Game categories

Game categories

This page is the map of the library. Use it to see how everything has been shelved, then walk straight to the shelf that matches your taste instead of scanning title by title.

Fourteen shelves and their sizes

The list above pairs each category with the number of games sitting on it. Every one of those numbers is read from the system when the page is built rather than typed into the prose, so the figures move with the catalogue instead of drifting away from it.

The shelves are nowhere near equal in size. Arcade is the biggest by a wide margin, with puzzle and shooter behind it, while the smallest shelves hold only a handful of titles. We do not flatten that curve by filing games where they do not belong. A thin shelf is allowed to look thin.

Why some categories you have seen elsewhere are missing

Only shelves that actually hold games are published. Where the system knows a category name but no game currently belongs to it, no page is created and the name does not appear in the list above.

The reasoning is plain enough. An empty shelf is worth nothing to the person who clicks it: it costs a click and returns them to where they started. Plenty of game portals leave those shells standing because it makes the catalogue look larger. We would rather every name on this page be a promise that something is behind it.

A game can live on several shelves

Nothing restricts a title to a single category. The clearest example in this library is the traffic-dodging driving game Traffic Racer, which is filed under three categories at once — action, racing and sports — because all three describe it equally well.

The consequence is that you will meet the same title twice if you open two neighbouring shelves in a row. That is not a glitch; it is the same arrangement that puts one novel on both the crime shelf and the translated-fiction shelf.

Questions about how shelves are drawn

How many categories are there?

Fourteen, and all fourteen hold games. That figure comes from the system, exactly like the per-shelf counts.

Why do the category counts add up to more than the number of games?

Because some titles are counted on more than one shelf, as described above. Adding up every category gives 102 placements across 98 actual games. The difference of four is titles standing in more than one place, not arithmetic gone wrong.

Can I browse by situation instead of by genre?

Yes. The curated sets shelve the same catalogue a second way — by the time you have and the way you are holding your device. To sweep the entire catalogue in one go, open the full library.