Whenever a prominent honors show draws close, there’s always an outcry for the addition fresh award types to recognize underappreciated efforts and satisfy the passions of followers who have specialized interests.
My colleague has already made for a horror game category. That would rule. The same goes for strategy board titles, which is a dedicated supporter's campaign. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front since similar to 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 classification for brain-teasing titles.
Categorizing Game Types
Categorizing art by genre is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and it will always start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why movie academies don’t do it. However, it represents an essential concession within the realm of gaming, showing incredible range they hardly constitute one unified medium.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Existing Game Classification System
The major gaming awards presently include award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these award types actually cover many game types, and you can find room for most games within them.
Not so for brain-teasing titles. There’s simply nowhere to put them. Think about these this year’s best games, each quite distinct: structural challenges in a particular game, the pulse-pounding block-matching in a different title, thought-provoking social scenarios of a third title. Where could they possibly go among existing types? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games released every year without proper recognition at major award shows, except when they manage to fit for categories like Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated in any category in 2014
- Another imaginative release missed out in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment recently
- Just some brain-teasers scraped into independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
Commonly they're small games, but the art in brain-teasers is of massive significance. Well-known matching games rank among the most-played games in the world and have been for over a decade.
The iconic tile-matching title challenges well-known building titles claiming status as most purchased experience; it additionally competes for best game of all time. Logic titles represent cornerstones for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences every year with ease — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
To emphasize again, these represent titles lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators function at the challenging frontier game development, producing among most fundamental forms of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they warrant appreciation. Don't make them wait generations.
