As any prominent awards ceremony approaches, you'll find a demand for the addition of new categories to acknowledge unsung work and delight the passions of followers with niche passions.
Another commentator made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. The same goes for tabletop games, which is a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification backing this proposal remains most pressing above others. Here's the proposal: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Categorizing Game Types
Classifying creative works is not a science; it remains highly personal, and inevitably spark debates and end in fuzzy definitions. It's understandable that film award organizations avoid this approach. But it is an essential concession for the industry of gaming, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to have a chance for representation, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards presently include award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Together, these classifications successfully include many game types, making space possible accommodating various experiences.
Not so for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists to put them. Consider three of recent excellent titles, all very different: building puzzles from a specific release, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, engaging interpersonal challenges from additional release. Which classification works within current classifications? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens excellent brain-teasers published annually lacking appropriate categories during gaming ceremonies, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition for anything that year
- Another imaginative release received no nominations that year
- A beloved organization game received no acknowledgment that year
- Limited numbers of brain-teasers scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
Commonly they're compact experiences, but the art behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Iconic mobile puzzle games stand as most popular titles in the world maintaining this status for an extended period.
The famous puzzle experience challenges popular creative games for the title of highest-selling title ever; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks for gaming as medium, and engaging with almost every other genre.
The Solution and Justification
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate five nominees interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude numerous deserving experiences.
To emphasize again, these represent titles that otherwise have no home at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers operate at the hard edge game development, developing some of the purest expressions of gaming itself. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay generations.
