Each time a major honors show nears, there’s always a demand to include of new categories to acknowledge underappreciated efforts and fill the spirits of fans with niche passions.
A fellow writer made the case for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. Equally deserving are board games, which is someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance for pushing forward because like all blinkered fanatics, I possess a compelling case for why my demand is the most urgent and important of all. This is the request: We need a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Categorizing art by genre defies precise measurement; it remains highly personal, and it will always spark debates and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why film award organizations avoid this approach. Yet it remains a necessary evil for the industry of video games, which are so diverse they barely qualify a single creative category.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, and for games of all stripes to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Current Gaming Award Categories
Leading game ceremonies offer these award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these award types actually cover a lot of ground, and you can find room for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, showing diverse approaches: building puzzles from a specific release, the pulse-pounding block-matching in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Where could they possibly go between these six categories? Simply put, no category fits.
The Representation Problem
Many instances occur outstanding logic titles released every year that have no home at major award shows, except when they manage to fit for categories like Mobile Game, VR/AR Game, and the highly challenging independent game categories.
- A renowned logic title wasn’t nominated completely during that awards season
- Another creative title was excluded that year
- Popular arranging title was overlooked recently
- Only a few brain-teasers managed to sneak into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
These are often modest productions, yet the craft of the puzzle game carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles count as the most-played games in the world and have been for many years.
The legendary block-stacking game competes with well-known building titles competing to become best-selling game of all time; it also contends for best game of all time. 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
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter such difficulty. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates engaging, different, qualified experiences annually without trouble — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
To emphasize again, these represent titles without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators are working at the demanding boundary game development, developing some of most fundamental forms of the video game form. Just like cinema stunt performers, they warrant appreciation. We shouldn't delay generations.
