As any significant honors show nears, you'll find a clamor for introducing of new categories to acknowledge overlooked contributions and satisfy the hearts of fans dedicated to specific genres.
My colleague has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. It would be amazing. Equally deserving are strategy board titles, which is someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance for pushing forward because like all dedicated enthusiasts, there's a strong justification backing this proposal is the most urgent and important of all. This is the request: There should be an award type for logic-based games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; it’s very subjective, and inevitably start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. There’s a reason cinema institutions don’t do it. Yet it remains an essential concession for the industry of gaming, that demonstrate such variety they hardly constitute one unified medium.
To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, specific award classifications remain vital.
Current Gaming Award Categories
The major gaming awards offer these classifications covering Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, RPG experiences, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Together, these award types actually cover a lot of ground, making space possible for most games within them.
Not so for logic-based experiences. No suitable classification appears to accommodate them. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, showing diverse approaches: building puzzles in a particular game, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, thought-provoking social scenarios in another game. What category would fit them between these six categories? Nowhere, that’s where.
The Representation Problem
Numerous examples exist outstanding logic titles published annually without proper recognition in entertainment awards, unless they happen to qualify classification types such as Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the intensely contested Indie races.
- An iconic brain-teaser wasn’t nominated in any category during that awards season
- Another imaginative release missed out that year
- A beloved organization game received no acknowledgment that year
- Only a few puzzle games scraped into small studio or handheld classifications
Importance of Logic Titles
These are often small games, but the art in brain-teasers carries substantial weight. Iconic mobile puzzle games rank among most popular titles globally maintaining this status for over a decade.
The famous puzzle experience competes with famous sandbox experiences competing to become best-selling game of all time; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Logic titles represent cornerstones for gaming as medium, while interacting across multiple categories.
The Solution and Justification
Logic titles wouldn't face this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five engaging, different, qualified experiences each ceremony simply — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude many worthy titles.
Restating the point, these include experiences without proper classification during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators are working at the demanding boundary interactive creation, creating some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they deserve recognition. Let’s not keep them waiting decades.
