As any prominent honors show draws close, one notices a clamor for introducing of new categories to acknowledge underappreciated efforts and fill the spirits of fans with niche passions.
Another commentator made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are board games, representing someone's personal cause. However, I must insist for pushing forward just as with other blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand is the most urgent above others. This is the request: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Categorizing Game Types
Categorizing art by genre isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and inevitably start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why film award organizations don’t do it. But it is an unavoidable compromise for the industry of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of achievement in video games to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to receive proper recognition, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Leading game ceremonies offer these award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these award types effectively encompass numerous genres, and you can find room for most games within them.
Not so for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Think about these recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: the architectural riddles in a particular game, intense tile-matching from another release, thought-provoking social scenarios from additional release. Where could they possibly go between these six categories? Simply put, no category fits.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games published annually without proper recognition at major award shows, if they accidentally match classification types such as Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition in any category during that awards season
- A different innovative game was excluded in 2019
- Popular arranging title was overlooked recently
- Only a few puzzle games scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Significance of Puzzle Games
These are often compact experiences, yet the craft behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles count as most popular titles in the world maintaining this status for an extended period.
The iconic tile-matching title rivals popular creative games for the title of best-selling game of all time; it also contends for top gaming experience. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, and engaging with diverse game types.
The Solution and Justification
Puzzle games wouldn’t have such difficulty. One could readily select a field of five with fascinating, diverse, deserving games annually without trouble — or rather, with difficulty, since numerous excellent many worthy titles.
Restating the point, these are games lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers are working at the challenging frontier of video game design, producing among the purest expressions of gaming itself. Just like film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
