As any prominent prize-giving event draws close, there’s always an outcry to include of new categories to acknowledge overlooked contributions and delight the passions of followers with niche passions.
My colleague previously argued advocating for terror-themed awards. That would be fantastic. Equally deserving are board games, which is someone's personal cause. However, I must insist when I prioritize just as with other blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal is the most urgent and important of all. The demand is this: We need a category for puzzle games.
Categorizing Game Types
Organizing artistic expressions defies precise measurement; it’s very subjective, and it will always spark debates 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 hardly constitute one unified medium.
For the full spectrum of interactive entertainment excellence to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these genre categories for Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Together, these classifications successfully include numerous genres, and you can find room for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, all very different: structural challenges in a particular game, intense tile-matching from another release, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Which classification works within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Recognition Challenges
Many instances occur of brilliant puzzle games released every year that have no home during gaming ceremonies, if they accidentally match for categories like Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, or the intensely contested independent game categories.
- One classic puzzle game got overlooked completely during that awards season
- Another imaginative release missed out that year
- Popular arranging title got ignored recently
- Only a few logic titles managed to sneak into independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
Commonly they're modest productions, however the design behind logic titles is of massive significance. Famous handheld logic titles stand as the most-played games in the world maintaining this status for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game challenges famous sandbox experiences for the title of best-selling game of all time; it also contends as greatest title ever. Puzzle games are foundational within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation with diverse game types.
The Solution and Justification
Logic titles wouldn't face such difficulty. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games each ceremony simply — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these are games that otherwise have no home during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers operate at the demanding boundary of video game design, producing among the purest expressions of gaming itself. Comparable to film action specialists, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay decades.
