Each time a significant honors show approaches, you'll find a demand for the addition additional classifications to recognize unsung work and delight the passions of fans with niche passions.
A fellow writer has already made for a horror game category. It would be amazing. The same goes for board games, this being a dedicated supporter's campaign. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front since similar to blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument supporting my request stands as crucial and significant. This is the request: There should be a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions defies precise measurement; opinions vary greatly, and inevitably generate discussions concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why movie academies avoid this approach. Yet it remains an unavoidable compromise for the industry of gaming, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them as a single art form.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, and to ensure all game types to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards offer these genre categories for Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these award types effectively encompass many game types, and you can find room for numerous titles.
Different situation exists for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists to put them. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, showing diverse approaches: structural challenges from a specific release, intense tile-matching from another release, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Where could they possibly go within current classifications? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens outstanding logic titles released every year lacking appropriate categories in entertainment awards, except when they manage to fit classification types such as Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested Indie races.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition completely that year
- Another imaginative release was excluded that year
- A beloved organization game was overlooked recently
- Only a few logic titles scraped into independent or mobile categories
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent compact experiences, but the art of the puzzle game holds tremendous importance. Famous handheld logic titles rank among most engaged experiences worldwide and have been for many years.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with well-known building titles claiming status as most purchased experience; it also contends for best game of all time. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation with diverse game types.
The Solution and Justification
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave many worthy titles.
And to reiterate, these are games without proper classification at major gaming awards. Logic title developers operate at the challenging frontier of video game design, creating some of most fundamental forms of gaming itself. Similar to movie stunt professionals, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
