Whenever a prominent awards ceremony draws close, you'll find a demand for the addition fresh award types to acknowledge underappreciated efforts and satisfy the hearts of fans with niche passions.
Another commentator has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. The same goes for tabletop games, representing someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me for pushing forward since similar to dedicated enthusiasts, there's a strong justification backing this proposal remains most pressing and important of all. Here's the proposal: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Classifying creative works isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and typically start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. There’s a reason film award organizations avoid this approach. But it is an essential concession for the industry of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse they barely qualify one unified medium.
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
The major gaming awards offer these award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, RPG experiences, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Together, these six categories successfully include a lot of ground, allowing placement for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to brain-teasing titles. No suitable classification appears to accommodate them. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, showing diverse approaches: the architectural riddles of one title, fast-paced pattern recognition in a different title, thought-provoking social scenarios from additional release. Which classification works between these six categories? Simply put, no category fits.
Recognition Challenges
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers launched regularly without proper recognition at major award shows, except when they manage to fit classification types such as Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging independent game categories.
- One classic puzzle game wasn’t nominated for anything during that awards season
- Another creative title missed out during that ceremony
- A beloved organization game got ignored that year
- Limited numbers of puzzle games managed to sneak into niche award types
Importance of Logic Titles
Commonly they're compact experiences, however the design behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Well-known matching games count as most popular titles in the world and have been for many years.
The iconic tile-matching title rivals well-known building titles for the title of most purchased experience; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Logic titles represent cornerstones within interactive entertainment, while interacting with almost every other genre.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Logic titles wouldn't face this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave so many good games out.
Restating the point, these represent titles without proper classification at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers are working at the demanding boundary game development, creating some of the purest expressions of gaming itself. Just like film action specialists, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
