This was a responce to the FPS Absurdity topic,
but it was locked before I could post. Well apparently it was unlocked while I was typing this and I jumped the gun, but whatever, I wrote the wrest of the post so it might as well stay.
"What is the difference between an RPG and an FPS? Why can't we have RPG FPS MMOs? MMORPGFPS? We need to stop basing a game's genre on how it's presented and instead focus on how it's played. Skyrim would be a roleplaying game, BF3 would be a casual war simulator, and CoD would be an arcade combat game. These games are fundamentally different yet you put them into FPS and RPG even though they all have EXP, first person camera, and combat."
Thinking about this, it made me realize how much we actually lump together games that are totally different based on how they are presented instead of their content and how much genres have become obsolete over the years.. We cal all agree that Portal is a puzzle game and Skyrim is an RPG, but when someone asks about for an FPS, why do we recommend Portal and not Skyrim? It's because Portal uses a gun and Skyrim doesn't, when we think about playing Skyrim we think about going on quests and engaging in melee combat, whilst we think of firing portals from a gun in Portal. Even though both games are presented in a first person fashion, we think of Portal as a FPS puzzle game and Skyrim just as an RPG.
Skyrim Portal
Let's look deeper, we can agree that Portal is a puzzle game, and even though it has FPS elements it's not a "standard" FPS, meaning it doesn't involve combat such as Battlefield or Call of Duty, so we can rule it out of the FPS genre, along with Skyrim for being an RPG focusing more on in your face combat and questing.
If you've played both Battlefield and Call of Duty, you will know that the only thing both games have in common is that you shoot at people until they stop moving. Both games are in a first person perspective and involve combat with guns, yet they go about this point drastically different. Battlefield goes for an authentic approach, offering more open levels, vehicles, squads, ect., while CoD goes for a more arcade fashion approach, offering kill streaks, death streaks, more gibbing, ect. While both games are FPS games focusing on combat with guns, someone who liked BF might no like CoD, and vice versa.
Battlefield 3 CoD Black Ops 2 Now, what would we call CoD and BF if we aren't going to call them first person shooters? We could call them arcade action shooters and casual authentic shooters, AAS and CAS for short, but that would leave a lot of other first person shooters with guns out of the picture, such as Planet side or Halo. This would make us add more genres for specific games, which would cause the same kind of issue that overgeneralization causes. Instead of basing a genre on the presentation of a game and a single mechanic it uses, we should base genres on gameplay. We already do this to some extent, RPG is based on how the game plays, rather than how it is presented. Searching for an RPG will give you a broad group of games that share many of the same gameplay elements, while searching for an FPS will give you a broad group of games that may have nothing more than first person perspective and the ability to shoot as a common aspect, which is why presentation based genres are working against the games they represent.
