploration focused
[ ] Adventure focused
[ ] Combat focused
[ ] XP-based
[ ] Use-based
[ ] Item-based

(Edit: I guess that's just "I agree". That they're less unwieldy when not grouped into categories of mutually exclusive things.)

On the other hand, "4. Focus" and "#. Character evolution mechanic" would be pretty well suited to being multiple choice because having hybrids is very probable in these cases. Making these criteria have mutually exclusive choices would mean changing the criteria themselves to something like:

Yeah, the "focus" stuff was part of what bothered me. I took the things to be mutually exclusive things because most of the categories seemed to have mutually exclusive things, and I guess you didn't really mean it like that. So, uh, cool.

Either way. That sounds a lot like "yeah, I'm thinking about that," which is pretty much the response I was hoping for.

 

[Excommunicator]

Don't fucking nest the definitions or make compound labels. As felipepepe said you just give broad, descriptive tags and give each game as many labels as applicable to it "3rd person" "Overhead" "Party Based" "Use-Based Skill System" "D&D" "Fantasy" That is the only way this is going to get anywhere

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

So the purpose of this is, I guess... if someone likes an RPG and wants more of the same, he'll just look up another RPG that ticks similar boxes?

The only worry here is that there are too few good RPGs as it is, we can't really afford to be picky.

 

[skuphundaku]

So the purpose of this is, I guess... if someone likes an RPG and wants more of the same, he'll just look up another RPG that ticks similar boxes?

This is a very good use case that I was thinking about as well. However, the main purpose is to establish a solid foundation when discussion RPGs because, right now, people debate about what RPGs are some think Wizardry, others think Fallout 2, others think Deus Ex and it always devolves into a circlejerk because everybody is starting from different premises.

 

[felipepepe]

So the purpose of this is, I guess... if someone likes an RPG and wants more of the same, he'll just look up another RPG that ticks similar boxes?

This is a very good use case that I was thinking about as well. However, the main purpose is to establish a solid foundation when discussion RPGs because, right now, people debate about what RPGs are some think Wizardry, others think Fallout 2, others think Deus Ex and it always devolves into a circlejerk because everybody is starting from different premises.

Er... I think that we should limit to "tags to help finding games to play"... I trully doubt that any definition or RPG will stand, or that delving into that can bring somehting good...