What kind of video games do you play? Some categorisations of Wolfenstein 3D from the perspectives of gaming communities

With the emergence of web 2.0, communities of players have gained an enhanced possibility to talk about the categorisation of video games, opposing their discourses with that of the industry. This way of categorising works, by co-constructing categories among internet users, shows new means to divide games into groups meaningful to the players (against the categorisation practiced by researchers, which often makes sense only to the sole researchers, because it is generally based on formal criteria). In this communication, I will exemplify the variety of categorisations considered by the players by exploring the case of Wolfenstein 3D, which seems a pretty straightforward work, but hides a few particularities ignored by scholars. For example, players do not only consider it as the father of the FPS (which can be problematic, because the term didn’t exist in 1992), but also as a game of a certain era, on a certain support or with technical aspects proper to games
published in shareware.