Each time a prominent honors show approaches, you'll find a clamor for introducing fresh award types to honor underappreciated efforts and fill the passions of fans who have specialized interests.
My colleague made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. That would rule. Equally deserving are strategy board titles, representing someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me for pushing forward just as with other blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand remains most pressing and important of all. The demand is this: There should be an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Classifying creative works is not a science; it’s very subjective, and typically spark debates resulting in unclear classifications. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. But it is an essential concession for the industry of interactive entertainment, showing incredible range they hardly constitute one unified medium.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of achievement in video games to receive acknowledgment, and to ensure all game types to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Existing Game Classification System
Leading game ceremonies currently feature genre categories for Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these award types successfully include a lot of ground, and you can find room for numerous titles.
This doesn't apply to puzzle games. No appropriate category exists to accommodate them. Think about these this year’s best games, all very different: the architectural riddles of one title, fast-paced pattern recognition from another release, engaging interpersonal challenges from additional release. What category would fit them within current classifications? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist excellent brain-teasers launched regularly that have no home at major award shows, if they accidentally match for categories like Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive Indie races.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked in any category during that awards season
- A different innovative game was excluded during that ceremony
- A beloved organization game got ignored recently
- Only a few logic titles barely qualified for small studio or handheld classifications
Value of Brain-Teasers
These are often compact experiences, however the design of the puzzle game is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as the most-played games globally maintaining this status for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience challenges famous sandbox experiences for the title of highest-selling title ever; it additionally competes as greatest title ever. Logic titles represent cornerstones 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 multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
Restating the point, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers operate at the demanding boundary of video game design, creating some of the purest expressions within interactive entertainment. Just like film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.
