As any significant honors show draws close, you'll find a demand for the addition fresh award types to recognize underappreciated efforts and satisfy the spirits of enthusiasts with niche passions.
My colleague previously argued advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are tabletop games, this being someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand is the most urgent and important of all. The demand is this: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Classifying creative works isn't exact; opinions vary greatly, and typically spark debates resulting in unclear classifications. It's understandable that cinema institutions steer clear of genre categories. Yet it remains an essential concession within the realm of gaming, which are so diverse they barely qualify as a single art form.
For the full spectrum of achievement in video games to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to receive proper recognition, specific award classifications remain vital.
Existing Game Classification System
The major gaming awards offer these award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these award types actually cover a lot of ground, making space possible accommodating various experiences.
Different situation exists for brain-teasing titles. No suitable classification appears to accommodate them. Think about these outstanding current releases, all very different: building puzzles of one title, fast-paced pattern recognition from another release, thought-provoking social scenarios of a third title. Which classification works within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Recognition Challenges
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers published annually without proper recognition during gaming ceremonies, unless they happen to qualify classification types such as Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging independent game categories.
- One classic puzzle game got overlooked in any category in 2014
- Another imaginative release missed out that year
- Well-received sorting experience got ignored recently
- Just some logic titles barely qualified for independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
Frequently they represent small games, however the design of the puzzle game holds tremendous importance. Famous handheld logic titles rank among most engaged experiences in the world and have been for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience rivals popular creative games competing to become best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes as greatest title ever. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, while interacting across multiple categories.
Proposal and Rationale
Logic titles wouldn't face such difficulty. It would be easy to populate a field of five with fascinating, diverse, deserving games annually without trouble — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave numerous deserving experiences.
To emphasize again, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Brain-teaser creators operate at the hard edge game development, developing some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Comparable to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.
