so after a lengthy "debate" with somebody on a facebook group, I'll just state this here:
Genre is not the goal that games must strive for, rather it is a brief and simplified way of giving single line descriptions. Every game has different levels of focus on different mechanics and therefore the level of focus on a mechanic determines the weight of how important it is for that mechanic to be good.
For example, having a glitch that makes the jump button not work is a problem, no doubt about that. But to say that it breaks Super Mario Bros. the same way it would break Tekken 2 is demonstrably wrong. In Tekken 2, you can still play the game rather easily and rather enjoyably without jumping. Super Mario Bros. on the other-hand is massively crippled by this and game becomes completely unplayable. Super Mario Bros focuses a lot more on jumping than Tekken 2 does, and therefore when judging Super Mario Bros, we need to examine the jumping much more than we do for Tekken 2. This should be really simple but some people just don't seem to get it.
If you are like the person I was *ahem* "debating" with last night, and think that a game must tick off a list of pre-set check-boxes based on the arbitrary genre we assign to it, you know who else uses this method? salesmen! At this point it's not about making a game as a form of expression or as a means to engage the player in it's mechanics, rather just you're just going through the motions. You know what we call games designed purely to sell? shovelware! "has it been a year since the last release? check! do we have the celebrity to target the teenage african-american males? check!"
If we are gamers, then judge a game on the quality of what the game IS. DO NOT use the genre labels as the be-all and end-all. To do so facilitates shovelware, to not do so facilitates creativity.
On a side note, going out of your way to try to make a game that doesn't fit neatly into a single box is the same problem. You would still be using genre as a benchmark to determine your goal. Rather just ignore the boxes entirely, just make the games that you think will be good, and if they just so happen to fit neatly into a box, then so be it.
