Have you played Defence of the Ancients? As the mod phenomenon for Blizzard’s classic strategy game Warcraft III continues to gain momentum, it’s clear that a huge, ever-growing number of people have. DotA provides a unique gaming experience, fusing real-time strategy with role-playing, and transplanting the resulting hybrid into the competitive, team-based multiplayer arena. It pits two teams of players against each other, tasking each team with the destruction of the opposition’s base structure. Players fight each other and AI “creep” units to accumulate the experience, cash and items needed to secure victory. Despite its mod origins, some of its fans regard DoTA as so innovative and distinctive that they refer to it not only as a game scenario, but as the vanguard and chief representative of a new gaming genre. This concept has been strengthened by the emergence of commercial games featuring very similar gameplay. But does DotA actually represent a new genre? The claim is so lofty that it deserves examination. After all, if it were true then the industry repercussions would be vast.

When Doom was released in 1993, it was not home to a new form of gameplay, but it was the consolidation of some high-tech developments that had been gestating for a few years, especially games also developed by id Software, such as 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D. Doom ended up being hugely successful, and in the following years, many action games featuring similar gameplay were released, trying to emulate Doom’s success. The press and public referred to them as "Doom clones". As games like Duke Nukem 3D and Half-Life built upon and expanded Doom’s model of gameplay, the term fell out of fashion and was gradually replaced with “first-person shooter”. Linguistically, a genre was born. An oddity made by a small team, Doom ultimately earned success which reshaped the way games were defined and conceptually organised. The first-person shooter became a reliable stable; games in the style have sold countless copies, making millions of dollars for developers and publishers, funding the development of ever more extravagant games.

DotA already has a legion of fans, but could it become something even bigger?

A single game, making innovations, hybridizations or consolidations in gameplay can change the way games are defined, and send shock-waves through the industry. Doom represents just one example of this process, which in its case forged the landscape of the modern FPS inhabiting every shelf and chart today. For DotA to be accepted as the flash point for a new genre would be a very big thing indeed. But before the crown is offered up to DotA or any other new thing, we need to ask a big question: what is a genre?

In truth, there’s no single answer. The concept is an amorphous one, far from universally accepted. What we can say with certainty is that the term means something largely very different in gaming circles than it does when used to categorise other forms of media. Whilst books, films and television programmes are divided into genres based on their style and tone, games arenormally categorised into genres based on their gameplay mechanics. It makes sense to us that if a model of a gun floats at the bottom of our screens, bobbing along as we fire it at enemies, we’re playing a “first-person shooter”. More obviously, if we’re racing, we’re playing a racer. As gamers, we’ve also become used to sometimes prefixing these genres with terms for genres borrowed from other media, creating more specific combinations like “science fiction real-time strategy”, for example. Maybe by looking at possible components of being a genre, andspeculating as to whether DotA could fulfil those requirements, we can both get closer to figuring out what a genre is and whether DotA is deserving of the title.