Each time a major awards ceremony nears, you'll find a demand for the addition additional classifications to honor overlooked contributions and fill the passions of enthusiasts dedicated to specific genres.
A fellow writer has already made for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. Equally deserving are strategy board titles, representing a dedicated supporter's campaign. However, I must insist for pushing forward because like all blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification backing this proposal remains most pressing and important of all. This is the request: We need a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Categorizing art by genre defies precise measurement; it remains highly personal, and typically generate discussions resulting in unclear classifications. There’s a reason film award organizations steer clear of genre categories. But it is a necessary evil for the industry of gaming, showing incredible range they barely qualify as a single art form.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to receive acknowledgment, and to ensure all game types to have a chance for representation, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these genre categories for Action, Adventure-action titles, RPG experiences, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these six categories actually cover numerous genres, allowing placement accommodating various experiences.
Different situation exists for logic-based experiences. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Think about these recent excellent titles, showing diverse approaches: building puzzles in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles in another game. What category would fit them among existing types? Simply put, no category fits.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist excellent brain-teasers published annually that have no home in entertainment awards, unless they happen to qualify for categories like Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested Indie races.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated in any category that year
- A different innovative game missed out that year
- Popular arranging title was overlooked recently
- Just some brain-teasers scraped into independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
Commonly they're compact experiences, but the art of the puzzle game carries substantial weight. Well-known matching games count as most popular titles worldwide continuing this trend for over a decade.
The iconic tile-matching title challenges well-known building titles competing to become most purchased experience; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks to the art of video games, while interacting with almost every other genre.
The Solution and Justification
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five engaging, different, qualified experiences annually without trouble — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude numerous deserving experiences.
Restating the point, these represent titles that otherwise have no home during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers are working at the hard edge interactive creation, producing among essential manifestations of the video game form. Comparable to movie stunt professionals, they warrant appreciation. We shouldn't delay decades.
