The Urgent Need For A New Game Taxonomy
Abhishek
Marketing Manager
@Gameopedia
The Urgent Need For A New Game Taxonomy
As video games become more complex and have increasingly intricate features, there is a long overdue need for a new, comprehensive game taxonomy for 2021. Game taxonomy is a systematic classification of games based on shared characteristics, such as gameplay mechanics, themes, art styles, and technical requirements. This blog will explore the urgent need for a new taxonomy, define what game taxonomy entails, and examine its critical role in game classification, discovery, and market analysis.
Introduction
The scope of this article covers the foundational concepts of game taxonomy, its hierarchical structures, and the practical applications for various stakeholders in the gaming ecosystem. We will discuss how taxonomies break down games into hundreds of specific tags across categories like art style, theme, gameplay mechanics, and game modes. The target audience includes developers, publishers, retailers, advertisers, and anyone involved in the video game industry who relies on accurate classification and discovery of games. Understanding and implementing a robust game taxonomy is essential for effective game classification, improving game discovery, and conducting insightful market analysis.
With the massive expansion of the video game market, every member of the gaming ecosystem—from developers to retailers—now has a larger audience to build games for and sell them to. However, selling to this audience can be tricky. Developers and publishers need to understand the complicated formula that works for successful games and then build on it. Retailers, who now have thousands of games to feature on their portals, need to correctly identify and recommend titles that a customer is likely to buy based on their preferences. This is where a comprehensive, flexible, and actionable taxonomy comes into play.
The Definitive Video Game Taxonomy
What is a Game Taxonomy?
Game taxonomy is a systematic classification of games based on shared characteristics, such as gameplay mechanics, themes, art styles, and technical requirements. Taxonomies break down games into hundreds of specific tags across categories like art style, theme, gameplay mechanics, and game modes, forming the foundation of rich, structured video game metadata used throughout the industry. Formal projects, such as the Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) project, have been developed to standardize and manage video game taxonomy and metadata.
The Complexity of Modern Games
Today’s games are complex works of art designed to continuously engage a wide audience. To think that only one aspect of a game makes it special is definitely foolish. For example, Candy Crush belongs to the Match-3 Puzzle genre, but its leaderboard, new level additions, timer, move-limit, and reward systems are also crucial attributes that incentivize players to keep returning.
Games can be analyzed by different aspects, such as narrative, gameplay, and simulation, which helps in effective classification.
Genres in video games are often defined by the primary actions players take, such as shooting in first person shooter games, solving puzzles in puzzle games, exploring in adventure games, driving in racing or vehicular games, or building diverse playstyles in a role playing game. These genres—adventure, first person shooter, role playing game, puzzles, and driving—are key elements that, when combined, help describe a game's gameplay features and narrative structure. Additionally, 'game type' can refer specifically to the narrative or story genre, which is distinct from gameplay mechanics or other classifications.
Games are often grouped by their underlying systems, such as Games for Understanding (GfU), which classifies games by their strategic core.
Hierarchical Structures in Game Taxonomy
Many modern game taxonomies use a nested structure—Category, Genre, and Subgenre—to identify specific market niches. This hierarchical approach allows for more precise classification and helps stakeholders understand nuanced relationships between closely related subgenres.
The Role of Tags in Classification
Taxonomies break down games into hundreds of specific tags across categories like art style, theme, gameplay mechanics, and game modes. These tags form the backbone of structured metadata, enabling better search, discovery, and analysis across the industry.
To further illustrate how taxonomy can be applied, let's explore the Values System developed by Gameopedia.
The Values System
Overview of the Four-Value System
Gameopedia has been delivering insightful game data to some of the biggest companies in the world since 2008. Over the last 12 years, we have created detailed video game breakdowns for over 180,000 games. While genre, feature-set, mechanics, and graphic style provide a high-level description, they do not fully capture what a game has to offer.
To address this, we introduced a rating system that assigns a value to feature-sets and mechanics to help evaluate their importance within the game. The four-value system in Gameopedia’s video game taxonomy assesses the significance, prevalence, and frequency of various game features, importantly evaluating how these features contribute to player skill and fun, which are fundamental to engaging and enjoyable gameplay. Formal design taxonomies also categorize games based on the kinds of fun they provide, such as Narrative, Challenge, Discovery, or Fellowship, further enriching our understanding of what makes games compelling.
The Four Categories:
Defining Features – Core elements that are essential to the game’s identity.
Key Features – Important aspects that significantly influence gameplay.
Notable Features – Features that are present and noticeable but not central.
Elemental Features – Minor elements that add flavor or variety.
Application Example: Candy Crush
Going back to Candy Crush, here is how our video game classification framework would break down the game:
Defining Feature: Match-3 Puzzle mechanic
Key Features: Beat the Clock mechanic (commonly seen in Action games)
Notable Features: Leaderboards, reward systems
Elemental Features: New level additions, move-limit
Although Puzzle is the main genre, important attributes like the Beat the Clock mechanic are more prominently seen in Action games. Excluding Action as a genre would be misleading, but it is not more important than solving the Match-3 Puzzle for game progression.
Significance of Gameplay Mechanics
This extra layer to the data allows for a more comprehensive look into the game and its offerings. Gameplay mechanics are often described as the primary methods or rules used to interact with the game state and progress through the game content, forming the core of player experience. Understanding the nature of gameplay mechanics helps legitimize and categorize different types of games, providing a foundation for meaningful analysis. Certain gameplay mechanics or features are particularly interesting because they engage players, evoke curiosity, and make the gameplay experience compelling and memorable. Additionally, understanding the game state is crucial for characterizing gameplay behaviors and player progress.
By using this system, you can identify exactly what makes a game popular among its audience and how it can be improved or modified to appeal to another demographic.
Transitioning from the Values System, let’s examine why detailed classification is so important in the evolving landscape of video games.
The Importance of Detail in Video Game Classification
Evolution of Video Games
Starting with Pong in the 70s, video games have evolved from simple digital games with a couple of controls into complex entities with multiple characters, storylines, mechanics, and more. In this multi-billion dollar industry, game developers and publishers are innovating daily to engage a community with a short-lived memory. This ongoing evolution not only reflects the industry's dynamic nature but also points toward the future of game taxonomy, where emerging trends, new genres, and innovative mechanics will continue to shape how games are designed, classified, and experienced.
Challenges in Classification
Modern games frequently blend genres, making traditional classification difficult and necessitating subgenres to capture unique experiences. To break into the market, studios must understand market trends, analyze their competition, and identify popular features to gain video game insights.
The Role of Advanced Taxonomies
A well-defined, in-depth, and flexible Video Game Taxonomy can help as part of broader market research for game studios. Advanced taxonomies combine genre, theme, and mechanics into a unified system to better categorize hybrid or cross-genre games.
Hierarchical and Player-Centric Structures
Many modern game taxonomies use a nested structure—Category, Genre, and Subgenre—to identify specific market niches.
Theme is a core component, describing a recurring motif, subject, or idea that influences the game's overall concept and aesthetic.
Player-centric taxonomies categorize games by the types of players they attract: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers.
A comprehensive Game Taxonomy lets you deep-dive into every aspect of the game and decode where each feature and mechanic fits in the overall scheme. It also gives you insights into how the developer has designed the game to make it not just enjoyable, but profitable as well.
Now, let's see how game design decisions directly impact taxonomy and classification.
The Impact of Game Design on Taxonomy
Game Design and Classification
Game design is at the heart of how video games are classified, marketed, and ultimately experienced by players. The design of the game world plays a crucial role in shaping the player's experience and influences how games are classified, as the environment, atmosphere, and interactive spaces evoke specific feelings and support exploration, narrative, and discovery. Every decision a game designer makes—from the core game mechanics to the narrative structure and the overall gameplay experience—directly influences how a particular game fits within established game categories and genres.
Influence on Market Analysis and Discovery
A robust classification system enables game designers and developers to analyze the market, identify emerging trends, and spot opportunities for new game ideas. When combined with game analytics enriched by metadata and game design validation tools like Lumos, these systems help teams move beyond raw player data to understand why certain experiences resonate.
Understanding Player Preferences
The Bartle taxonomy, for example, segments players into Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, each drawn to different gameplay elements such as competition, discovery, social interaction, or mastery. Player preferences and gameplay features can vary significantly between single-player and multiplayer experiences, with multiplayer modes often emphasizing social interaction and competitive dynamics. By recognizing these different types, game designers can craft experiences that cater to a wide range of players, ensuring their games have broad appeal and longevity in the market.
Adapting to Innovation
The introduction of new mechanics—such as location-based gameplay or hybrid genres—continually challenges and expands existing classification systems. Mobile games, with their unique design considerations and interaction paradigms, further push taxonomy systems to adapt, as they introduce distinct gameplay, narrative, and physical interaction components compared to traditional games. A comprehensive taxonomy must be flexible enough to accommodate these innovations, allowing for the creation and recognition of new genres as the industry evolves.
In summary, the impact of game design on taxonomy is profound and multifaceted. A well-structured taxonomy system not only helps classify and market games more effectively but also empowers game designers to innovate, explore new ideas, and create engaging experiences tailored to diverse audiences.
Next, let’s look at how Gameopedia applies its taxonomy system to real-world video game breakdowns.
How Gameopedia Does Video Game Breakdowns Using Our Game Taxonomy System
Comparative Analysis: Grand Theft Auto V vs. Mafia II
Let’s take a look at two of the most popular open-world games in the market today: Grand Theft Auto V and Mafia II. Both are relatively well-known, but one is clearly more popular than the other. The reason for the crowd loving Grand Theft Auto V more than Mafia II is because of the well-thought-out, vast world. Our video game breakdown reveals that Rockstar Games created a dynamic open-world environment with multiple side-missions, heists, and DLC content that immerses the player thoroughly, keeping them in a trance. The game world evokes a strong sense of immersion and atmosphere, making players feel truly part of its vibrant setting, which significantly contributes to its popularity.
Broader video game genre trend analysis shows similar player preferences at the market level, with certain genres consistently outperforming others, especially when supported by performance data on game mechanics and features. Mafia II, on the other hand, serves the purpose of delivering a more linear story experience, while still allowing the player to explore the open world.
Classification Methods and Frameworks
Games can be divided into categories such as simulations, abstract games, and sports, while also considering the number of players involved. While many features can define a game, often there is one thing that truly distinguishes a particular game type or category—such as the realism of physics in racing simulators.
Classification can also be based on the source of uncertainty, such as symmetric vs. asymmetric games and zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum games.
Game theory further categorizes games by their structural properties: Normal form, Extensive form, and whether they have Perfect or Imperfect Information.
Board games like chess, Monopoly, and Scrabble, as well as card games like poker, exemplify different structural and gameplay characteristics.
Sports and sports games highlight both physical activity and the intersection of digital and physical gaming experiences.
Both games have been successful in their objective and have proven profitable for their respective publishers. But for someone looking to replicate this success, it is necessary to understand what made each game tick.
Now, let’s explore the practical use cases for game taxonomy across the industry.
Industry Use Cases for Game Taxonomy
A comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy has use cases for a wide range of beneficiaries. Gameopedia’s Taxonomy has been created while keeping the pain points and requirements of the gaming ecosystem in mind. Game taxonomies can provide a common design vocabulary, which helps clarify design issues and save time in proposal writing and design meetings.
Key Industry Use Cases
Retailers:
Help customers find better results for the kind of games they are looking for.
Narrow down search results to suit customer preferences, maximizing the chances of a sale.
Illustrate how e‑retailers can boost game discoverability with quality, structured content.
Advertisers:
Benefit from better ad targeting tools built by measuring trends in the community.
Focus attention on maximizing returns from markets that are highly receptive, especially when partnering with niche game metadata providers like Gameopedia.
Developers/Publishers:
Understand the market and analyze competition to ensure a strong start at launch.
Use comprehensive taxonomy and game classification to inform launch strategies.
Analyze and de-risk game concepts using Gameopedia’s taxonomy-driven tools or market analysis.
Evaluate games and features with comparison engines.
Additional Benefits
Provide a consistent, flexible, and up-to-date structure to keep in touch with evolving market preferences.
Rely on form as a fundamental category in structuring and analyzing different game genres and experiences.
Use low-level components, such as basic interactions and mechanics, as the foundation for higher-level narrative and gameplay systems.
Offer clarity and actionable insights across the entire game development and publishing process, which is why many platforms adopt advanced video game tagging and taxonomy services.
At Gameopedia, our team of experts is constantly at work analyzing the changing trends in the video game market. Our taxonomy is well-researched and built to ensure that the most important aspects are covered accurately.
For e-commerce and marketplaces, this includes best practices for managing video game information on online stores and understanding how digital storefront metadata now drives discovery. It is vital that you have a good video game classification system such as ours to provide accurate video game breakdowns and get high-quality video game insights, supported by robust video game search and discovery solutions.
If you have a business problem that requires a customized solution powered by a comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy, get in touch with us to start making better business decisions using game data.
