Lord RoAlJo said:TymanTheLong said:IanVanCheese said:Lord RoAlJo said:Day 9312983712987 of me begging TA to add a horror tag. T_T
Haha I was trying to find it when I was putting together the "best type of horror" poll, I agree it's weird we don't have one. I'll look into it but no promises.
I think the problem is that horror in video games is more of a theme than a genre. Saying something is “horror” really doesn’t imply anything about the gameplay unlike saying something is a shooter or a platformer.
But saying “action horror” or “survival horror” does, however that doesn’t come close to covering all horror.
This is honestly such an annoying argument everyone tries. It could be said "Adventure" is a theme then but we have that option.
It makes no sense that 'Australian Football", with its whooping collection of 5 games, is listed yet horror isn't. Even if we say horror is a theme, there's still an insanely huge collection of games that falls under this. There's a huge community of horror gamers out there TA just ignores existing and I honestly have no idea why.
Other gaming-related websites have no issues with having horror as a genre.
What I mean is that a game like SOMA is basically a walking simulator that has a horror theme. If someone says “walking simulator” that tells me something useful about the gameplay, the same way that someone telling me “Doom is a FPS” tells me about its gameplay.
“Horror” means almost nothing from a gameplay perspective. It’s why you see terms like “survival horror” to try and fix this issue. When we communicate genre in gaming generally we mean “game play mechanics” not theme.
In movies horror is very formulaic, that’s why we see so many repetitive tropes and plot points that a movie like Cabin in the Woods or Tucker and Dale vs. Evil can be made poking fun at them.
Adventure is wildly broad of course and that can be its own kind of problem (which is why we see stuff like Action Adventure), but that doesn’t mean using Horror as a genre isn’t a problem.
There’s no Dewey Decimal System for organizing video games (or maybe libraries for have a system now and if they do perhaps everyone should use it) so everyone is just muddling through the best they can.
Personally I say let’s have genre tags, I don’t think that would really upset people (except maybe the database people 😂).