Every genre sits somewhere on six underlying axes. Pick a projection and watch the landscape rearrange — the same games, a different map. Dot size = current popularity. Click a dot for its field entry; click a family in the legend to dim it.
The second taxonomy: descent. Most genre names are fossils — they name an ancestor, not a feature (rogue-like, souls-like, metroidvania, "DotA-likes" became MOBAs). Nine families, each descended from a founding game or pre-digital tradition. Bright tags mark cross-family DNA — the places where the tree model breaks down and the landscape shows through. Each family opens with an essay on its deep logic — the question every genre in it is secretly answering.
The third taxonomy: time. Genres are born when one game invents a loop so compelling that others copy it until the copies need a name. Each entry below is that spark. Notice the rhythm: arcades birth the action genres, the PC era births the systems genres, mods and flash birth the 2000s, and indies + free-to-play birth the modern map.
Understanding lives in the differences. Pick any two genres — or start with a classic confusion pair. Each pair comes with a litmus test: one question that splits them cleanly.
Fingerprints overlaid ·
The final piece of intuition: many famous "genres" are really adjectives — modifiers that attach to any noun-genre and change its texture. This is why modern store tags look chaotic: a game like Hades is an action roguelite, Slay the Spire a roguelite deckbuilder, Stardew a cozy farming life-sim RPG. Once you can parse names into noun + modifiers, the whole landscape reads cleanly.