December Days 24: What's In A Game?
Dec. 24th, 2019 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
Genres in games are much like genres in other media forms, at least as much as they are not really hard lines that are impenetrable, and at most, they describe a loose confederation of conventions that a game might draw from to explain what a player can expect in the game set before them. In that sense, they function much more like tags than like categories.
Permit me a diversion where I flex one of the few things that a library degree is directly good for (and that I did learn in library school through paying attention), and not just a certain set of orthopraxy that allows us to go with whatever is presented and produce something useful from incomplete and sometimes contradictory information. So, classification schemes, like the Nippon Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress's Medical Subject Headings, or the Linnean classification of the creatures of the planet humans call Terra, work on taxonomy, the idea that things can be separated into distinct categories based on the presence, absence, or particular configuration of attributes of the taxonomy. To stick with creature classification, one of the boundary lines drawn is the presence or absence of vertebrae as part of the structure that holds a creature together. Another is the presence or absence of an exoskeleton for structure. And so one, and so on, until the differences between species are often very small, indeed.
A taxonomic classification also insists there is one best place for any given individual item, even if it is the kind of item that might do well being in more than one place. Books about, say, the Movement for Black Lives have many potential places where they could go, and in a library with infinite shelf space and infinite resources, copies of that book might appear in all of the places it might possibly come from. In a taxonomic classification, however, and because we are libraries with limited budgets and space, the "best" place to go is where the object fits most strongly in the classification, and where it will be around objects that share the most attributes that it has. This sometimes means that books that are about the same subject, such as the Movement for Black Lives, will end up in different places around the library, depending on whether the book is a biography of one of the founders of the movement, whether it is about the movement's goals in general, or whether it is about a thing that affects Black people more strongly and that the Movement is invested in either encouraging or stomping out completely. With the advent of networked computer systems as the primary method of accessing a catalog of objects and new schema that are meant to draw out the relationships between objects as a primary method of navigating and understanding them, catalogs are able to provide more robust and numerous methods of getting to a resource based on a query. The classification doesn't change, specifically, but the number of references increases exponentially when the work of providing them is essentially "add a line in the correct field linking this node to this other node." This allows the catalog to be a more complete abstraction of the works and their contents contained within. With card catalogs, where each reference and node had to be crafted by hand and then added, there were physical limitations of how many cards would fit in the catalog, and so some relationships that were not primary or not very strong, even though they were relevant, were not present.
The other thing a taxonomy demands is a controlled vocabulary. Since the goal of a taxonomy is to divide things into discrete categories, for a taxonomy to be successful, words have to mean very specific things (which cannot be confused with other things). There is only one category of bugs in Linnean classification, Hemiptera. While bugs are arthropods, not all arthropods are bugs. Lepidopeterans are not bugs, and neither are arachnids. A controlled vocabulary is not immune to changes, additions, or subtractions, but it often has to go through An Entire Process to have things shifted, added, or deleted from the record. (Which causes a certain amount of consternation when in the Library of Congress Classification's subject headings, there exist things like "illegal aliens" and other products of times gone by where people of the current age want them, at least, to be reduced to a SEE reference, and ultimately, would like to see them dropped out of the LCSH entirely and to no longer be part of the controlled vocabulary. Or when it takes still too long for the Dewey Decimal Classification to get off its ass and fix the religion classification (200s) so that everything that's not Christians isn't lumped into a single range (290-299.)) Everything in the taxonomy can be described with the controlled vocabulary, and best results for finding all the objects that you are looking for in that classification is to use that controlled vocabulary as much as you can.
This is, of course, entirely artificial and often orthogonal to the way that people actually think and use language. Professionals train in the use of the controlled vocabulary so that they can help guide someone else in their research tasks, or in being as complete as possible for their own research reviews and readings. To expect someone to learn a controlled vocabulary and then come with a query or to go to a search terminal or OPAC and use that controlled vocabulary is unrealistic, to put it mildly. Especially for people who are just looking for something good to read or something that will be informative or they really just want to know some sort of factoid about something. Controlled vocabularies and taxonomies are for researchers, professionals, and people who have already run a few searches and aren't finding the things they're looking for or want to find more on a particular facet or subset of their results. And, sometimes, the taxonomy doesn't actually cover everything that a person might be looking for, or it discards certain important relationships between objects because of the way it sets control and authority on the vocabulary.
To remedy these gaps, we have folksonomy, which does not have a controlled vocabulary, but it often also composed of links and shared ideas hat sometimes transcend the rigid boundaries of the classification system. What people commonly call bugs encompasses several different Linnean classifications. Malware is a supergroup of many different types of malicious program, but if someone says their computer caught a virus, they might mean a worm or some other technical classification of malware that isn't, strictly speaking, a virus. Tagging is the way that folksonomy is most commonly run, where links that are either personal or that highlight something missing from the taxonomy are made. While a taxonomy might have a lot of information available about any given work of art, it might not actually mention the colors of the paints used in the work (unless those pigments are themselves notable). Thus, a person looking through a digital collection that just wants a painting that's primarily red would have a hard time determining whether they have all the paintings possible. But if someone had gone through and tagges each painting with tags representing their primary colors, then, suddenly, someone can choose the tag (or search for red) and has a good chance of collecting them all, so long as each person tags things in relatively the same way. It's useful information to the layperson who is just looking at things, even if it didn't make the official classification scheme.
Some things that appear repeatedly in a folksonomy might be imported into the controlled vocabulary, and might even become part of the taxonomy. For a current and large-scale example of folksonomy eventually becoming taxonomy, watch the tag wrangling and syn(onym)ing that happens in the tag cloud of the Archive of Our Own. As new tags come in, sometimes things are described differently depending on the writer. Eventually, a certain set of tags come through that are all representative of the same relationship or concept. One of those tags has to be selected to become the official taxonomic controlled vocabulary term. All other terms that are related to that one then end up as synonyms, see-alsos, and otherwise set up in such a way that using those terms will ilnk back to the canonical term in use and display all works that have that canonical term or any of the other terms that have been synonym-linked to it. As new tags come in from other places and as people express themselves in the multitudes that they can, those tags are evaluated to see whether they should also be added to the canonical tags or should be spun into a canonical tag of their own. I suspect that only certain tags that cross a threshold of usage end up under consideration for inclusion in the taxonomy, so as not to overwhelm the volunteers that do the tag wrangling, but it's a masterful example of building a taxonomy by mining the folksonomy already in place and being created and expanded on a regular basis. Taxonomy and folksonomy don't have to compete with each other, as they fill different niches. Although, there's always the possibility that the folksonomy will get overwhelmed and become useless if certain tags are overused or otherwise just return everything. Much like keyword searching on the Internet, both taxonomy and folksonomy should return useful, or at least interesting, results when they are used to traverse and discover relationships between objects.
There, now that I've spent about 1700 words explaining what taxonomies and folksonomies are, how does this apply to games? Well, in the beginning, there was a thought that game genres could be more taxonomic, so that you could find your niche (and marketing category) easily and be content buying and playing games from that particular group, and marketers could figure out where their audiences were and who were the right groups to market particular games to. The ideal space would be that a person looked at the box art, the title, and the genre, and would have a particular idea of what a game consisted of, and a good chance to figure out whether or not they would like it. As with every other attempt to make genre into a taxonomy, it crashed and burned, because once you start trying to define strong boundaries and categorizations and put people into lanes, there will inevitably end up being edge cases. And things that don't fit nicely into a single genre or taxonomic spot. And things that are created to deliberately mess with the genre boundaries. Or things created specifically to take the tropes of any given genre and turn them against a Genre Savvy player and force them to play a completely different game than the one they thought they were getting (looking at you, Undertale, as a pretty prominent example of the last one.) You do a little bit better classifying games according to things like their prevalent tropes, storytelling quirks, and mechanics (for which the obligatory mention is that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life even as it gives you a vocabulary to be better able to describe the experiences you are having and the mechanics that you are seeing. This is decidedly folksonomic, even as TVTropes works on taking the folksonomy and transforming it into a taxonomy (for their own wiki, anyway) once enough examples of any given concept exist to start their own wiki page after it goes through the process of You Know That Thing Where… I freely use the TVTropes controlled vocabulary because I find it useful and descriptive, even in just trope names, but you could use other things to describe games and their devices. Steam has an entire tag cloud put together, and while their tags are more taxonomic than folksonomic, they don't necessarily try to control the game tags in such a way as to make taxonomic classifications about the game, but instead display things like "people who have played this game / looked at this game use these tags most frequently." Which is meant as another piece of information in addition to the video and screenshot previews of the game as well as the description of the game as provided by the developer. People tend to tag reasonably well about all of these things, including things like the presence or absence of 18+-type situations and possible content as well as what general mechanics or style someone might get by playing the game.
So we have a richly developed classification and description system in place, but even then, we still have genre markers as supergroups of what kind of things to expect out of a game. "Fighting" games generally work in 1v1 situations, where each character has a specific roster of possible moves and defenses to choose from, some of which work very well and others which don't against the other characters in the roster. This makes them distinct from "Brawler" games, which tend toward multiple combatants all at once in an arena that may or may not have hazards, weapons, or other features that also have to be contended with, in addition to all the other fighters. These are distinct, however, from "beat-em-ups," which are usually anywhere from one to four player characters against waves and hordes of less-powerful mooks, each of which must be defeated in their entirety before the characters are allowed to progress to the next stage (and sometimes the player characters are on a clock for each wave that will punish them for taking too long to defeat their opponents), culminating in boss battles against more powerful characters at the end of each stage, who usually require different fighting approaches and strategies compared to the opponents faced in the stage. All of these types of games, while they contain action, are usually different than "action" games, which tend to be the supergroup of things like first-person shooters, "shoot-em-ups" like Metal Slug and "danmaku" (bullet hell) games, where the focus is on often simple-seeming gameplay (sometimes overlaid on top of a very complex system for point scoring and gathering bonuses that are essential to survival) that often emulate the loops of arcade machines (and often, their tendency to start at punishing difficulty and get worse).
Then, somewhere over elsewhere, we have the role playing games, where someone can usually expect a tabletop-like mechanical system that rewards players with experience points and level progressions that improve their statistics, where finding and equipping good gear is important to keeping up with the increasing difficulty of enemies, some system of generating magic or magic-like effects, and things like random encounters, side quests, and optional bonus bosses that sometimes require the exploitation of a particular overlooked mechanic (such as utilizing the Standard Status Effects when every other battle in the game can be easily defeated without them) or that require specific actions in sequence so as to achieve a desired result (Chrono Cross is one that comes to mind, where not only does realizing that there's useful information on the screen and in the sound take some thinking, but finding the item needed to actually achieve the good ending means having to know where it is and go to that space, because it doesn't signal its presence on the map like the other places do). Except Undertale also describes itself as a role-playing game, and it is, except that everything that's seen as a standard feature to the genre supergroup is anathema to getting the good ending in Undertale, and instead, to do well at Undertale, you have to play bullet hell and other types of games instead. Or you can play Undertale like a genre-standard RPG and end up with the Bad Ending instead.
And those old friends of ours, "casual" and "hardcore", sometimes show up in the tags as well, although they're usually meant as a barometer of how much the game will teach you before it tosses you into the gameplay experience, how much time you will be expected to invest in the game before you understand it well enough to attempt to play it well, or how much it will help (or mock) you if you're clearly having difficulties with the gameplay and its requirements.
As with any genre form, you get more comfortable with the conventions and expectations of it the more you interact with it, which is why it's often useful to have a good game that's an example of the form and its tropes handy if someone asks about whether they would enjoy a particular genre or not. And a few other recommendations for people who like the genre, except for that one mechanic that seems to be everywhere that they find more stressful than enjoyable. In a lot of ways, being good at reading the tags and recommending the games and figuring out whether any particular offering is going to be something you really enjoy playing and which are things that you might get a quick thrill out of, but then will get bored with swiftly or ragequit over, is a matter of time, finesse, and practice. And playing a few exemplar games in each genre to get a feel for what it does and doesn't do. Assuming you have the money for that, or more likely, the friends (or YouTube streamers) that can do it or play it while you watch. Those with librarian training (or the ability to think and elicit information from people like a librarian) will find it easier to classify, engage with the taxonomies and folksonomies, and otherwise break apart games into the important components so as to make good recommendations. (Which actually goes for any media elements you consume, be it canon, fic, art, audio, video, or games.)
Tell me about your favorite games and why you like them. Or ask for recommendations. Or suggest topics for future entries. We've still got a week's worth of entries left before the end of the month.
Genres in games are much like genres in other media forms, at least as much as they are not really hard lines that are impenetrable, and at most, they describe a loose confederation of conventions that a game might draw from to explain what a player can expect in the game set before them. In that sense, they function much more like tags than like categories.
Permit me a diversion where I flex one of the few things that a library degree is directly good for (and that I did learn in library school through paying attention), and not just a certain set of orthopraxy that allows us to go with whatever is presented and produce something useful from incomplete and sometimes contradictory information. So, classification schemes, like the Nippon Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress's Medical Subject Headings, or the Linnean classification of the creatures of the planet humans call Terra, work on taxonomy, the idea that things can be separated into distinct categories based on the presence, absence, or particular configuration of attributes of the taxonomy. To stick with creature classification, one of the boundary lines drawn is the presence or absence of vertebrae as part of the structure that holds a creature together. Another is the presence or absence of an exoskeleton for structure. And so one, and so on, until the differences between species are often very small, indeed.
A taxonomic classification also insists there is one best place for any given individual item, even if it is the kind of item that might do well being in more than one place. Books about, say, the Movement for Black Lives have many potential places where they could go, and in a library with infinite shelf space and infinite resources, copies of that book might appear in all of the places it might possibly come from. In a taxonomic classification, however, and because we are libraries with limited budgets and space, the "best" place to go is where the object fits most strongly in the classification, and where it will be around objects that share the most attributes that it has. This sometimes means that books that are about the same subject, such as the Movement for Black Lives, will end up in different places around the library, depending on whether the book is a biography of one of the founders of the movement, whether it is about the movement's goals in general, or whether it is about a thing that affects Black people more strongly and that the Movement is invested in either encouraging or stomping out completely. With the advent of networked computer systems as the primary method of accessing a catalog of objects and new schema that are meant to draw out the relationships between objects as a primary method of navigating and understanding them, catalogs are able to provide more robust and numerous methods of getting to a resource based on a query. The classification doesn't change, specifically, but the number of references increases exponentially when the work of providing them is essentially "add a line in the correct field linking this node to this other node." This allows the catalog to be a more complete abstraction of the works and their contents contained within. With card catalogs, where each reference and node had to be crafted by hand and then added, there were physical limitations of how many cards would fit in the catalog, and so some relationships that were not primary or not very strong, even though they were relevant, were not present.
The other thing a taxonomy demands is a controlled vocabulary. Since the goal of a taxonomy is to divide things into discrete categories, for a taxonomy to be successful, words have to mean very specific things (which cannot be confused with other things). There is only one category of bugs in Linnean classification, Hemiptera. While bugs are arthropods, not all arthropods are bugs. Lepidopeterans are not bugs, and neither are arachnids. A controlled vocabulary is not immune to changes, additions, or subtractions, but it often has to go through An Entire Process to have things shifted, added, or deleted from the record. (Which causes a certain amount of consternation when in the Library of Congress Classification's subject headings, there exist things like "illegal aliens" and other products of times gone by where people of the current age want them, at least, to be reduced to a SEE reference, and ultimately, would like to see them dropped out of the LCSH entirely and to no longer be part of the controlled vocabulary. Or when it takes still too long for the Dewey Decimal Classification to get off its ass and fix the religion classification (200s) so that everything that's not Christians isn't lumped into a single range (290-299.)) Everything in the taxonomy can be described with the controlled vocabulary, and best results for finding all the objects that you are looking for in that classification is to use that controlled vocabulary as much as you can.
This is, of course, entirely artificial and often orthogonal to the way that people actually think and use language. Professionals train in the use of the controlled vocabulary so that they can help guide someone else in their research tasks, or in being as complete as possible for their own research reviews and readings. To expect someone to learn a controlled vocabulary and then come with a query or to go to a search terminal or OPAC and use that controlled vocabulary is unrealistic, to put it mildly. Especially for people who are just looking for something good to read or something that will be informative or they really just want to know some sort of factoid about something. Controlled vocabularies and taxonomies are for researchers, professionals, and people who have already run a few searches and aren't finding the things they're looking for or want to find more on a particular facet or subset of their results. And, sometimes, the taxonomy doesn't actually cover everything that a person might be looking for, or it discards certain important relationships between objects because of the way it sets control and authority on the vocabulary.
To remedy these gaps, we have folksonomy, which does not have a controlled vocabulary, but it often also composed of links and shared ideas hat sometimes transcend the rigid boundaries of the classification system. What people commonly call bugs encompasses several different Linnean classifications. Malware is a supergroup of many different types of malicious program, but if someone says their computer caught a virus, they might mean a worm or some other technical classification of malware that isn't, strictly speaking, a virus. Tagging is the way that folksonomy is most commonly run, where links that are either personal or that highlight something missing from the taxonomy are made. While a taxonomy might have a lot of information available about any given work of art, it might not actually mention the colors of the paints used in the work (unless those pigments are themselves notable). Thus, a person looking through a digital collection that just wants a painting that's primarily red would have a hard time determining whether they have all the paintings possible. But if someone had gone through and tagges each painting with tags representing their primary colors, then, suddenly, someone can choose the tag (or search for red) and has a good chance of collecting them all, so long as each person tags things in relatively the same way. It's useful information to the layperson who is just looking at things, even if it didn't make the official classification scheme.
Some things that appear repeatedly in a folksonomy might be imported into the controlled vocabulary, and might even become part of the taxonomy. For a current and large-scale example of folksonomy eventually becoming taxonomy, watch the tag wrangling and syn(onym)ing that happens in the tag cloud of the Archive of Our Own. As new tags come in, sometimes things are described differently depending on the writer. Eventually, a certain set of tags come through that are all representative of the same relationship or concept. One of those tags has to be selected to become the official taxonomic controlled vocabulary term. All other terms that are related to that one then end up as synonyms, see-alsos, and otherwise set up in such a way that using those terms will ilnk back to the canonical term in use and display all works that have that canonical term or any of the other terms that have been synonym-linked to it. As new tags come in from other places and as people express themselves in the multitudes that they can, those tags are evaluated to see whether they should also be added to the canonical tags or should be spun into a canonical tag of their own. I suspect that only certain tags that cross a threshold of usage end up under consideration for inclusion in the taxonomy, so as not to overwhelm the volunteers that do the tag wrangling, but it's a masterful example of building a taxonomy by mining the folksonomy already in place and being created and expanded on a regular basis. Taxonomy and folksonomy don't have to compete with each other, as they fill different niches. Although, there's always the possibility that the folksonomy will get overwhelmed and become useless if certain tags are overused or otherwise just return everything. Much like keyword searching on the Internet, both taxonomy and folksonomy should return useful, or at least interesting, results when they are used to traverse and discover relationships between objects.
There, now that I've spent about 1700 words explaining what taxonomies and folksonomies are, how does this apply to games? Well, in the beginning, there was a thought that game genres could be more taxonomic, so that you could find your niche (and marketing category) easily and be content buying and playing games from that particular group, and marketers could figure out where their audiences were and who were the right groups to market particular games to. The ideal space would be that a person looked at the box art, the title, and the genre, and would have a particular idea of what a game consisted of, and a good chance to figure out whether or not they would like it. As with every other attempt to make genre into a taxonomy, it crashed and burned, because once you start trying to define strong boundaries and categorizations and put people into lanes, there will inevitably end up being edge cases. And things that don't fit nicely into a single genre or taxonomic spot. And things that are created to deliberately mess with the genre boundaries. Or things created specifically to take the tropes of any given genre and turn them against a Genre Savvy player and force them to play a completely different game than the one they thought they were getting (looking at you, Undertale, as a pretty prominent example of the last one.) You do a little bit better classifying games according to things like their prevalent tropes, storytelling quirks, and mechanics (for which the obligatory mention is that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life even as it gives you a vocabulary to be better able to describe the experiences you are having and the mechanics that you are seeing. This is decidedly folksonomic, even as TVTropes works on taking the folksonomy and transforming it into a taxonomy (for their own wiki, anyway) once enough examples of any given concept exist to start their own wiki page after it goes through the process of You Know That Thing Where… I freely use the TVTropes controlled vocabulary because I find it useful and descriptive, even in just trope names, but you could use other things to describe games and their devices. Steam has an entire tag cloud put together, and while their tags are more taxonomic than folksonomic, they don't necessarily try to control the game tags in such a way as to make taxonomic classifications about the game, but instead display things like "people who have played this game / looked at this game use these tags most frequently." Which is meant as another piece of information in addition to the video and screenshot previews of the game as well as the description of the game as provided by the developer. People tend to tag reasonably well about all of these things, including things like the presence or absence of 18+-type situations and possible content as well as what general mechanics or style someone might get by playing the game.
So we have a richly developed classification and description system in place, but even then, we still have genre markers as supergroups of what kind of things to expect out of a game. "Fighting" games generally work in 1v1 situations, where each character has a specific roster of possible moves and defenses to choose from, some of which work very well and others which don't against the other characters in the roster. This makes them distinct from "Brawler" games, which tend toward multiple combatants all at once in an arena that may or may not have hazards, weapons, or other features that also have to be contended with, in addition to all the other fighters. These are distinct, however, from "beat-em-ups," which are usually anywhere from one to four player characters against waves and hordes of less-powerful mooks, each of which must be defeated in their entirety before the characters are allowed to progress to the next stage (and sometimes the player characters are on a clock for each wave that will punish them for taking too long to defeat their opponents), culminating in boss battles against more powerful characters at the end of each stage, who usually require different fighting approaches and strategies compared to the opponents faced in the stage. All of these types of games, while they contain action, are usually different than "action" games, which tend to be the supergroup of things like first-person shooters, "shoot-em-ups" like Metal Slug and "danmaku" (bullet hell) games, where the focus is on often simple-seeming gameplay (sometimes overlaid on top of a very complex system for point scoring and gathering bonuses that are essential to survival) that often emulate the loops of arcade machines (and often, their tendency to start at punishing difficulty and get worse).
Then, somewhere over elsewhere, we have the role playing games, where someone can usually expect a tabletop-like mechanical system that rewards players with experience points and level progressions that improve their statistics, where finding and equipping good gear is important to keeping up with the increasing difficulty of enemies, some system of generating magic or magic-like effects, and things like random encounters, side quests, and optional bonus bosses that sometimes require the exploitation of a particular overlooked mechanic (such as utilizing the Standard Status Effects when every other battle in the game can be easily defeated without them) or that require specific actions in sequence so as to achieve a desired result (Chrono Cross is one that comes to mind, where not only does realizing that there's useful information on the screen and in the sound take some thinking, but finding the item needed to actually achieve the good ending means having to know where it is and go to that space, because it doesn't signal its presence on the map like the other places do). Except Undertale also describes itself as a role-playing game, and it is, except that everything that's seen as a standard feature to the genre supergroup is anathema to getting the good ending in Undertale, and instead, to do well at Undertale, you have to play bullet hell and other types of games instead. Or you can play Undertale like a genre-standard RPG and end up with the Bad Ending instead.
And those old friends of ours, "casual" and "hardcore", sometimes show up in the tags as well, although they're usually meant as a barometer of how much the game will teach you before it tosses you into the gameplay experience, how much time you will be expected to invest in the game before you understand it well enough to attempt to play it well, or how much it will help (or mock) you if you're clearly having difficulties with the gameplay and its requirements.
As with any genre form, you get more comfortable with the conventions and expectations of it the more you interact with it, which is why it's often useful to have a good game that's an example of the form and its tropes handy if someone asks about whether they would enjoy a particular genre or not. And a few other recommendations for people who like the genre, except for that one mechanic that seems to be everywhere that they find more stressful than enjoyable. In a lot of ways, being good at reading the tags and recommending the games and figuring out whether any particular offering is going to be something you really enjoy playing and which are things that you might get a quick thrill out of, but then will get bored with swiftly or ragequit over, is a matter of time, finesse, and practice. And playing a few exemplar games in each genre to get a feel for what it does and doesn't do. Assuming you have the money for that, or more likely, the friends (or YouTube streamers) that can do it or play it while you watch. Those with librarian training (or the ability to think and elicit information from people like a librarian) will find it easier to classify, engage with the taxonomies and folksonomies, and otherwise break apart games into the important components so as to make good recommendations. (Which actually goes for any media elements you consume, be it canon, fic, art, audio, video, or games.)
Tell me about your favorite games and why you like them. Or ask for recommendations. Or suggest topics for future entries. We've still got a week's worth of entries left before the end of the month.
