Whenever a major honors show nears, you'll find an outcry for introducing additional classifications to acknowledge overlooked contributions and satisfy the passions of fans dedicated to specific genres.
A fellow writer has already made for a horror game category. That would be fantastic. So would tabletop games, this being a passionate advocate's mission. However, I must insist when I prioritize just as with other blinkered fanatics, I have a cast-iron argument for why my demand is the most urgent and significant. This is the request: We need an award type for logic-based games.
The Genre Classification Challenge
Classifying creative works isn't exact; opinions vary greatly, and inevitably generate discussions and end in fuzzy definitions. This explains why movie academies don’t do it. Yet it remains a necessary evil for the industry of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse they barely qualify one unified medium.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to receive acknowledgment, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Existing Game Classification System
Leading game ceremonies currently feature genre categories for Action, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these six categories successfully include many game types, allowing placement for most games within them.
Not so for logic-based experiences. There’s simply nowhere to put them. Think about these this year’s best games, all very different: structural challenges from a specific release, intense tile-matching in a different title, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? Unfortunately, nowhere.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist excellent brain-teasers released every year without proper recognition in entertainment awards, except when they manage to fit classification types such as Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.
- A renowned logic title got overlooked completely in 2014
- Another imaginative release was excluded in 2019
- Well-received sorting experience was overlooked in 2021
- Only a few brain-teasers barely qualified for independent or mobile categories
Importance of Logic Titles
Frequently they represent modest productions, however the design behind logic titles holds tremendous importance. Well-known matching games rank among the most-played games worldwide maintaining this status for over a decade.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with well-known building titles competing to become most purchased experience; it also contends as greatest title ever. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks for gaming as medium, and they are in conversation with almost every other genre.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter that issue. You could fill five nominees engaging, different, qualified experiences annually without trouble — perhaps, with difficulty, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
To emphasize again, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Puzzle game makers operate at the challenging frontier of video game design, developing some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they deserve recognition. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.
