Whenever a prominent prize-giving event nears, you'll find a clamor to include additional classifications to acknowledge underappreciated efforts and fill the spirits of followers with niche passions.
My colleague has already made for a horror game category. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are strategy board titles, this being someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me when I prioritize because like all blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument supporting my request remains most pressing and significant. This is the request: It's essential to create a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and inevitably generate discussions resulting in unclear classifications. There’s a reason film award organizations avoid this approach. However, it represents a necessary evil for the industry of gaming, which are so diverse they barely qualify as a single art form.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, and to ensure all game types to compete fairly, specific award classifications remain vital.
Current Gaming Award Categories
The major gaming awards presently include genre categories for Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these six categories successfully include many game types, and you can find room for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to logic-based experiences. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Consider three of this year’s best games, all very different: building puzzles in a particular game, intense tile-matching from another release, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Which classification works among existing types? Unfortunately, nowhere.
Acknowledgment Issues
There are dozens outstanding logic titles released every year lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, unless they happen to qualify award groups including Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.
- A renowned logic title received no recognition for anything in 2014
- Another creative title missed out during that ceremony
- Well-received sorting experience got ignored that year
- Just some brain-teasers barely qualified for independent or mobile categories
Significance of Puzzle Games
Frequently they represent modest productions, but the art behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles rank among most popular titles globally and have been for an extended period.
The legendary block-stacking game challenges famous sandbox experiences claiming status as best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks to the art of video games, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Proposal and Rationale
Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five with fascinating, diverse, deserving games every year with ease — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave so many good games out.
And to reiterate, these represent titles without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers function at the challenging frontier game development, creating some of most fundamental forms of gaming itself. Similar to film action specialists, they deserve recognition. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
