Categories and Classification

Labels like “RPG,” “roguelike” and “open world” were once useful shorthand. Stretched across thousands of games, many now describe almost nothing. This series traces how game categories form, drift and collapse, from the roguelike to the soulslike, and what each one actually picked out at the start. A label that fits everything stops helping anyone choose, compare or understand.

The alternative proposed here is to describe games along separate axes instead of folding everything into one word: genre, mechanic, theme, perspective and format. Kept apart, these let a description say exactly what a game is and does, and make comparisons that a single label hides. Every episode returns to one question: how do we describe what a game actually is, without leaning on a label that no longer means anything?