Nathan Sheff
Entries in the Fallout universe draw on lots of influences and genres, but rather than being a messy hodgepodge, the Fallout experience is cohesive, interesting, and just plain fun. But successfully making a game that is both a roleplaying game and a first-person shooter is no easy task—it requires the developers to make a single experience that recognizably belongs to both genres. While genres are flexible, they come with built-in restrictions; audiences expect a certain kind of experience when they play a shooter rather than a platformer. This chapter explains the difficulty of this task by way of Kendall Walton's work on categories of art. According to Walton, the “feel” of a work depends on the categories (including genre) it belongs to, and category membership depends on the standard features of those categories. The more categories a work belongs to, then, the more standards it has to finesse. This, in turn, heightens the sense of creative risk that designers take whenever they fuse genres.