Each time a prominent prize-giving event nears, there’s always a clamor for introducing fresh award types to acknowledge unsung work and satisfy the hearts of fans with niche passions.
My colleague made the case supporting a scary games classification. That would be fantastic. So would strategy board titles, which is a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist when I prioritize just as with other blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal remains most pressing and significant. The demand is this: We need a category for puzzle games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and it will always spark debates and end in fuzzy definitions. There’s a reason movie academies avoid this approach. However, it represents an essential concession for the industry of video games, that demonstrate such variety it's challenging to consider them one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of achievement in video games to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
The major gaming awards currently feature award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these six categories effectively encompass numerous genres, and you can find room for most games within them.
Not so for logic-based experiences. No suitable classification appears for their placement. Think about these recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: the architectural riddles of one title, intense tile-matching from another release, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. Which classification works between these six categories? Simply put, no category fits.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist excellent brain-teasers released every year lacking appropriate categories in entertainment awards, except when they manage to fit classification types such as Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, and the highly challenging independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked in any category that year
- Another creative title received no nominations that year
- Well-received sorting experience was overlooked that year
- Limited numbers of logic titles scraped into niche award types
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent small games, yet the craft of the puzzle game is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as the most-played games in the world maintaining this status for an extended period.
The famous puzzle experience competes with famous sandbox experiences competing to become best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes for best game of all time. Logic titles represent cornerstones to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter that issue. You could fill multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude numerous deserving experiences.
To emphasize again, these are games lacking appropriate categories in important events. Logic title developers operate at the hard edge game development, creating some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay decades.
