Whenever a prominent honors show nears, you'll find a demand for introducing additional classifications to honor underappreciated efforts and fill the passions of fans dedicated to specific genres.
Another commentator has already made for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front since similar to dedicated enthusiasts, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal stands as crucial above others. This is the request: We need an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Classifying creative works is not a science; it remains highly personal, and inevitably spark debates concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that movie academies don’t do it. Yet it remains a necessary evil within the realm of gaming, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, and to ensure all game types to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Existing Game Classification System
Leading game ceremonies offer these award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these classifications effectively encompass a lot of ground, making space possible for numerous titles.
Not so for puzzle games. No suitable classification appears for their placement. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: structural challenges from a specific release, intense tile-matching in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Recognition Challenges
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers launched regularly that have no home in entertainment awards, if they accidentally match for categories like Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- A renowned logic title wasn’t nominated completely in 2014
- Another creative title received no nominations that year
- Well-received sorting experience got ignored recently
- Just some brain-teasers scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
Commonly they're compact experiences, but the art in brain-teasers carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles rank among the most-played games globally and have been for an extended period.
The iconic tile-matching title challenges well-known building titles competing to become highest-selling title ever; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Logic titles represent cornerstones to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with diverse game types.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, given the need to exclude numerous deserving experiences.
Restating the point, these are games that otherwise have no home at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers operate at the challenging frontier interactive creation, creating some of most fundamental forms within interactive entertainment. Comparable to cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay decades.
