As any significant awards ceremony approaches, you'll find a demand for the addition additional classifications to honor overlooked contributions and satisfy the hearts of followers dedicated to specific genres.
A fellow writer has already made supporting a scary games classification. That would rule. The same goes for board games, representing someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument supporting my request is the most urgent and important of all. This is the request: There should be a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and typically start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. Yet it remains a necessary evil in the world of gaming, that demonstrate such variety they barely qualify one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of achievement in video games to gain proper attention, and to ensure all game types to receive proper recognition, specific award classifications remain vital.
Present Award Structure
Leading game ceremonies presently include genre categories for Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Together, these six categories successfully include many game types, making space possible for most games within them.
Not so for logic-based experiences. No suitable classification appears to put them. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: building puzzles from a specific release, fast-paced pattern recognition from another release, thought-provoking social scenarios in another game. Which classification works within current classifications? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Acknowledgment Issues
Many instances occur outstanding logic titles released every year that have no home during gaming ceremonies, if they accidentally match classification types such as Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
- One classic puzzle game wasn’t nominated for anything in 2014
- Another imaginative release received no nominations that year
- Well-received sorting experience got ignored that year
- Just some logic titles managed to sneak into niche award types
Value of Brain-Teasers
Frequently they represent modest productions, however the design in brain-teasers holds tremendous importance. Well-known matching games stand as the most-played games in the world maintaining this status for over a decade.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with popular creative games competing to become best-selling game of all time; it also contends as greatest title ever. Puzzle games are foundational to the art of video games, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
The Solution and Justification
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter such difficulty. It would be easy to populate a field of five interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — actually, with challenge, since numerous excellent so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these are games that otherwise have no home at major gaming awards. Puzzle game makers operate at the hard edge game development, producing among most fundamental forms within interactive entertainment. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. Let’s not keep them waiting 35 years.
