I've spent a bit of time recently watching YouTube videos related to the question of what makes something an RPG. Since studying literary theory in college, I've become skeptical that you can give clean-cut definitions of the various genres. I think two works belong to the same genre if they are similar enough across various dimensions. The problem with similarity is that it's vague. Everything is similar to everything else in some way, just on a general metaphysical level, and once you get to the products of human culture, each of them is much more like each of the others than it is different. So arguments about genre tend to fixate on arbitrarily selected differences the importance of which are then magnified to the level of dogma.
I believe there is no one difference that will always make X a member of genre G rather than genre G'. The products of culture are descriptively rich, and there are any number of relevant features that make our experience of each one memorable, so that when another cultural product reminds us enough of the features that we most appreciated in X, we naturally group the two together. To belong to a genre is to participate in a network of resemblances. At the same time, because these resemblances are a matter of the impressions that cultural products make on us, judgments about genre become, to a certain extent, idiosyncratic or subjective.
Because similarity is vague, because similarity rests as much on the connections we individually draw when we engage with a product of culture as its objective qualities and relations (if indeed it has any), the truth of the judgment that X and Y belong to the same genre becomes vague. This is a judgment we can on the one hand support with reasons by appealing to qualities that are objectively present in the work -- but which, on the other hand, depends upon the subjective weight we each (whether consciously or unconsciously) assign to those various qualities based on our own experience with the genre -- based on what we have found most memorable through the course of a lifetime of engagement.
The only reason that we agree as much as we do on what does and does not belong to a given genre is because of the constraints that our common nature places on our individual experience. It's only because our subjective experiences are for the most part so similar that we for the most part agree on the genre to assign to a given cultural product.
I believe there is no one difference that will always make X a member of genre G rather than genre G'. The products of culture are descriptively rich, and there are any number of relevant features that make our experience of each one memorable, so that when another cultural product reminds us enough of the features that we most appreciated in X, we naturally group the two together. To belong to a genre is to participate in a network of resemblances. At the same time, because these resemblances are a matter of the impressions that cultural products make on us, judgments about genre become, to a certain extent, idiosyncratic or subjective.
Because similarity is vague, because similarity rests as much on the connections we individually draw when we engage with a product of culture as its objective qualities and relations (if indeed it has any), the truth of the judgment that X and Y belong to the same genre becomes vague. This is a judgment we can on the one hand support with reasons by appealing to qualities that are objectively present in the work -- but which, on the other hand, depends upon the subjective weight we each (whether consciously or unconsciously) assign to those various qualities based on our own experience with the genre -- based on what we have found most memorable through the course of a lifetime of engagement.
The only reason that we agree as much as we do on what does and does not belong to a given genre is because of the constraints that our common nature places on our individual experience. It's only because our subjective experiences are for the most part so similar that we for the most part agree on the genre to assign to a given cultural product.
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