Each time a prominent awards ceremony approaches, there’s always an outcry for introducing fresh award types to honor overlooked contributions and satisfy the passions of followers with niche passions.
My colleague made the case for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. Equally deserving are strategy board titles, representing someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front since similar to blinkered fanatics, I possess a compelling case for why my demand stands as crucial and significant. This is the request: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Categorizing art by genre defies precise measurement; opinions vary greatly, and typically generate discussions resulting in unclear classifications. It's understandable that movie academies don’t do it. But it is an essential concession in the world of gaming, that demonstrate such variety they barely qualify one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Current Gaming Award Categories
The major gaming awards offer these genre categories for Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these award types effectively encompass many game types, making space possible for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to logic-based experiences. No appropriate category exists to accommodate them. Consider three of recent excellent titles, all very different: building puzzles from a specific release, intense tile-matching in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Where could they possibly go among existing types? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers launched regularly lacking appropriate categories during gaming ceremonies, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition in any category during that awards season
- Another creative title was excluded in 2019
- A beloved organization game received no acknowledgment in 2021
- Limited numbers of logic titles scraped into niche award types
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent modest productions, however the design behind logic titles is of massive significance. Iconic mobile puzzle games stand as most popular titles worldwide maintaining this status for an extended period.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with famous sandbox experiences for the title of highest-selling title ever; it also contends for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks within interactive entertainment, while interacting with almost every other genre.
The Solution and Justification
Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. One could readily select multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these represent titles that otherwise have no home during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers are working at the demanding boundary game development, developing some of essential manifestations of gaming itself. Just like film action specialists, they warrant appreciation. Let’s not keep them waiting 35 years.
