Each time a significant prize-giving event draws close, you'll find a demand for introducing fresh award types to honor overlooked contributions and delight the spirits of enthusiasts who have specialized interests.
My colleague has already made for a horror game category. It would be amazing. So would strategy board titles, representing someone's personal cause. However, I must insist if I try to elbow in front just as with other single-minded supporters, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand remains most pressing above others. Here's the proposal: It's essential to create a category for puzzle games.
Categorizing Game Types
Organizing artistic expressions defies precise measurement; it remains highly personal, and it will always spark debates concluding with vague boundaries. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. But it is a necessary evil for the industry of video games, that demonstrate such variety it's challenging to consider them one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, and to ensure all game types to receive proper recognition, genre categories are essential.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Prominent interactive entertainment events presently include award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Together, these classifications effectively encompass numerous genres, making space possible for numerous titles.
Not so for brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists to put them. Think about these recent excellent titles, all very different: building puzzles of one title, fast-paced pattern recognition from another release, engaging interpersonal challenges of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? Simply put, no category fits.
Acknowledgment Issues
Numerous examples exist of brilliant puzzle games launched regularly without proper recognition at major award shows, if they accidentally match classification types such as Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated for anything during that awards season
- Another imaginative release missed out in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience got ignored recently
- Limited numbers of brain-teasers scraped into niche award types
Significance of Puzzle Games
Commonly they're small games, but the art of the puzzle game is of massive significance. Well-known matching games count as the most-played games globally continuing this trend for many years.
The iconic tile-matching title challenges popular creative games for the title of most purchased experience; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational within interactive entertainment, and engaging with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Logic titles wouldn't face that issue. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences each ceremony simply — actually, with challenge, because you’d have to leave numerous deserving experiences.
To emphasize again, these are games without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers function at the challenging frontier interactive creation, developing some of the purest expressions of gaming itself. Just like cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay decades.