Each time a prominent honors show approaches, you'll find a clamor to include of new categories to recognize underappreciated efforts and delight the passions of fans who have specialized interests.
My colleague previously argued for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. Equally deserving are tabletop games, which is a dedicated supporter's campaign. But they will have to forgive me if I try to elbow in front just as with other dedicated enthusiasts, there's a strong justification supporting my request remains most pressing above others. The demand is this: It's essential to create a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; opinions vary greatly, and it will always generate discussions concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that film award organizations avoid this approach. However, it represents an essential concession in the world of video games, which are so diverse they hardly constitute a single creative category.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards presently include award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, RPG experiences, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these classifications successfully include numerous genres, making space possible for numerous titles.
This doesn't apply to logic-based experiences. There’s simply nowhere to put them. Consider three of outstanding current releases, showing diverse approaches: structural challenges 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? Nowhere, that’s where.
Acknowledgment Issues
There are dozens excellent brain-teasers launched regularly lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, unless they happen to qualify classification types such as Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated completely that year
- Another creative title missed out during that ceremony
- A beloved organization game got ignored in 2021
- Limited numbers of brain-teasers scraped into independent or mobile categories
Value of Brain-Teasers
Commonly they're compact experiences, however the design of the puzzle game is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as the most-played games worldwide maintaining this status for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game rivals well-known building titles claiming status as highest-selling title ever; it also contends for best game of all time. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
The Solution and Justification
Logic titles wouldn't face that issue. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these include experiences without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Logic title developers are working at the hard edge of video game design, developing some of essential manifestations of gaming itself. Just like movie stunt professionals, they merit acknowledgment. Don't make them wait decades.
