As any prominent honors show draws close, there’s always a clamor to include fresh award types to recognize underappreciated efforts and delight the passions of followers dedicated to specific genres.
My colleague previously argued advocating for terror-themed awards. That would rule. The same goes for tabletop games, this being a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist when I prioritize since similar to single-minded supporters, I have a cast-iron argument backing this proposal stands as crucial and significant. The demand is this: There should be a classification for brain-teasing titles.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Categorizing art by genre isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and typically generate discussions and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why cinema institutions avoid this approach. But it is an essential concession in the world of gaming, that demonstrate such variety it's challenging to consider them one unified medium.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, and for games of all stripes to have a chance for representation, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these classifications actually cover a lot of ground, making space possible for numerous titles.
Different situation exists for brain-teasing titles. No appropriate category exists to accommodate them. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, all very different: structural challenges in a particular game, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. Where could they possibly go between these six categories? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist of brilliant puzzle games published annually that have no home in entertainment awards, except when they manage to fit for categories like Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.
- One classic puzzle game received no recognition for anything that year
- A different innovative game missed out that year
- A beloved organization game was overlooked in 2021
- Limited numbers of 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 holds tremendous importance. Well-known matching games stand as most engaged experiences worldwide and have been for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience competes with famous sandbox experiences for the title of highest-selling title ever; it’s also in the running for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational to the art of video games, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — actually, with challenge, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
To emphasize again, these include experiences without proper classification at major gaming awards. Brain-teaser creators function at the challenging frontier game development, creating some of the purest expressions within interactive entertainment. Just like film action specialists, they deserve recognition. Let’s not keep them waiting 35 years.
