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Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025?

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On 1/9/2026 9:01 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jan 2026 05:10:05 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
> <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
>> Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com> wrote at 19:01 this Sunday (GMT):
> 
> 
>>> Everything's blending together.  Most of the more current RPGs have
>>> 'action' A lot of the Action has RPG elements.
> 
> 
>> Genres in general feel way more fluid nowadays, I think
> 
> 
> Genre-fluidity? Man, even video-game genres are going woke now! ;-)
> 
>       [No, I don't know what 'woke' means either.]
> 
> I admit, there is a part of me that wishes games stuck more to fixed
> genres. Mostly, though, that's the part of me that makes spreadsheets
> and wants to know what category to type into the 'genre' box of my
> makeshift database of games. The part that actually /plays/ the games,
> though, doesn't care as much.
> 
> But genres are such artificial categorizations anyway, and even from
> the start, many games didn't neatly pigeonhole into a specific one. I
> think one of the earliest games that made me realize this was Maxis'
> long-forgotten 1992 game, "Rome: Pathway to Power". Was it a political
> simulation? A tactical wargame? An adventure? An RPG? Visually, it
> looked similar to their city-builder games. It was a bit of all of
> those and this lack of focus annoyed me, even though --had I just
> played the game and accepted it for what it was-- I probably would
> have enjoyed it.
> 
>      [That's not to say "Rome" was the first mixed-genre game I
>       played; it was just the first one where I realized it
>       didn't neatly fit into one genre.]
> 
> Even when the current hierarchy of newsgroups was being created
> (csipg.action, csipg.adventure, csipg.strategy, etc.), this
> uncertainty was a major argument against splitting the group. There
> were so many ways to interpret which game fit where... and some people
> got quite vocal about it. "Take your damn Wing Commander post out of
> csipg.flight-sim; that's an action game" said some, while at the same
> time others said, "Take your damn "Wing Commander" post out of
> csipg.action; it's a flight-sim!" Even _DOOM_, what we now consider a
> quintessential action game, was considered by some to be more
> simulation than arcade, and not appropriate for this newsgroup.
> (By some, anyway. On the whole, most people here welcomed Doom. It was
> just too popular /not/ to talk about). But it gives you an idea of how
> controversial genres could be.
> 
> These days, almost every game has such a mixture of genres that
> pigeonholing them is all but impossible. They pick and choose from
> idea used by dozens or hundreds of other games, and mix-and-match
> those ideas to create something new. Very few games are single-genre
> anymore. And that's not a bad thing.
> 
> Even if it does make my spreadsheet a bit of a mess. ;-)
> 
The Easy fix is just have more than one "Genre" slot for each game....

-- 
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky 
dirty old man.

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What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2026-01-01 12:14 -0500
  Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-01 09:34 -0800
    Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2026-01-02 13:30 +0000
      Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-02 07:37 -0800
        Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2026-01-03 00:26 +0000
          Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-02 17:25 -0800
            Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2026-01-08 01:10 +0000
              Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Gottfried Neuner <kyonshi@wilderland.ovh> - 2026-01-11 01:23 +0100
  Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2026-01-03 01:47 +0000
    Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2026-01-03 11:31 -0500
      Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Gottfried Neuner <kyonshi@wilderland.ovh> - 2026-01-03 21:55 +0100
        Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2026-01-04 06:09 +0000
        Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com> - 2026-01-04 11:01 -0800
          Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2026-01-09 05:10 +0000
            Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2026-01-09 12:01 -0500
              Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-09 17:30 -0800
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2026-01-10 10:58 -0500
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-10 09:38 -0800
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com> - 2026-01-10 14:42 -0500
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2026-01-11 11:25 -0500
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> - 2026-01-11 08:55 -0500
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-11 08:46 -0800
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2026-01-13 14:00 +0000
                Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> - 2026-01-13 08:09 -0800
      Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) - 2026-01-04 06:08 +0000
  Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? The True Melissa <thetruemelissa@gmail.com> - 2026-01-03 13:02 -0500
    Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com> - 2026-01-04 10:26 -0500
    Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN DECEMBER 2025? phoenix <j63840576@gmail.com> - 2026-01-16 10:44 -0600

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