As any prominent honors show draws close, you'll find an outcry to include of new categories to acknowledge overlooked contributions and delight the passions of fans who have specialized interests.
My colleague made the case for a horror game category. It would be amazing. So would tabletop games, representing a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist when I prioritize since similar to blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal is the most urgent and important of all. This is the request: We need an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; it remains highly personal, and inevitably start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. There’s a reason film award organizations steer clear of genre categories. Yet it remains an unavoidable compromise in the world of video games, that demonstrate such variety they barely qualify a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of achievement in video games to receive acknowledgment, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these classifications covering Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these six categories effectively encompass numerous genres, making space possible for most games within them.
Different situation exists for brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Consider three of outstanding current releases, all very different: structural challenges of one title, fast-paced pattern recognition in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. What category would fit them within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist outstanding logic titles released every year lacking appropriate categories during gaming ceremonies, except when they manage to fit for categories like Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked completely that year
- A different innovative game received no nominations during that ceremony
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment recently
- Just some puzzle games barely qualified for niche award types
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent compact experiences, yet the craft in brain-teasers is of massive significance. Iconic mobile puzzle games rank among the most-played games in the world and have been for an extended period.
The famous puzzle experience challenges famous sandbox experiences competing to become highest-selling title ever; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
The Solution and Justification
Puzzle games wouldn’t have such difficulty. It would be easy to populate five nominees with fascinating, diverse, deserving games each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave numerous deserving experiences.
To emphasize again, these represent titles without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers function at the hard edge of video game design, creating some of the purest expressions of gaming itself. Comparable to cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay decades.
