As any significant awards ceremony nears, one notices a demand to include fresh award types to honor unsung work and delight the passions of fans who have specialized interests.
A fellow writer 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 when I prioritize just as with other single-minded supporters, there's a strong justification for why my demand is the most urgent and significant. The demand is this: We need an award type for logic-based games.
Categorizing Game Types
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and inevitably start arguments resulting in unclear classifications. It's understandable that movie academies avoid this approach. But it is an unavoidable compromise for the industry of gaming, which are so diverse they barely qualify a single creative category.
For the full spectrum of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, and for games of all stripes to have a chance for representation, genre categories are essential.
Present Award Structure
The major gaming awards offer these classifications covering Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these award types successfully include many game types, and you can find room accommodating various experiences.
This doesn't apply to logic-based experiences. No suitable classification appears to accommodate them. Consider three of recent excellent titles, all very different: building puzzles from a specific release, intense tile-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. Which classification works within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens excellent brain-teasers published annually without proper recognition in entertainment awards, if they accidentally match award groups including Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition for anything that year
- Another imaginative release received no nominations that year
- A beloved organization game got ignored that year
- Limited numbers of brain-teasers scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent compact experiences, but the art in brain-teasers holds tremendous importance. Iconic mobile puzzle games count as the most-played games in the world maintaining this status for an extended period.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with famous sandbox experiences for the title of highest-selling title ever; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter such difficulty. You could fill multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
And to reiterate, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Logic title developers function at the demanding boundary game development, developing some of essential manifestations of the video game form. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. Don't make them wait decades.
