1. Adventure

Adventure games focus heavily on a storyline, usually placing the player in the role of main character. Game-play usually involves collecting items, puzzle solving and choosing dialogue options. Although this often shares some amount of overlap with the RPG genre, the major difference is that an adventure game will usually contain minimal (if any) combat. Older adventure games were text-based, whilst the most popular examples of the genre tend to be of the "point & click" graphical style popularised by Sierra's games. Visual Novels and Interactive Fiction are strongly related to this genre.

Many of these games have reasonably low system requirements, and not much difficult programming work is required compared to some other genres.

Famous examples include King's Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, and Myst.

2. Arcade

Originally games that were literally played in a video arcade, traditionally taking the form of coin-operated machines. Popular examples include pin-ball machines and fighting games such as Tekken, Mortal Kombat, et al. or scrolling shooter or "beat 'em up" games. Modern incarnations aren't necessarily games that are literally played on a cabinet machine, but often share many of the characteristics of those games. There's often little or no storyline which is not the main focus, and game-play is designed for repeated plays which were originally intended to encourage the player to continue feeding coins into the machine. Objectives are commonly to achieve high-scores, simply finish the game, or to beat a second player.

Arcade games (excepting real arcade game cabinets) are well suited to hand-held devices and consoles, although many casual and web-based games are also classified as arcade games.

Popular examples (in addition to pinball machines and the fighting games mentioned above) include Pac-man, Frogger, Galaga, and Asteroids.

3. Strategy

Usually war games -- either real-time or turn-based -- in which the player gathers resources and controls the construction and placement of multiple units in order to achieve a combat victory against one or more AI or human opponents. The player controls multiple units rather than a single character, and meaningful decisions often include timing of commands and placement of units and structures. There are many table-top of board-game varieties of this genre, but turn-based or real-time strategy video-games are also popular. This genre has traditionally been poorly suited to consoles, with the majority of notable examples benefiting from the input devices and display provided on the platform.

Popular examples of real-time strategy games include the Command & Conquer series, the Age of Empires series and Supreme Commander, and popular examples of turn-based games include the Civilization series, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Alpha Centauri.

4. Simulation

Wikipedia says that a simulation is "the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time", and apart from the fact that sim-games do not always cover real-world processes or systems I don't think I can provide a better definition.

Sim-games model complex systems, often with many parts, and the player interacts by interfering with or adjusting one or more of those parts.

Examples include Sim City, Spore, and Sim Tower.



Hope that helps!

Hello,

jbadams has made a great overview, if in doubt, go with that one.

Although this often shares some amount of overlap with the RPG genre, the major difference is that an adventure game will usually contain minimal (if any) combat.

The only part of jbadams' post I have a (small) problem with.
I'd say that the fact that adventures prefer riddles over combat is more of a symptom than a defining characteristic for them.
The main difference imho would be, that in an adventure, the story is the most important feature, whereas in an rpg the protagonist is. Of course there are rpgs with astonishing storys out there, but even in those cases, the most important part for the gameplay experience is the character and how the player connects with him (no matter if the protagonist is a fully developed personality or a blank slate for the player to insert himself into).

Also, since we've already got such a great topic on game genres going, there's another pair of genres that I've always struggled with keeping apart: adventures and roguelikes. It'd be really nice if someone could tell me the difference between those two.

bw,
Tobl

1. Adventure - Characterized by puzzles. There are two type of adventure, both of which feature puzzles. "Adventure games" like the Myst series are usually mouse-driven, often do not have combat, may have an interactive story. "Action Adventure Games" like the Zelda series typically are influenced by RPGs, but have a simplified inventory system and more arcade-like combat.
2. Arcade - Characterized by requiring quick reflexes for shooting, punching/kicking, or maneuvering vehicles or puzzle pieces
3. Strategy - Characterized by controlling an army of units
4. Simulation - There are two types of sim. The city/factory/farm/breeding/etc. sim is characterized by an emphasis on the playing putting in work to earn money, usually also upgrading infrastructure related to production. The driving/flying/guitar/etc. sim is characterized by emulating the experience of controlling a vehicle, mount, weapon, or musical instrument.

roguelikes

I'd say the defining features of a rogue-like are random map generation, often accompanied with either procedurally generated items, or simply items with slightly randomised attributes, and the focus of these games is always exploration and discovery. These are almost exclusively turn-based games (although I think it might be possible to retain the feel in a real-time game), and unlike many other genres it's also usual for these games to feature perma-death.

Many of these games are only lightly reliant on visual representation -- allowing them to take more easily create the large collections of randomised or procedurally generated content normally seen -- and it isn't uncommon that you are actually able to switch between different representations, including the traditional ASCII-based displays and increasingly one or more choices of graphical tile-set. It's extremely uncommon to be able to make this choice of display in any other genre, but very common in modern rogue-likes.

I'd say the majority of rogue-likes are more heavily related to role-playing rather than adventure games, although obviously these are highly related genres with some amount of overlap, and any given example game might share more in common with one or the other.

I'd say that the fact that adventures prefer riddles over combat is more of a symptom than a defining characteristic for them.

While I'll agree that a lack of (or minimal) combat isn't necessarily a defining feature of the genre -- and therefore you could possibly have an adventure game featuring both combat and puzzle-solving equally -- I would say that the inclusion of puzzle-solving certainly is a defining characteristic, and a game without puzzles probably isn't an adventure game; it might instead be a role-playing game, a visual novel, or interactive fiction. I can't think of a single adventure game that doesn't heavily feature puzzles, and whilst I agree in principle that they could possibly include more combat I can't think of a single prominent example where combat is a major focus; many games don't include it at all, beyond perhaps the occasional puzzle that results in the death or injury of an opponent.



With all this discussion of genres, I think it's also important to remember that they're just classifications -- sometimes fairly loose ones -- based upon characteristics of a game, and while it can be valuable to use a genre to quickly describe the core features of a game or to examine established convention in similar ideas it often isn't particularly constructive to spend too much time obsessing over how to classify a particular game, and that it can sometimes be unnecessarily restrictive to stick exclusively to features found within your genre when creating a new idea.