I thought that it would be useful for you to know about this article by Rune Klevjer - Genre Blindness http://www.digra.org/hardcore/hc11 as it looks at Genre Studies in the field of Game Studies (or the lack there of) and is a call to arms to re-evaluate the usefulness of Genre Studies as a topology.
“… we need to take genre more seriously because we need to take the games themselves more seriously. We need to look for the significant difference before we settle for the well-formed generalisation. Genre blindness means game blindness.”
It is important for us to understand that just calling a game by a tag word such as "RPG" or "shooter" is not enough to analyse a game and understand how it both fits within the matrix or taxonomy of genre and how genre works both as a category and a framework to understand games and their development. Genre is an important aspect of game analysis, many frameworks and methods of categorisation have been established throughout the development of game studies as a defined discipline, some are helpful in understanding the development of games and some are somewhat ludicrous!
Genre frameworks work both as an analytical tool and a marketing tool and it is important to understand what frameworks to use and what purposes they serve.
Apperley, T. H. Genre and Game Studies: Towards a critical approach to video game genres
http://sag.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/1/6 (This will have to accessed from within the university firewalls on a student computer/athens login)
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