01. Overview

Ten thousand million new video games are released every year. On top of that, twenty thousand billion games already exist. How does one… I dunno, how does one know where to start? Know what’s important? Explore what clicks with them? Find more of what they already love? There is no consistent method of categorizing games, and in my opinion, this harms video games as a whole. It prevents us from finding what we want, and it prevents developers from making what they want.

We need to create our own, independent taxonomy for games.

(big epic logo goes here)

Every game is unique in its own right, and there’s no way that a creative artistic expression could neatly fit within arbitrary categories or numbers. At the same time, we can empirically measure how gameplay mechanics have evolved over time. We can see how games have influenced one another. This allows a sort of genealogy - a family tree. Our challenge, then, is to strike a balance with setting standards that still somehow capture the freedom and versatility of art.

Uhhhhh so yeah, that's what we're doing and there's a whole lot of good reasons why :) Poke around the proposed Taxonomy and Rating System to get the underlying theory, or go straight to Find Games! if you want to use that tool. I'll rewrite this later, I promise.