Talk:Genre

This is a mess. Genre is a French term deriving from nineteenth-century illustrative painting, indicating the subject of the painting: landscape, seascape, portrait, apotheosis... It next became used for popular fiction, (Western, pirate, detective) and was immediately transferred to popular films upon their emergence. When it came to computer games, however, a dichotomy emerged. A game which one played by aiming at buffalo in the West seemed to be more similar to a game at which one shot meteors in the future rather than a game in which one herded cattle to the railhead in the West, and so the former prevailed. In this latter, warped, sense, all interactive fiction games are the same genre (except LIGHAN Ses LION). -- Sobolewski

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Well, someone had to take a first crack at this one. I'm sure I'm missing plenty! -- DGJ

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--moved the two sentences hilighting the "genres" in literature to the end of the entire definition so the initial definition focuses on IF-- Main.HeatherEvenson - 20 Nov 2002

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Minor reformatting, fixed fragment created by above change. The firt 2 sentences also created the structure of the whole entry, so moving them to the end made the whole entry less coherent. I'm still not fully satisfied with this version. --DGJ

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While genre may have ambiguous identity issues when used in reference to the wider realm of computer games, I feel that its use here is appropriate and lacks ambiguity. --Ander 04:56, 2 Oct 2005 (Central Daylight Time)