Whenever a significant honors show draws close, you'll find a clamor for the addition of new categories to acknowledge overlooked contributions and delight the hearts of enthusiasts with niche passions.
My colleague previously argued for a horror game category. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are board games, this being a passionate advocate's mission. But they will have to forgive me when I prioritize since similar to dedicated enthusiasts, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand remains most pressing and significant. Here's the proposal: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Classifying creative works is not a science; it’s very subjective, and typically start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why film award organizations steer clear of genre categories. However, it represents an unavoidable compromise for the industry of video games, showing incredible range they barely qualify as a single art form.
For the full spectrum of achievement in video games to be recognized, and for games of all stripes to receive proper recognition, genre categories are essential.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events currently feature award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these award types successfully include many game types, allowing placement for most games within them.
Different situation exists for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists to put them. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, all very different: the architectural riddles in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition in a different title, engaging interpersonal challenges from additional release. What category would fit them within current classifications? Nowhere, that’s where.
Recognition Challenges
There are dozens excellent brain-teasers released every year lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, unless they happen to qualify classification types such as Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked for anything in 2014
- A different innovative game missed out in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment that year
- Just some brain-teasers barely qualified for independent or mobile categories
Value of Brain-Teasers
These are often compact experiences, yet the craft of the puzzle game carries substantial weight. Well-known matching games count as most engaged experiences in the world maintaining this status for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game competes with popular creative games for the title of most purchased experience; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five engaging, different, qualified experiences each ceremony simply — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave many worthy titles.
And to reiterate, these represent titles that otherwise have no home during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers function at the demanding boundary of video game design, creating some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Similar to movie stunt professionals, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay decades.
