Hey fam, I'm working on a top sekrit projakt. I'm seeking advice on a list of game genres that could be used to categorize games.

Like, for example on a.cc we have:

Which is great, but it's a little imbalanced since most games get funneled under Action and Arcade, which is a little lame. What categories do you think are/would_be important or relevant?

kthxbai

Yo, dawg. I heard you like genres, so I got some genres for your genres.

For starters, there are "setting" genres and "gameplay" genres... and it looks like A.cc's list does a good job not mixing the two. If genres are like tags on blog posts, however, you should mix the two, with any given game expected to belong to multiple genres.

Then, there are genres that can be extrapolated from other meta data, for which tagging would be redundant. Say you have a field in this database for date of publish. It wouldn't make sense to have a "90's" genre... or would it? I ask because games like Turtles in Time or Mortal Kombat seem more 90's than, say, FIFA or Might and Magic VI... but maybe that's just me. Still, perhaps "genre" should be defined on a gradient, not in binary terms.

Yeah... genres can get kinda subjective. Perhaps it's best not to open this can of worms... Since you're asking, however, I would branch A.cc's action and arcade categories with at least some of the following (examples included):

side-scrolling platformer ... Super Mario Brothers 3
racing
    behind .................. Pole Position
    top-down ................ Monaco GP
    third-person
        scrolling ........... Super R.C. Pro AM
        fixed ............... Micro Machines
shooting
    no gravity
        vertical ............ 1942
        horizontal .......... Gradius
    gravity ................. Abuse

... There are plenty more ways to slice 'em. I wish there were a wiki somewhere that categorized games in all sorts of genres. That would be fun to contribute to (not to mention useful for finding new games).

I'm thinking of going with a tag system, actually. It makes the most sense, will be easier to cross-categorize similar games, etc. With that in mind, maybe I should course-correct my original request:

What categories would be good to include in a tagging system?

Racing + Split-Screen + Co-op + Fantasy + Great Soundtrack are really good examples.

Hmm, even then I'm sure somebody would come along and make a game released in 2017 that's totally 90s in style, and want to put it in the 90s category.

On Android we have to select one out of these in order to put a game on the store:

Action
Adventure
Arcade
Board
Card
Casino
Casual
Educational
Music
Puzzle
Racing
Role Playing
Simulation
Sports
Strategy
Trivia
Word

What's "Simulation"?

There's also flight simulations which are quite popular on Android I guess

There is a certain 2015 film that definitely belongs in the 80s category.

I think imgur leaves tag categories entirely up to users. I'm not sure if there is democratic process involved. Imagine how easy it was to make that, though.

Late to the discussion. Categories are rather an outdated practice for gaming in my view. It worked fine for the 80s and 90s, but as bamccaig pointed out, by the 2000s games started combining genres which makes it more difficult to use a category due to the combination. For example, Fallout 3 could be categorized as first person shooter, third person shooter, or RPG due to it's design. I don't know if using A.cc's categories is the best example because when you are learning to use a library the games you make while learning the library are usually arcade clones, action clones, and puzzle clones. I'm more in agreement with the idea of tag system or a system that simply shows related games based on the game you are looking at, kind of like how Netflix does: "Because you watched <this movie> here are more like it: ".