What goes into a Genre?

[Ayyavazi]

Hello all,

I realized that coming up with genres and example movies/books does not help people to craft stories using my game, since Genre is too broad a term. What I need is some insight into what goes into a genre.

So far, I know there is Setting (the where and the when), The Plot Type (the What is going on) and the Mood (How it feels).  However, say I am thinking of classic game fantasy (ala DnD) or just fantasy (like in Lord of the Rings). Where does that fit in to this structure? Is there a component I am missing, or am I failing to pin down the proper elements in these examples? A helpful list of settings, plots, and moods would certainly help me (my mind is failing at the moment, hopefully its just a sleep issue), and any light you can shed o exactly what makes a genre a genre.

Thanks, and cheers,
--Norm

[dindenver]

Norm,
  Someone turned me onto this site. And I think it does a great job of dissecting genres, cliches and tropes:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
  Hope it helps.

[Ayyavazi]

Thanks dindenver. That site is interesting, but it doesn't really address my core question well enough to solve the problem.

I have broken down genre (thanks to a friend) into Setting, Plot Type, and Mood. Perhaps Setting could be further broken down into When (and all of the things related to time) and Where (all of the things related to location).

In this case, Setting would be determining where the story takes place (this isn't just geographic, but also includes all of the culture and color of the place, of which time could be said to be a part). So, a setting tells a person something they can know. If I said that the setting was Western in nature, you would have a few correct assumptions. For example, you would assume that the location of the story is somewhere where there are frontier issues, outside negative influence (injuns!), internal negative influence (corrupt sherrifs or other figures!), guns (six-shooters especially, high-tech frowned upon), and lots of dusty locations. There are probably a slew of other things I am not explicitly naming that go with this setting, but it is a powerful concept.

Because of this, I am looking for a list of settings (perhaps in a sentence or less each so that people have an idea of what goes into it), Moods (you know the stuff), and Plot-Types (such as Medical Mystery ala House, or Hunting from Cowboy Bebop, or even just Interpersonal Drama, from just about any soap). The idea is that I am not able to think of every single example of these things, and am having trouble starting. So, I want help in creating the list. From it, I can better create my game, which depends on creating and agreeing to these details up front before play begins, and also create a possible resource that everyone can use to help craft their own games, even if they are specialized to a specific setting, mood or plot type. It might even fire some people's imagination to make a game for combinations that haven't been tried yet.

Thanks again,
--Norm

[JoyWriter]

I don't believe in genre, except as a system of marketing to help you find stuff in a crowded set of options, so maybe I'm not the best person to give you advice! But from my experience I prefer the "you liked this, how about that?" approach or ones that try to find similar elements across different stories, like tropewiki. Some of the categories you came up with like mood may be best set with examples; "like the sad bit in ____" or "like ___ mixed with ____". Apart from that, the setting list would be a list of every place a story has ever been set, or could be set! No wonder you're having difficulty making a list.

I sympathise with the cause; giving people explicit choices forms inspiration, whereas just saying "pick anything" doesn't give them what they need to start, they have to bring it with them. But there is a point where you just have to insure that they can talk to each other, without needing you to guess everything they could say and putting it in a list.

Another rule I tend to follow in this situation is binary cuts; you cut all the options down by finding distinctions you can make between big groups: "It's either all set in one place or it moves around" Then you can ask those questions to people and see which they pick. This is the way "20 questions" works, and may make your load a little easier if you want to keep going on that path.