Forums > MobyGames > separate category for 'Hidden Objects' games.
Gucek (232) on 8/19/2011 2:08 PM · Permalink · Report
The subject says it.. As quite hardcore adventure gamer I believe it's a blasphemy to put those games into Adventure genre AND also Puzzle-Solving category. I know that creators of those 'games' are trying to convince people that those are 'Adventures'. I'm also aware of the fact that 'typical' adventure games also quite often had some pixel-hunting which was closely related to 'puzzle-solving', but still - that was not the main (or ONLY) object of the game. So.. any ideas how to solve this? The simplest (but definitely not the best) would be to add 'Hidden Objects' into 'Non-Sport', and (even though I'm heavily against this) ..leave them as adventures. What do you think?
vedder (70795) on 8/19/2011 2:17 PM · Permalink · Report
In my proposal for an update to our genre system, they have their own "sub-genre". They would still be filed on the the Adventure genre as their main genre, but easily identifiable because of the sub-genre. As would other major streams within the Adventure genre, such as Graphical adventure or Interactive fiction (the latter already exists).
Unicorn Lynx (181775) on 8/19/2011 3:02 PM · Permalink · Report
I don't think there is a big difference between marking these games with new sub-genre or having a separate group for them. The way the engine works now, the latter is even easier: you can open the group in one window and then browse through Adventure + Puzzle-solving, bypassing the titles in the Hidden Object group. Yeah, I know it's lame, but you can't exclude genres when browsing anyway. If Hidden Object were a sub-genre, you'd be able to browse Hidden Object games, but not games which are not Hidden Object. Which is pretty much the same situation we have now.
So the only valid solution would be to exclude Hidden Object from the Adventure genre. Personally, I think that the ideal situation would be to exclude both Hidden Object and Visual Novel from the Adventure genre, because, well, they aren't really adventure games.
The question is - what are they? Hidden Object is not exactly the same as puzzle game (even if Puzzle were made to a main genre instead of the current Strategy). Visual Novels really don't fall under any genre but itself.
Bottom line, there is no perfect genre system in the world. Our classification is dubious, but it's logical in its own twisted way. Basically, you could say that we classify anything which is neither RPG, Action, Educational, Sports, Strategy, and Simulation as Adventure. It is the last resort when nobody knows what genre the game belongs to.
Unicorn Lynx (181775) on 8/19/2011 3:54 PM · Permalink · Report
Yup, I think what we should first focus on is fixing all those browser peculiarities and search engine insanities, rather than re-designing the genre system or changing the site's visuals.
Err, I mean, that's what I hope GameFly people will focus on in case they read this...