Like a great many people on here, I am a fan of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation videos. They are highly entertaining and his views and cutting sense of humour are very similar to my own. There is one thing however that annoys me, and that is his dismissal of certain games based on their genres.
Clearly Yahtzee is entitled to his opinions, and utilises hyperbole for the benefit of making quality entertainment, but both of his Dead Space reviews have annoyed me. The main reason he pans them is because they do not match his concept of survival horror. He wants to play a survival horror game like Silent Hill 2, and attacks Dead Space for not meeting those criteria. This annoys because genres are a simple way of helping you to explain or understand something, or to find a book in a library. Filing a game under a specific genre helps you identify things you may or may not like.
Genres however are not boundaries or limitations. You will not find a dictionary definition of what makes a game a survival horror, or an action adventure, or anything else. There are no rules or checklists. They are a guide for finding something you might like, nothing more. What happens in Yahtzee's reviews for both Dead Space games is that he labels them bad for not conforming to his preferences within survival horror, rather than approaching them simply as games. Treating genres as a series of parameters a game must fall within to be good is just silly.
As gaming progresses, we are seeing more complex offerings, a blurring of lines and distinctions. More and more games straddle multiple genres, some more successfully than others. Feel free to dislike a game, just don't complain that it doesn't meet a set of criteria you have arbitrarily assigned it.
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