Each time a prominent prize-giving event draws close, you'll find an outcry to include of new categories to honor overlooked contributions and fill the spirits of followers who have specialized interests.
My colleague made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are board games, which is someone's personal cause. However, I must insist when I prioritize because like all single-minded supporters, I possess a compelling case supporting my request remains most pressing and important of all. Here's the proposal: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; opinions vary greatly, and typically start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. It's understandable that cinema institutions don’t do it. Yet it remains an unavoidable compromise within the realm of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse it's challenging to consider them a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of achievement in video games to receive acknowledgment, and to ensure all game types to have a chance for representation, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these genre categories for Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these classifications effectively encompass a lot of ground, making space possible for numerous titles.
Not so for puzzle games. There’s simply nowhere for their placement. Consider three of this year’s best games, all very different: building puzzles from a specific release, fast-paced pattern recognition in a different title, thought-provoking social scenarios in another game. Which classification works within current classifications? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
There are dozens excellent brain-teasers launched regularly without proper recognition in entertainment awards, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.
- One classic puzzle game got overlooked for anything during that awards season
- A different innovative game was excluded that year
- A beloved organization game was overlooked in 2021
- Limited numbers of puzzle games managed to sneak into small studio or handheld classifications
Value of Brain-Teasers
These are often compact experiences, however the design in brain-teasers holds tremendous importance. Famous handheld logic titles rank among most engaged experiences in the world and have been for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game rivals famous sandbox experiences for the title of most purchased experience; it also contends for best game of all time. Logic titles represent cornerstones within interactive entertainment, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Logic titles wouldn't face such difficulty. One could readily select multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
To emphasize again, these are games lacking appropriate categories at major gaming awards. Logic title developers are working at the challenging frontier of video game design, creating some of the purest expressions of gaming itself. Comparable to film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
