Games as graphs (and charts!)

If you’ve ever opened a text book (those things people try to push on you when you’re not playing games), you know that they’re full of words – often large ones. Why can’t someone just condense everything you need to know into a series of bite-sized, uber-convenient nuggets of colorful joy? Well suck this into your eyeball holes, friends, we’ve got GRAPHS AND CHARTS. (See Figure 0-1 for clarification.)

What’s that you say? Aren’t graphs and charts just for boring things like algebra and sexual positions?

Absolutely not! Videogames are best represented via the visual display of quantitative and sequential information, and we’ll prove it to you with the greatest, most graphical guide to gaming ever created. On to our first topic...

1) Game Identification

Figure 1-1. Puzzle Games

Puzzle games don’t generally contain any guns or swords. So how do you kill dudes, right? You don’t. They’re just about colors and shit. We know. Maybe it will be clearer in graph form:

Still not getting it – but at least we’d know one if we saw one. Remember; look for the colors and shit.

Figure 1-2. Identification of Sandbox Games

If you want to understand the immensely popular sandbox genre, there’s no better way than to study a carefully constructed flowchart. Figure 1-2 will aid you in the identification of most sandbox crime games. Try it on your friends – it’s 123% accurate.

Figure 1-3. Prominence of “dead”

This chart is self-explanatory, which means that you should stop reading this and look at it.