As any significant prize-giving event nears, you'll find an outcry to include fresh award types to acknowledge underappreciated efforts and delight the spirits of followers with niche passions.
My colleague made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. That would be fantastic. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist for pushing forward since similar to single-minded supporters, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand stands as crucial and important of all. Here's the proposal: We need a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; it remains highly personal, and typically generate discussions resulting in unclear classifications. It's understandable that movie academies don’t do it. However, it represents an unavoidable compromise for the industry of gaming, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of gaming accomplishments to gain proper attention, and for games of all stripes to receive proper recognition, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events presently include classifications covering Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these classifications successfully include numerous genres, making space possible accommodating various experiences.
Not so for puzzle games. No suitable classification appears to put them. Think about these recent excellent titles, all very different: structural challenges in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition from another release, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Where could they possibly go within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games published annually lacking appropriate categories in entertainment awards, except when they manage to fit for categories like Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested independent game categories.
- A renowned logic title received no recognition for anything during that awards season
- A different innovative game missed out during that ceremony
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment in 2021
- Just some logic titles scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Value of Brain-Teasers
Commonly they're small games, but the art behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles stand as most popular titles worldwide continuing this trend for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game challenges popular creative games for the title of best-selling game of all time; it’s also in the running as greatest title ever. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Logic titles wouldn't face this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, since numerous excellent numerous deserving experiences.
And to reiterate, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Logic title developers are working at the hard edge interactive creation, creating some of the purest expressions within interactive entertainment. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay decades.
