Each time a significant awards ceremony approaches, you'll find an outcry for introducing additional classifications to recognize unsung work and delight the spirits of fans who have specialized interests.
A fellow writer has already made for a horror game category. It would be amazing. So would tabletop games, representing a passionate advocate's mission. Yet I need to apologize in advance when I prioritize just as with other blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification for why my demand stands as crucial and important of all. The demand is this: It's essential to create a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and typically start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why film award organizations steer clear of genre categories. However, it represents a necessary evil in the world of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For the full spectrum of gaming accomplishments to gain proper attention, and for games of all stripes to have a chance for representation, genre categories are essential.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards currently feature award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these classifications successfully include numerous genres, and you can find room for numerous titles.
This doesn't apply to brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists to put them. Consider three of this year’s best games, all very different: structural challenges of one title, intense tile-matching from another release, engaging interpersonal challenges from additional release. What category would fit them between these six categories? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Recognition Challenges
There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games released every year lacking appropriate categories during gaming ceremonies, except when they manage to fit award groups including Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive Indie races.
- A renowned logic title wasn’t nominated in any category that year
- Another creative title missed out in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment in 2021
- Only a few logic titles scraped into independent or mobile categories
Importance of Logic Titles
These are often compact experiences, yet the craft behind logic titles is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as most popular titles globally and have been for over a decade.
The legendary block-stacking game competes with famous sandbox experiences competing to become most purchased experience; it also contends for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
Proposal and Rationale
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter such difficulty. You could fill multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences every year with ease — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these represent titles without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators are working at the challenging frontier interactive creation, developing some of essential manifestations of the video game form. Similar to movie stunt professionals, they deserve recognition. Don't make them wait generations.
