Action game
This player character must navigate a level, collecting objects, avoiding obstacles, and battling enemies with their natural skills as well as weapons and other tools at their disposal.
Alternatively, the player gets to the end of the game by finishing a sequence of levels to complete a final goal, and see the credits.
The action genre includes any game where the player overcomes challenges by physical means such as precise aim and quick response times.
[1] Action games can sometimes incorporate other challenges such as races, puzzles, or collecting objects, but they are not central to the genre.
Players may encounter tactical and exploration challenges, but these games first-and-foremost require high reaction speed and good hand–eye coordination.
Action games may sometimes involve puzzle solving, but they are usually quite simple because the player is under immense time pressure.
The obstacles and enemies in a level do not usually vary between play sessions, allowing players to learn by trial and error.
[2] When the timer expires, the player typically loses a life, although some games generate a difficult enemy or challenge.
Some action games even allow players to spend upgrade points on the power ups of their choice.
[2] In action games that involve navigating a space, players will encounter obstacles, traps, and enemies.
[2] In many action games, the avatar has a certain number of hit-markers or health, which are depleted by enemy attacks and other hazards.
[2] In many action games, achieving a high score is the only goal, and levels increase in difficulty until the player loses.
[3][4][5] Shooter games allow the player to take action at a distance using a ranged weapon, challenging them to aim with accuracy and speed.
Other settings include hunting games, or follow the story of a criminal, as seen in the popular Grand Theft Auto franchise.
Although shooting is almost always a form of violence, non-violent shooters exist as well, such as Splatoon which focuses on claiming more territory than the opposing team, by covering the playable environment with colored paint or ink.
[2] Researchers from Helsinki School of Economics have shown that people playing a first-person shooter might secretly enjoy that their character gets killed in the game, although their expressions might show the contrary.
[27] The game was designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who drew inspiration from Atari's Breakout (1976) and the science fiction genre.
According to Eugene Jarvis, these new character-driven Japanese action games emphasized "character development, hand-drawn animation and backgrounds, and a more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" of play.
[3] According to Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers focused mainly on space shooters during the late 1970s to early 1980s, greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but taking the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own Defender (1981)[3] and Robotron: 2084 (1982)[2] as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).
These new side-scrolling character-driven action games featured large character sprites in colorful, side-scrolling environments, with the core gameplay consisting of fighting large groups of weaker enemies using attacks/weapons such as punches, kicks, guns, swords, ninjutsu or magic.
[4] The most notable early example was Irem's Kung-Fu Master (1984),[4] the first beat 'em up[41] and the most influential side-scrolling martial arts action game.
[42] It was based upon two Hong Kong martial arts films, Bruce Lee's Game of Death (1973) and Jackie Chan's Wheels on Meals (1984),[41][43] This side-scrolling arcade action format became popular during the mid-to-late 1980s, with examples including ninja action games such as Taito's The Legend of Kage (1985) and Sega's Shinobi (1987), run and gun video games such as Namco's Rolling Thunder (1986), and beat 'em ups such as Technōs Japan's Renegade (1986) and Double Dragon (1987).
Popular examples include first-person light gun shooting gallery games such as Nintendo's Duck Hunt (1984), pseudo-3D third-person rail shooters such as Sega's Space Harrier (1985) and After Burner (1987), and Taito's Operation Wolf (1987) which popularized military-themed first-person light gun rail shooters.
[46][47] A trend that was popularized for action games in the early 1990s was competitive multiplayer, including what would later be known as esports tournaments.
The arcade fighting game Street Fighter II (1991) by Capcom popularized the concept of direct, tournament-level competition between two players.
[4] On personal computers, the first-person shooter (FPS) genre was popularized by Doom; it is also considered, despite not using 3D polygons, a major leap forward for three-dimensional environments in action games.
