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As any prominent awards ceremony draws close, you'll find an outcry for the addition fresh award types to honor underappreciated efforts and satisfy the hearts of enthusiasts dedicated to specific genres.

My colleague made the case advocating for terror-themed awards. That would be fantastic. The same goes for tabletop games, which is a passionate advocate's mission. But they will have to forgive me when I prioritize because like all single-minded supporters, I possess a compelling case backing this proposal is the most urgent and important of all. This is the request: It's essential to create a classification for brain-teasing titles.

The Genre Classification Challenge

Organizing artistic expressions is not a science; it remains highly personal, and inevitably start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. It's understandable that cinema institutions don’t do it. Yet it remains a necessary evil in the world of interactive entertainment, showing incredible range they hardly constitute a single creative category.

To recognize the complete range of interactive entertainment excellence to be recognized, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, classification by type becomes crucial.

Present Award Structure

Leading game ceremonies offer these genre categories for Action, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Combat games, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Collectively, these classifications effectively encompass a lot of ground, allowing placement for most games within them.

Different situation exists for brain-teasing titles. There’s simply nowhere to accommodate them. Examine these examples from recent excellent titles, showing diverse approaches: the architectural riddles in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition of another game, engaging interpersonal challenges of a third title. What category would fit them among existing types? Nowhere, that’s where.

Recognition Challenges

There are dozens excellent brain-teasers published annually that have no home during gaming ceremonies, except when they manage to fit award groups including Handheld titles, VR/AR Game, or the extremely competitive small studio competitions.

• An iconic brain-teaser got overlooked in any category in 2014
• Another creative title received no nominations in 2019
• A beloved organization game was overlooked in 2021
• Just some puzzle games scraped into small studio or handheld classifications

Importance of Logic Titles

These are often small games, however the design of the puzzle game holds tremendous importance. Well-known matching games stand as most engaged experiences in the world and have been for over a decade.

The legendary block-stacking game rivals famous sandbox experiences for the title of highest-selling title ever; it also contends for best game of all time. Puzzle games are foundational for gaming as medium, and engaging across multiple categories.

The Solution and Justification

Puzzle games wouldn’t have this problem. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — or rather, with difficulty, since numerous excellent numerous deserving experiences.

To emphasize again, these are games lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Brain-teaser creators operate at the challenging frontier interactive creation, producing among most fundamental forms of the video game form. Just like movie stunt professionals, they merit acknowledgment. Don't make them wait decades.