Tetris Wouldn't Triumph at The Game Awards — An Additional Classification Might Solve This

Whenever a significant awards ceremony nears, there’s always a demand for the addition fresh award types to recognize unsung work and delight the passions of followers who have specialized interests.

My colleague has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. That would be fantastic. The same goes for strategy board titles, this being someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance when I prioritize just as with other blinkered fanatics, there's a strong justification for why my demand is the most urgent and significant. This is the request: We need a category for puzzle games.

Organizing Gaming Categories

Organizing artistic expressions isn't exact; it remains highly personal, and it will always start arguments resulting in unclear classifications. There’s a reason film award organizations don’t do it. But it is an essential concession for the industry of interactive entertainment, which are so diverse they barely qualify one unified medium.

To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to have a chance for representation, specific award classifications remain vital.

Existing Game Classification System

Leading game ceremonies currently feature award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Between them, these award types actually cover numerous genres, and you can find room for numerous titles.

This doesn't apply to logic-based experiences. No suitable classification appears for their placement. Think about these recent excellent titles, each quite distinct: the architectural riddles in a particular game, the pulse-pounding block-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles from additional release. What category would fit them between these six categories? Nowhere, that’s where.

Acknowledgment Issues

There are dozens excellent brain-teasers launched regularly without proper recognition at major award shows, if they accidentally match award groups including Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, or the extremely competitive independent game categories.

  • An iconic brain-teaser received no recognition in any category during that awards season
  • Another creative title was excluded during that ceremony
  • Popular arranging title was overlooked recently
  • Only a few brain-teasers scraped into small studio or handheld classifications

Significance of Puzzle Games

Commonly they're modest productions, but the art in brain-teasers holds tremendous importance. Iconic mobile puzzle games rank among most engaged experiences in the world and have been for over a decade.

The famous puzzle experience rivals popular creative games 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 engaging across multiple categories.

Proposal and Rationale

Logic titles wouldn't face this problem. You could fill multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles each ceremony simply — perhaps, with difficulty, because you’d have to leave many worthy titles.

Restating the point, these represent titles that otherwise have no home in important events. Logic title developers function at the challenging frontier of video game design, developing some of essential manifestations of the video game form. Comparable to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.

Joshua Reid
Joshua Reid

A technology strategist with over a decade of experience in digital innovation and startup ecosystems across Europe.