Understanding Genre as Atmospheric Assemblage: The Case of Videogames

Abstract

This article advances an affect-based theorization of genre as atmospheric assemblage by applying such a framework to an analysis of videogame genre. The affective excess originating from the relations between the components of the assemblage is experienced by the player as a specific type of thinking-moving-feeling understood as a wholistic atmosphere. By looking at the cases of the soulsborne, rouguelike, and metroidvania genres, the article explains how an assemblage framework is useful to explain how players experience individual videogames as belonging to the same genre despite noticeable differences between them. On the other hand, a final example, that of the puzzle game, illustrates how minimal changes to the articulation of an assemblage enables quite different experiences for the players that may result in the establishment of a different genre. This article suggests that the atmospheric assemblage framework could be applied to other media forms, such as television and film.

Introduction

Game scholar Ian Bogost (2009) once noted that “videogames are a mess.” His comment was directed at the state of game studies at a time when the field was grappling with the question of what constitutes a videogame. Is it a system of rules and mechanics, a narrative, or a social act? The complexity only compounds when thinking videogames through genre, another inherently messy concept. How do we understand what constitute different videogame genres?

My aim with this essay is twofold. Firstly, I approach genre from an experiential perspective, attentive to the embodied and affective lived-experience of players, intervening in the debates around videogame genres by deploying the concept of atmosphere. Specifically, I argue that different genres are recognizable by their atmosphere, by which I mean a wholistic affective and embodied experience arising in-between player and videogame. In other words, players identify different games as belonging to the same genre by recognizing comparable atmospheres. Secondly, I will address how are different genres constructed to evoke different atmospheres.

I begin by introducing key debates on the topic of videogame genre. For the most part, these debates revolve around what are the fundamental criteria of genre. I adopt a phenomenological approach to videogame genre, attuned to the lived-experience of players. After elaborating on the concept of atmosphere, I suggest that understandings of genre should seriously consider atmosphere as a fundamental criterion.

I integrate the above discussion by drawing from assemblage theory, towards an understanding of videogame genre as actualizations of different genre diagrams. I proceed by thinking videogame genres as events, happening in the ‘here and now’ of experience, that is, during gameplay. During these events, affective encounters between assembled bodies create an affective excess resulting in an atmosphere, attuned to by players, and experienced as a holistic type of embodied “looking-moving-feeling.” The experienced quality of this event enables players to identify different videogames as belonging to a certain genre.

Through an analysis of the soulsborne, roguelike, and metroidvania genres, I will explain that different videogames may be considered part of the same genre, despite differences in their design, due to a similar atmosphere. Lastly, through an analysis of browser-puzzle videogames, I will show how sometimes, even minimal changes to a videogame assemblage can result in an event presenting a different atmosphere, which may be argued to be the actualization of a different genre.

Genre and Videogames

Like film genres (Frow 2014, 20), videogame genres are often considered a meaning-creating framework for players to make sense of their experience (King and Krzywinska 2006, 55). This explanation, however, gets problematized by the co-presence of fiction and narrative on one side, and game mechanics, rules and modes of interaction on the other. Many videogames do present stories, characters, and fictional gameworlds, and could therefore be analyzed from a literary perspective (Kücklich 2013, 115–16) sympathetic to the existence of genres such as horror, fantasy, science-fiction, et cetera. However, videogames complicate this notion by presenting medium specificities such as digital representations of navigable space and non-representational modes of interactions defined by rules (Apperley 2009, 354–55).

Accordingly, some believe videogame genre should be defined by rules, mechanics, and the types of interactions they afford, rather than representation (Aarseth 2004; Apperley 2006; Wolf 2001; 114–15). However, while useful analytically, the separation between rules and representations is artificial when considering the lived-experience of players (Clearwater 2011, 33). For example, Arma 3 (Bohemia Interactive 2013) and Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016) are both first-person shooters, yet the setting, stories, characters, themes, tones are different, and accordingly, playing them feels different: should they then be considered as belonging to different genres?

This debate mirrors a foundational one within (video)game studies, namely the ludology versus narratology debate (Pearce 2005). This debate, briefly stated, revolved around appropriate methodologies and the supposed essence of videogames, and whether this was to be found in videogames-as-texts defined by narrative or videogames-as-games defined by rules, with a trickle-down effect that impacted debates on videogame genre.

Additionally, other criteria may be used to classify videogames: the style of play they afford, such as “single player,” “multiplayer,” or “networked”; their platform, such that we have, for example, “mobile,” “console,” or “PC” videogames (Whalen 2004, 293); their ludic context, that is, where they are played (Newman 2004, 12); how the player is positioned in relation to the gameworld, that is, “first person,” “third person,” or “god perspective.”

This complexity has led some to abandon the idea of rigidly separated videogame genres (Arsenault 2009; Järvinen 2002), yet, designers, marketers, scholars, journalists, and players regularly refer to them. Accordingly, before prematurely getting rid of the notion, we could look for alternative approaches.

Genre, Affect, and Atmosphere

Following the insight that genres are sense-making frameworks, I also acknowledge that they function, to a large extent, affectively, as argued by Noël Carroll (2003). Emotions tell us what matters to us and how. Through genre, producers of a text tell us what matters, why, how it should matter to us, and so on. Accordingly, genre texts are, to an extent, designed to achieve a certain embodied emotion: “With comic amusement, ideally, we laugh; (. . .) with horror films our skin may crawl; with suspense films, we tense up; and with melodramas, we may shed a tear” (Carroll 2003, 69).

The affective framework of genre, then, clearly addresses the body. Noticeable in this regard is the work of Linda Williams (1991) who writes about “body genres,” recognizable by the type of embodied emotions and feelings they afford, for example, disgust and shudder in the case of horror, carnal excitement in the case of porn, and weeping in the case of melodrama. Similarly, Vivian Sobchack (1992, 161) believes that genres may be understood as “the correlated postural schemas, motility, and spatiality of both the spectators watching the film and the film itself as spectator.” For Sobchack, through their compositions, editing, framings, point of views, and so on, films construct a lived-space experienced by a filmic body whose affects resonate in that of the viewer. Genres may be, then, recognized in that they afford specific types of embodied experiences.

Videogame genres too are affective frameworks, with different genres generating different affects. It is then possible to approach videogame genre from a phenomenological and affective perspective, attentive to the evoked emotions, embodied feelings, and sensations. Diane Carr (2006), for example, writes that videogame genres generate different affects through their design and the navigational styles they afford. In this sense, videogame genres produce different types future-oriented “looking-moving-feeling” (Huges 2010, 126), each with their own emotional resonance for players. Videogame genres thus understood should, then, be rooted in aesthetics before narrative and mechanics (Arsenault 2009, 171), and recent calls have been made for the exploration of how matters of “mood” and “theme” play into different genres (Clarke et al. 2017, 460).

This complex of emotions, sensations, and embodied feelings, is what I understand as atmosphere. Philosophically and phenomenologically, atmospheres are defined by their affectiveness and spatiality. Gernot Böhme (2017, 22) defines atmospheres as an “in-between,” cutting through the subject-object divide, produced by constellations of people and things present in a space, while being more than their sum. People and things, display a certain “going-forth” called “ecstasies”: the colors, smells, shapes, and so on, emanating from things and people in constellations composing atmospheres (Böhme 2017, 122). However, atmospheres always need a subject to be perceived and experienced and are never wholly independent of them.

An important precursor of this theorization of atmospheres is Martin Heidegger and his notion of Stimmung, usually translated as mood or attunement. For Heidegger (1962, 172) attunements are an existential fact. In other words, we are always in a mood, for example happiness, sadness, excitement, anxiety and so on. Heidegger (1995, 67) points out that Stimmung is neither a merely “internal” affair, nor only “out there,” arising instead as an atmosphere out of our being-in-the-world in our engagements with people, objects and tasks. Attunements are therefore a matter of being-in-atmospheres, bodily and affectively, attending to things mattering to us in the world, always-already immersed within them. Immersing ourselves into a videogame means attuning to an atmospheric event by attending to things that matter to us in the moment in a fully embodied way, registering and feeling the qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements of the atmosphere at hand.

Recently, scholars have started to include atmosphere in their consideration of genre, through an extension of affect-based approaches, both in cinema (Sinnerbrink 2012) and literature (Christiansen 2019). Steen Christiansen (2019, 10) writes that genre is an “archive of atmosphere.” In other words, we recognize texts as examples of a certain genre not only because we pay attention to their foregrounded narrative affordances, but because we feel their atmospheric background, relating them to atmospheres of other texts belonging to the same genre across media, and eliciting in us a wholistic complex of emotions, feelings, and embodied sensations. Accordingly, we recognize videogame genres not solely because of their rule-based ludic affordances, or because of iconography and themes, but because we recognize and attune to those genres’ “looking-moving-feeling.”

The question, then, is how are different genres constructed as to evoke different atmospheres? Böhme (2017, 17) describes stage design as paradigmatic for an aesthetic of atmosphere. Stage designers create atmospheres, experienced by audiences, through the selective disposition of props, lights, sounds et cetera. It is reasonable to believe that different theater atmospheres express different theater genres and vice versa. Mutatis mutandis, videogame design elements, wholistically perceived as an atmosphere, would indicate different videogame genres.

Genre Assemblages

Considering the above, it is necessary to explain how different articulations of game design express different genres. I suggest that genres may be conceptualized as assemblages expressing an atmosphere, to which players attune. The concept of assemblage is here derived from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) To properly explain my position, I must introduce, in addition to assemblages, some further Deleuzian terminology, namely the virtual-actual dichotomy (Deleuze 2007) and the diagram (Deleuze 1987). An assemblage is a multiplicity, a spatiotemporally contingent and situated coming-together of bodies, both human and non-human, but also signs, practices, and ideas. That is, assemblages exist in the here and now, as events, expressive of properties that their individual components lack. Manuel DeLanda (2016, 108) explains that assemblages also possess tendencies, dispositions, and capacities that may be either manifest or not. A non-manifest capacity is a virtual one (i.e., a potential). Comparatively, an actual capacity is manifest and exercised. For example, a soccer team has a virtual capacity to score a goal, always present though not always manifest.

The diagram is the structure of the possibility space associated with an assemblage. The diagram can be understood as the assemblage in its pure virtuality, encompassing all its possibilities. The diagram connects assemblages with other diagrams and with “a cosmic space in which diagrams exist free from the constraints of actuality” (DeLanda 2016, 6), essentially in a state of pure virtuality, where all potentialities are real, but not actualized here and now. The diagram may actualize in concrete assembled forms defined by an intensity, the excessive sum of relations between individual components. Like others (Anderson 2009; Slaby 2018) I interpret this intensity as an atmosphere.

Diagrammatics is usefully deployed for an understanding of videogame genre. Cameron Kunzelman (2020) explores how new videogame genres appear and become recognizable through their various actualizations, despite noticeable differences between titles belonging to the same genre, understood as “a set of mechanics, modes of storytelling, and player expectations that branch out and proliferate from the original object. Diagrams allow us to identify which of these is being transported from one game to another” (Kunzelman 2020, 185).

I extend Kunzelman’s argument in two ways: First, I believe that genre is not only defined by set of mechanics, modes of storytelling, and player expectations, but also by atmosphere and affect; second, I argue that these affects and accompanying atmospheres are precisely what carries over between different videogames belonging to the same genre despite formal differences between them.

Let us unpack this. Ciara Cremin (2016, 15) writes about a “videogame plane, the plane of all possible videogames”, defined by multiplicity and virtuality. On its surface, all videogame possibilities and events occur, and every videogame exists in potentiality. Every assemblage has its own diagram and accordingly, its own plane, yet the diagram is also what connects actualized assemblages with other diagrams (and their assemblages) (DeLanda 2016, 6). Out of the virtual plane of all possible videogames, videogame assemblages actualize. There is this videogame and that videogame, each operating on their own plane, in the here and now of an event.

Variations between diagrams produce differences in kind, Cremin (2016, 16) explains:

For videogames, variations produce new and wonderful multiplicities (. . .), ‘shoot’em ups’, ‘role players’, Star Foxes and Final Fantasies. With Space Invaders Taito invented or at least popularised the shoot-‘em-up plane. Square did not invent the role-playing plane with Final Fantasy; they simply made it their own. It is because all videogames emanate from a single plane or origin that, for all their diversity, they can be compared.

During play, players composes and liberate affects contained within the game design, actualizing a previously virtual assemblage (Cremin 2016, 22). Following Cremin’s line of thought, we conclude that each genre exists on its own diagram (or plane), In the event of play, genres are actualized in the here and now in the form of a videogame assemblage. At the same time, each videogame assemblage is connected to other assemblages via their respective diagrams, themselves ultimately connected to the “plane of all possible videogames” (Cremin 2016, 15), where all possible permutations of assemblage components are found.

The different diagramming of components during a play event gives rise to different genres, expressing an atmosphere, experienced by players attuned to the event. Genres are therefore not stable, objective entities, existing “out there,” but always actualizations of potentials. Discussing processes of actualization from virtual fields of potentiality, Brian Massumi (2002, 77) writes that

change is emergent in relation, the becoming sensible in empirical conditions of mixture, of a modulation of potential. Post-emergence, there is capture and containment. Rules are codified and applied. The intermixing of bodies, objects and signs is standardized and regulated. Becoming becomes reviewable and writable: becoming becomes history.

Only retroactively may a videogame be assigned to a genre, which must first emerge in the actualized unfolding of the event.

Different Assemblages, Same Diagram

I expand upon these points by looking at the concrete case of the soulsborne, roguelike and metroidvania genres. Kunzelman (2020) develops his diagrammatic understanding of genres through an analysis of the “soulsborne” genre, a composite derived from the name of two games, Dark Souls (FromSoftware 2011) and Bloodborne (FromSoftware 2015). The soulsborne typically features

a focus on combat, being unable to cancel animations and being forced to ‘go through’ with every input, interconnected level design, a third-person perspective, and a general design that is focused on completing sections of the game and defeating large bosses at the ends of those sections. All of this has a somber tone and an oblique story that needs to be put together by the player community.

(Kunzelman 2020, 189).

These design features are hardly novel. Indeed, much of Dark Souls’ focus on the alternation of exploration and combat, leading up to big boss fights is found in earlier videogames such as titles of The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo) or Monster Hunter (Capcom) series. Clearly, no videogame exists in a vacuum. As assemblages linked to diagrams, all videogames are connected. At the same time, the actualization of the soulsborne diagram in the early to mid-2010s was accompanied by a specific intensity that made the Dark Souls and Bloodborne assemblages recognizable as belonging to the soulsborne genre defined retroactively.

With the ex-post facto establishment of the genre, others followed the blueprint for the soulsborne diagram, inspired by its success. A large number of what some have disparagingly called “souls clones” was released, a dynamic already seen in the early 1990s after the success of Doom (Id Software 1993) and the subsequent development of “doom clones” featuring very similar design and offering similar gameplay experiences. Amongst some popular “souls clones” we may include Lords of the Fallen (Deck13 Interactive 2014), Nioh (Team Ninja 2017), Ashen (A44 2018), Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen 2019), and Salt and Sanctuary (Studios Ska 2016). To these we must also add those titles which, in virtue of having been developed by FromSoftware, have been labeled sequels or “spiritual successors” rather than “souls clones,” such as Dark Souls II (FromSoftware 2014), Dark Souls III (FromSoftware 2016), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (FromSoftware 2019), Elden Ring (FromSoftware 2022), and, noticeably, Demon’s Souls (FromSoftware 2009), considered by many a spiritual prequel to Dark Souls, and only retroactively included in the soulsborne genre.

While the above titles share many similarities, they are also noticeable differences. Kunzelman (2020, 187) writes that “these games are all different, and they do offer different kinds of experiences. They are not all dark fantasy games. The souls-like genre seems able to contain many different perspectives as well, from top-down 2D to side scroller to Dark Souls’ third-person action gameplay.” Kunzelman (2020) concludes that the soulsborne is not so much a “genre” of videogame, but rather a specific type of aesthetic, that through its modulation and application within game design, is able to generate subjectivities and normalize certain behaviors.

While I agree, rather than on subject formation, I wish to focus on player experience. Kunzelman (2020, 188) writes that a genre becomes an aesthetic category “when a person experiences and performs certain affects,” yet he does not specify which affects are we dealing with here exactly. I argue the soulsborne diagram actualizes play events presenting a recognizable atmosphere across different soulsborne titles. The soulsborne’s atmosphere is hectic, tense, unforgiving. Players must be precise, patient and meticulous, as the smallest misstep may be game-ending. The visual and sound aesthetics of most soulsborne titles reinforce these affects, with a dark, moody tone, horrific enemy designs, and dramatic soundtracks. However, even when certain assemblage components change, the soulsborne diagram remains recognizable by the player as an overall experiential atmosphere.

We see the same dynamic at play in other genres which become recognized as such only retrospectively. One example is the roguelike, a genre taking its name from Rogue (AI Design 1980), and featuring turn-based gameplay focused on exploration of randomly generated dungeons, permadeath mechanics (the players must start from the beginning with a new character whenever their previous character dies), ASCII graphical style, and presenting a high degree of complexity and depth (Johnson 2017). A further example is the metroidvania genre, which much like the soulsborne takes its name from two “archetypal” videogames, in this case Super Metroid (Nintendo R&D1 1994) and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami 1997). Both titles featured hallmarks of the genre such as gameplay focused on exploration of complex 2D structures, simple combat mechanics, and progression hinging upon the unlocking of special skills or obtaining particular items.

In both the roguelike and the metroidvania we recognize specific experiential atmospheres. In the case of the roguelike, we find a tense, unforgiving atmosphere, not dissimilar from that of the soulsborne, though the former’s permadeath mechanic admittedly “ups the stakes” even more. Furthermore, the minimalist graphics contribute to an aesthetic of nostalgia (Johnson 2017, 117) which also “colors” the experience. The metroidvania, on the other hand, constructs an atmosphere heavily reliant on spatial navigation revolving around the unlocking of skills. The way the mazes of metroidvania videogames are navigated and “conquered” (Carr 2006) following increases in avatar capacities evokes feelings of growth and power. For example, as Samus we quickly dispatch of some enemies who previously were making progressing through a specific room in Super Metroid slow and laborious, or as Alucard we may transform into a bat and fly over entire sections of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The feeling of an unfolding spatial freedom is what defines the metrodvania genre.

New Atmosphere, New Genre?

Finally, we may also observe those cases in which different actualizations of a diagram fail to evoke recognizable atmospheres. In late 2021, the browser videogame Wordle (Wardle 2021) became a global sensation and a Twitter darling. In Wordle players get six chances to guess one five-letter word, which changes every day. Players kept, and keep, coming back to Wordle regularly, enticed by the game’s rapid-fire nature, the fact that each new day presents a different challenge, and Wordle’s online “shareability” encouraging people to post their daily score online. Perhaps some are also attracted by Wordle’s minimalist aesthetic (a 5 × 6 grid of squares, where players insert letters; the squares turn green if the letter is in the right position; yellow if the letter is in the wrong position; gray if the letter is not part of the word), strikingly different from many contemporary videogames’ over-bloated interfaces.

In January 2021, the New York Times bought the rights to Wordle and made it accessible on their website. Many players believed “something” felt off following the acquisition. Little, apparently, had changed in the “brainy” puzzle videogame, but something was lost. That something was the distinct affective quality of an independent puzzle game, a niche genre, but one presenting a recognizable atmosphere, found also in titles like 2048 (Cirulli 2014) or Knotwords (Gage and Schlesinger 2022).

While it is true that atmospheres are more than the sum of their parts, and that it is consequently possible to change assemblage components without altering the atmosphere so much as to actualize a different genre, it is also possible to make minimal changes to the assemblage composition and end with quite a different atmosphere. While most of the Wordle assemblage was left untouched, there was at least one significant change to the assemblage: the publisher. Additionally, following its acquisition, the New York Times got rid of words deemed offensive or “obscure,” resulting in many players complaining that Wordle had lost part of its aura. The interface was also subtly changed: the font for the New York Times version of the game is strongly angular compared to the softer, smoother font of the original; likewise, the squares on the 5 × 6 grid present sharp angles in the “corporate” version, while the original squares featured rounder angles. This resulted in a more formal and authoritative feel, than the more welcoming and casual one of the original

With a major news outlet as publisher now part of the Wordle assemblage, there was a sudden change in the perceived “feel” of playing Wordle, even though not much had changed mechanically speaking. Effectively, the atmosphere of authenticity of an independent puzzle videogame had changed to that of a puzzle videogame hosted by a major media outlet. In a way, when the New York Times took over, the resulting assemblage changed so much that we may talk about a new diagram being actualized, in other words a new genre. Perhaps this sounds absurd, as talking about “puzzle-videogame-hosted-by-a-major-media-outlet” as a separate genre might seem like an excessive degree of granularity. And yet, this remains the logical conclusion if we follow the suggestion that genres are defined by atmospheres. In the case of Worlde the “looking-moving-feeling” enabled by the assemblage, after the New York Times acquisition, was different than the one players were able to attune to previously. This also reminds us that as actualized diagrams, genres are spatiotemporally contingent, existing as events.

Conclusion

In this essay I adopted atmosphere as a lens through which to understand videogame genre. By doing so, I intervened in some critical debates on the relation between videogame and genre. To reiterate, atmospheres are here understood in their experiential and phenomenological sense, as a wholistic affective and embodied phenomenon arising in-between subject and object (or player and videogame), giving rise to patterns of “looking-moving-feeling.” I argued that atmospheres thus understood provide a basis for an affective and phenomenological understanding of genre. In other words, I claim that players understand and differentiate between genres not based on narrative structures, rules and mechanics, or modes of interaction, but rather on the types of atmospheres they experience.

Such an understanding moves us beyond foundational debates in game studies regarding genre and refocuses our analysis on player experience, while at the same time bringing the scholarship on videogame genre in conversation with that already begun in fields such as film studies and literature studies attentive to the importance of atmosphere for genre.

I further extended my discussion of videogame genre as atmosphere by adopting an assemblage perspective. In such a perspective, genres are understood as spatiotemporally contingent events taking place through the coalescing of bodies. Such events present distinct affective intensities, or atmospheres, to which players attune. Through an assemblage perspective I showed how different videogames belonging to the same genre present similar atmosphere despite noticeable formal differences between them. At the same time, I explained how even minimal differences between otherwise very similar assemblage configurations can give rise to distinct experiential atmospheres.

Atmospheres and assemblages thus provide a novel and effective way to understanding and theorizing genre that may be applied to other media apart from videogames, such as television and film.