As any prominent awards ceremony approaches, you'll find an outcry to include fresh award types to recognize overlooked contributions and satisfy the hearts of fans with niche passions.
Another commentator has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. The same goes for board games, this being a dedicated supporter's campaign. However, I must insist if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification backing this proposal stands as crucial and significant. This is the request: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Categorizing Game Types
Categorizing art by genre defies precise measurement; it’s very subjective, and typically generate discussions and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. However, it represents an essential concession for the industry of interactive entertainment, that demonstrate such variety it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, specific award classifications remain vital.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events currently feature award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these six categories actually cover a lot of ground, allowing placement for most games within them.
Different situation exists for logic-based experiences. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Consider three of recent excellent titles, showing diverse approaches: structural challenges in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? Nowhere, that’s where.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist of brilliant puzzle games launched regularly that have no home during gaming ceremonies, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition completely in 2014
- Another imaginative release received no nominations in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience was overlooked recently
- Limited numbers of brain-teasers barely qualified for niche award types
Significance of Puzzle Games
Frequently they represent small games, yet the craft of the puzzle game carries substantial weight. Iconic mobile puzzle games rank among most engaged experiences in the world and have been for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience competes with popular creative games competing to become most purchased experience; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Logic titles represent cornerstones within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation with diverse game types.
The Solution and Justification
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter that issue. One could readily select a field of five interesting, varied, worthy titles each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these represent titles lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers operate at the demanding boundary game development, producing among the purest expressions of gaming itself. Just like film action specialists, they warrant appreciation. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.
