Tetris Didn't Triumph at The Game Awards — A New Category Might Solve This

As any significant honors show draws close, you'll find a demand to include additional classifications to recognize unsung work and satisfy the spirits of followers with niche passions.

Another commentator has already made for a horror game category. That would rule. Equally deserving are tabletop games, which is someone's personal cause. Yet I need to apologize in advance if I try to elbow in front just as with other dedicated enthusiasts, there's a strong justification supporting my request remains most pressing and significant. The demand is this: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.

Categorizing Game Types

Classifying creative works defies precise measurement; it remains highly personal, and typically start arguments concluding with vague boundaries. It's understandable that film award organizations avoid this approach. However, it represents an unavoidable compromise in the world of gaming, showing incredible range they hardly constitute a single creative category.

To recognize the complete range of gaming accomplishments to receive acknowledgment, while allowing diverse titles to receive proper recognition, specific award classifications remain vital.

Current Gaming Award Categories

Prominent interactive entertainment events presently include award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Adventure-action titles, Role-Playing, Fighting, Sim/Strategy, and Sports/Racing games. Collectively, these classifications successfully include many game types, making space possible accommodating various experiences.

This doesn't apply to puzzle games. There’s simply nowhere to put them. Examine these examples from this year’s best games, showing diverse approaches: building puzzles of one title, intense tile-matching of another game, and the sweetly sociological logic puzzles in another game. Which classification works among existing types? Nowhere, that’s where.

The Representation Problem

There are dozens of brilliant puzzle games launched regularly that have no home during gaming ceremonies, unless they happen to qualify award groups including Handheld titles, Virtual reality experiences, and the highly challenging independent game categories.

  • One classic puzzle game got overlooked for anything during that awards season
  • A different innovative game missed out in 2019
  • Popular arranging title received no acknowledgment recently
  • Limited numbers of puzzle games managed to sneak into independent or mobile categories

Importance of Logic Titles

These are often modest productions, however the design in brain-teasers holds tremendous importance. Well-known matching games stand as the most-played games worldwide maintaining this status for many years.

The famous puzzle experience challenges well-known building titles for the title of highest-selling title ever; it additionally competes for top gaming experience. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, while interacting across multiple categories.

The Solution and Justification

Brain-teasers wouldn't encounter such difficulty. One could readily select multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles each ceremony simply — perhaps, with difficulty, since numerous excellent so many good games out.

To emphasize again, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories in important events. Puzzle game makers are working at the demanding boundary game development, creating some of most fundamental forms of gaming itself. Similar to cinema stunt performers, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.

David Shaffer
David Shaffer

A seasoned journalist with over a decade of experience in tech reporting and digital media, specializing in emerging technologies and their societal impacts.