As any major awards ceremony nears, you'll find a demand to include of new categories to acknowledge unsung work and delight the passions of enthusiasts with niche passions.
A fellow writer made the case for a horror game category. It would be amazing. The same goes for tabletop games, representing someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me for pushing forward since similar to blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand remains most pressing and significant. The demand is this: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; it’s very subjective, and inevitably start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why movie academies steer clear of genre categories. Yet it remains an essential concession for the industry of gaming, that demonstrate such variety they hardly constitute as a single art form.
For the full spectrum of gaming accomplishments to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Present Award Structure
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these classifications covering Action, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these six categories actually cover a lot of ground, and you can find room for numerous titles.
Not so for brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, all very different: structural challenges of one title, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. Where could they possibly go between these six categories? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers released every year lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, unless they happen to qualify award groups including Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition for anything during that awards season
- Another imaginative release was excluded that year
- Popular arranging title got ignored in 2021
- Just some brain-teasers managed to sneak into small studio or handheld classifications
Significance of Puzzle Games
Frequently they represent compact experiences, yet the craft of the puzzle game holds tremendous importance. Iconic mobile puzzle games stand as most popular titles worldwide maintaining this status for many years.
The iconic tile-matching title rivals popular creative games for the title of most purchased experience; it also contends for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks to the art of video games, while interacting with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences annually without trouble — actually, with challenge, since numerous excellent many worthy titles.
Restating the point, these are games without proper classification at major gaming awards. Brain-teaser creators are working at the hard edge of video game design, developing some of most fundamental forms of gaming itself. Similar to film action specialists, they deserve recognition. Don't make them wait generations.
