Each time a significant honors show approaches, there’s always an outcry for the addition additional classifications to honor underappreciated efforts and delight the passions of fans dedicated to specific genres.
My colleague has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. That would rule. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being a passionate advocate's mission. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification backing this proposal remains most pressing and significant. The demand is this: It's essential to create an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and inevitably start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that cinema institutions steer clear of genre categories. But it is an essential concession within the realm of interactive entertainment, showing incredible range they hardly constitute one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of gaming accomplishments to receive acknowledgment, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events presently include award types recognizing Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these award types effectively encompass many game types, making space possible accommodating various experiences.
This doesn't apply to puzzle games. There’s simply nowhere for their placement. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, each quite distinct: structural challenges from a specific release, intense tile-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. Which classification works between these six categories? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist outstanding logic titles published annually without proper recognition at major award shows, unless they happen to qualify award groups including Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested independent game categories.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated in any category that year
- Another imaginative release received no nominations during that ceremony
- Well-received sorting experience was overlooked that year
- Limited numbers of puzzle games scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
These are often compact experiences, but the art in brain-teasers is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as most engaged experiences worldwide and have been for an extended period.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with famous sandbox experiences for the title of most purchased experience; it additionally competes as greatest title ever. Logic titles represent cornerstones for gaming as medium, and engaging with diverse game types.
The Solution and Justification
Logic titles wouldn't face this problem. One could readily select multiple candidates with fascinating, diverse, deserving games annually without trouble — or rather, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave many worthy titles.
To emphasize again, these are games that otherwise have no home at major gaming awards. Logic title developers are working at the challenging frontier game development, developing some of essential manifestations within interactive entertainment. Just like cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. Don't make them wait decades.
