As any prominent honors show nears, one notices a clamor for introducing fresh award types to honor underappreciated efforts and delight the passions of enthusiasts who have specialized interests.
My colleague previously argued for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. So would strategy board titles, which is someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me if I try to elbow in front just as with other blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification supporting my request remains most pressing above others. This is the request: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Categorizing Game Types
Organizing artistic expressions defies precise measurement; it remains highly personal, and typically spark debates concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why movie academies avoid this approach. Yet it remains a necessary evil in the world of gaming, showing incredible range they hardly constitute a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of achievement in video games to be recognized, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these six categories successfully include many game types, making space possible for most games within them.
Different situation exists for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists to accommodate them. Think about these recent excellent titles, showing diverse approaches: building puzzles from a specific release, intense tile-matching in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles in another game. What category would fit them between these six categories? Nowhere, that’s where.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist of brilliant puzzle games launched regularly lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, except when they manage to fit award groups including Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging Indie races.
- A renowned logic title wasn’t nominated completely during that awards season
- Another creative title was excluded during that ceremony
- A beloved organization game was overlooked recently
- Just some brain-teasers scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
Commonly they're small games, but the art of the puzzle game holds tremendous importance. Iconic mobile puzzle games stand as the most-played games globally maintaining this status for many years.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with well-known building titles for the title of most purchased experience; it also contends as greatest title ever. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks within interactive entertainment, and engaging with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter that issue. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
Restating the point, these represent titles without proper classification at major gaming awards. Logic title developers function at the hard edge of video game design, producing among most fundamental forms of gaming itself. Comparable to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
