Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware by Dominic Arsenault

Author:Dominic Arsenault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SNES; 16-bit; console; history; video games; business; marketing; technology; game studies; management studies; twentieth century; 20th century; North America; US; Nintendo; platform; industry; graphics; Super Nintendo; Super; SFC; Super Famicom; game; games; platform studies; console; consoles; console wars; culture; CD-ROM; Mode 7; 2D; 3D; 2-D; 3-D; self-party; third-party; publisher; developer; hardware; software; Sega; Sony; Genesis; Mega Drive; PlayStation; FMV; 2.5D; perspective; F-Zero; Mario World; Donkey Kong; Castlevania; Final Fantasy; sprites; scaling; three-dimensional
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Beyond Graphics and into Genre Innovation

Although often stated in retrospective articles dedicated to the console, the strength of the SNES’ (and SFC’s) game library requires serious attention from the perspective of genre because it highlights the two modalities of generic evolution, which I introduced in an earlier journal article: reiteration and innovation (Arsenault 2009). The importance of generic templates in game design, which Ernest Adams (2009) attributes to Nintendo’s draconian publishing policies with the NES platform, reaches its apex during the 1990s on the Super NES, where the many incremental technology advances favor reiteration.

The industrialization process that took over Japan and the United States, and the resulting lack of game diversity that resulted from it, is easily demonstrated if we look at the context of Europe, where microcomputers ruled the roost in the 1980s. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum, for instance, held a position in the United Kingdom similar to Nintendo’s NES and Famicom—an inexpensive game machine that met with success amid the masses, except for the heavy industrialization. Instead, a “proto-industrial push” happened, thanks to a direction of “homebrew” development, spurred by game magazines that printed code for Sinclair owners to type in their own games. In the words of Skot Deeming, curator of an exhibit on homebrew development on the ZX Spectrum at the Université de Montréal, this amateur development culture was free from the imperatives of profitability, which resulted in a lot of formal explorations away from conventions.13

As a design practice, video games are always, at least somewhat, about innovation and problem solving, a reality that lends itself relatively well to an evolutionary conception of game genres (Arsenault 2009). A game is often produced following model games, genres, or design features that are blended together with some unique new propositions. As Alastair Fowler noted when discussing literary genres, “What produces generic resemblances, reflection soon shows, is tradition: a sequence of influence and imitation and inherited codes connecting works in the genre” (Fowler 1982, 42). These series of influences trace certain trajectories of innovation, nondeterministic paths that offer enough leeway or the freedom to go in another direction entirely but that favor some experimentations over others (especially in the video game business, where the industrial risk is high given the “hit-driven” nature of the market, and where innovation may not translate into accrued sales).

Games may be labeled as “belonging” to any number of genres, defined according to multiple criteria, and this labeling may differ from one community to another. Ultimately, genre does not correspond, as in biology, to innate features that some games would have in common in any objective or positivist manner; genre labeling is a discursive act that frames an existing game in a certain way, and genres are such linguistic codifications, shifting, imprecise, and always culturally situated (Arsenault 2009). That is why Thomas Schatz described genre in Hollywood as “a range of expression for filmmakers and a range of experience for viewers” (Schatz 1981, 22). This framing of how genre operates is not restricted to Hollywood but also functions in other industrial and heavily marketed entertainment sectors.

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