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- By Brian Tate
- 03 Oct 2026
As any prominent prize-giving event approaches, you'll find an outcry for the addition fresh award types to recognize underappreciated efforts and delight the passions of enthusiasts with niche passions.
My colleague has already made advocating for terror-themed awards. That would be fantastic. The same goes for tabletop games, which is someone's personal cause. But they will have to forgive me when I prioritize because like all single-minded supporters, I have a cast-iron argument supporting my request remains most pressing and significant. Here's the proposal: There should be a category for puzzle games.
Classifying creative works is not a science; opinions vary greatly, and it will always start arguments and end in fuzzy definitions. It's understandable that movie academies steer clear of genre categories. Yet it remains an essential concession in the world of gaming, showing incredible range they hardly constitute as a single art form.
For comprehensive acknowledgment of interactive entertainment excellence to gain proper attention, while allowing diverse titles to compete fairly, genre categories are essential.
Prominent interactive entertainment events offer these award types recognizing Action-oriented games, Action/Adventure, Role-Playing, Fighting, Simulation and strategy titles, plus athletic and racing experiences. Between them, these award types successfully include numerous genres, and you can find room for most games within them.
Not so for puzzle games. No appropriate category exists for their placement. Think about these this year’s best games, showing diverse approaches: the architectural riddles in a particular game, fast-paced pattern recognition in a different title, engaging interpersonal challenges from additional release. Where could they possibly go among existing types? Simply put, no category fits.
Many instances occur excellent brain-teasers published annually lacking appropriate categories at major award shows, if they accidentally match classification types such as Mobile Game, Virtual reality experiences, or the intensely contested small studio competitions.
Frequently they represent compact experiences, however the design behind logic titles carries substantial weight. Famous handheld logic titles stand as the most-played games globally continuing this trend for an extended period.
The legendary block-stacking game competes with famous sandbox experiences competing to become best-selling game of all time; it also contends for top gaming experience. Brain-teasers form essential building blocks to the art of video games, and they are in conversation across multiple categories.
Logic titles wouldn't face that issue. It would be easy to populate multiple candidates interesting, varied, worthy titles every year with ease — or rather, with difficulty, given the need to exclude so many good games out.
To emphasize again, these include experiences lacking appropriate categories during prominent ceremonies. Logic title developers function at the challenging frontier of video game design, creating some of essential manifestations of gaming itself. Comparable to movie stunt professionals, they merit acknowledgment. We shouldn't delay 35 years.
Film critic and industry analyst with a passion for uncovering cinematic trends and storytelling techniques.