Video Games!

It's hard for me to search for games that I'll like just by going off of genre and tags on steam or wherever.

I think it's more useful to try and create your own "genres" or "groups" of games that you like.

The games I list here aren't exhaustive of the games I like; the list would be way too long. Maybe eventually I'll work this into a full "games that I've played" list.

Story Rich

Games with a good story, focused on the linear telling of that story. Branching paths is fine, too, but it's not the same as more "emergent" or "exploratory" story games. I don't really care about the mechanics for these kinds of games. For example, even though I usually don't really like FPS games, I really enjoyed Titanfall 2 and its storytelling. Bad/slow mechanics can make this tricky. Some older JRPGs are a bit of a slog to get through, especially if they hadn't reached the point where they start making turn based combat somewhat interesting.

Community-focused Life Sim/City-Builder Games (Harvest Moon Clones, basically)

This is almost its own category, to be honest, but all of these kinds of games typically have some sort of story going on in the background.

Exploration

You could probably split this further into "exploration story games" and "exploration emergent-story games", but for some games in this category, it would be hard to distinguish between them. E.g., No Man's Sky technically has linear stories/quests in it, but most of the actual "story" aspect comes from emergent gameplay. Kenshi is completely on the "emergent" side, despite having a few scripted things based on character actions. Same with Elite: Dangerous, where player actions have zero impact on what's going on beyond elusive/grindy background simulation mechanics. I put Outer Worlds in here since although it does have a "set" story, the way you experience the story is completely nonlinear, and even someone's perception of what the story is about could change based on how they deciphered the different bits of the story. Breath of the Wild is nonlinear, but I don't know if I'd put it in this category or Story Rich. Same with Pokemon, which may be extremely linear (even in Scarlet/Violet) but has lots of emergent storytelling, especially if you do some sort of nuzlocke or other challenge.

Dunno if that makes sense for anyone except for me.