Whenever a significant prize-giving event nears, you'll find an outcry to include fresh award types to honor unsung work and fill the hearts of enthusiasts dedicated to specific genres.
My colleague previously argued supporting a scary games classification. That would rule. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me if I try to elbow in front because like all blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification backing this proposal remains most pressing and significant. The demand is this: There should be a category for puzzle games.
Organizing Gaming Categories
Classifying creative works is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and typically spark debates concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that cinema institutions steer clear of genre categories. Yet it remains an essential concession in the world of interactive entertainment, showing incredible range they barely qualify one unified medium.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of gaming accomplishments to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.
Present Award Structure
Leading game ceremonies offer these award types recognizing Action, Adventure-action titles, RPG experiences, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these six categories successfully include a lot of ground, making space possible for most games within them.
This doesn't apply to brain-teasing titles. There’s simply nowhere for their placement. Consider three of this year’s best games, each quite distinct: building puzzles of one title, the pulse-pounding block-matching in a different title, engaging interpersonal challenges of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? 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 classification types such as Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the intensely contested Indie races.
- An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked in any category that year
- Another creative title missed out that year
- Well-received sorting experience received no acknowledgment in 2021
- Just some logic titles scraped into niche award types
Value of Brain-Teasers
These are often small games, but the art in brain-teasers is of massive significance. Iconic mobile puzzle games count as the most-played games globally maintaining this status for over a decade.
The iconic tile-matching title competes with popular creative games claiming status as most purchased experience; it also contends as greatest title ever. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, and engaging across multiple categories.
Recommendation and Reasoning
Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter this problem. It would be easy to populate a field of five with fascinating, diverse, deserving games annually without trouble — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
Restating the point, these are games without proper classification in important events. Brain-teaser creators are working at the challenging frontier game development, developing some of the purest expressions of the video game form. Comparable to film action specialists, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay generations.
