If we’re talking about recognition in terms of awards, I can’t say. I haven’t been keeping up the Ennies and such, and I’m not so immersed in the larger RPG community that I have a sense for the overlooked gems when it comes to award season.
If we’re talking recognition in terms of people knowing about and being willing to play a game, then in my own area I’d love for people to have more recognition of games like Fate and Savage Worlds. MEPACon, our local game convention in Scranton, Pa., is typically dominated by Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder with a smattering of Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu games. There are no Savage Saturdays at the con, though if I game master a table of Savage Worlds, it usually runs (the most recent being my Stargate-inspired SG-13 adventure). That said, I tried to run two Savage Worlds events at the last MEPACon, and the second one — a supernational pirates adventure — didn’t run.
It’d be great if these games had a greater following in the greater eastern Pennsylvania region so I could run them more often (or even better, have someone else run them). I’ll admit I haven’t done a lot to make that happen. I post about my upcoming con games on Nuketown, but I hardly command a sizable readership in Pennsylvania. What I think I really need to do is submit two or three such games to the convention, and then once they’re approved actively promote them in the official forums for each game. That’d help build awareness of the convention and the game and just might spark the beginnings of a community around these games in my local area.