As any major honors show draws close, there’s always a clamor to include fresh award types to recognize underappreciated efforts and satisfy the spirits of enthusiasts with niche passions.
A fellow writer previously argued advocating for terror-themed awards. That would rule. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me for pushing forward because like all blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal stands as crucial and important of all. The demand is this: We need an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; opinions vary greatly, and it will always spark debates concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that film award organizations steer clear of genre categories. But it is a necessary evil for the industry of video games, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them as a single art form.
For the full spectrum of gaming accomplishments to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Leading game ceremonies currently feature award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these six categories successfully include many game types, allowing placement accommodating various experiences.
Different situation exists for brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists to put them. Examine these examples from outstanding current releases, all very different: building puzzles from a specific release, the pulse-pounding block-matching in a different title, engaging interpersonal challenges of a third title. What category would fit them between these six categories? Simply put, no category fits.
Recognition Challenges
There are dozens outstanding logic titles launched regularly lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, except when they manage to fit award groups including Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked in any category that year
- Another imaginative release was excluded in 2019
- A beloved organization game got ignored that year
- Just some brain-teasers barely qualified for niche award types
Value of Brain-Teasers
These are often compact experiences, yet the craft of the puzzle game carries substantial weight. Well-known matching games count as most engaged experiences in the world continuing this trend for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience challenges famous sandbox experiences claiming status as best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Puzzle games wouldn’t have such difficulty. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, since numerous excellent many worthy titles.
And to reiterate, these represent titles lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators are working at the challenging frontier of video game design, developing some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they warrant appreciation. Let’s not keep them waiting 35 years.