Plotkin quote re: best puzzles make the player feel smart?

There’s a much-repeated saying that I thought was from Andrew Plotkin about the key to good puzzle design being making the player feel smart. Does anyone know the original source of that statement? Was it something on rec.arts.int-fiction?

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There was a comment in Get Lamp about making the player feel clever, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.

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I don’t think I’ve heard such a quote repeated that much!

It sounds like something I’d say, but I don’t remember the context either.

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I’m not sure this can be attributed to a specific person. the earliest I can find on this forum is a post by @dfabulich from 2016

However, the idea that puzzles should make people feel smart has been going on for longer. This news article from 2014 references the idea as well.

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Thank you, @bg, @zarf and @pieartsy. I’ll look through Get Lamp and see if I can find something earlier in the general videogame literature.

I’m pretty sure that I first heard it before 2014 in the context of IF puzzle design. Maybe it was in the context of one of zarf’s game instead of something from zarf directly…

@otistdog The comment I’m thinking of is around the 37:20 timestamp in this interview, here: GET LAMP: Andrew Plotkin : Jason Scott : Internet Archive

(Only part of this interview appeared in Get Lamp proper.)

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Thanks again for pointing me to that video, @bg – what zarf says there doesn’t seem exactly right but it’s definitely close, and Get Lamp was far enough back that I could just be misremembering the details of the exact phrasing.

quickly searching here for variations on “player feel smart” turns up…

@VictorGijsbers 2015-03-15

@HiEv 2021-10-08

@DeusIrae 2022-05-01

@mathbrush 2023-02-10

@BogusMeatFactory 2023-04-12

@DeusIrae 2023-10-19

@mathbrush 2023-10-20

@AvB 2024-05-15

A couple of 'em aren’t quite about puzzle design per se but I thought I’d include them anyway.

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I think the basic idea is much older and much broader in scope. I’ve heard similar advice for people trying to Gamemaster tabletop roleplaying games – listen to the players when they speculate about what the solution to the mystery might be, implement one of their ideas, and then let them feel brilliant for figuring it out.

It’s been quite disillusioning, learning how much of authorship is permitting the reader/player the illusion of competence.

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Look at it like this: an author can easily present an unsolvable problem in an incoherent way. Refraining from doing that isn’t necessarily “permitting the illusion of competence” unless you choose to set the bar for competence at a level that only psychics or superhuman intellects can reach.

Actually the interesting thing about adventures is that they aren’t classically designed to be played by an unaided human. That’s different from most games. They’re aimed at what Doug Engelbart called an “H-LAM/T system” (Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained). In this case, a notebook and serious note-taking and map-making skills. The target player isn’t a human, it’s an intellect augmented beyond human capability by synergy with its “LAM/T ingredients”. Coincidentally this type of entity is commonly found in university computer labs.

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This is the holy grail of puzzle design in text adventures. I’ve used the phrase myself on several occasions. Unfortunately, all your players have different skills and different intelligence levels related to each of those skills. This makes it damn near impossible to achieve that holy grail for all players.

I quite often find that testers will have trouble with one or two puzzles, so I make them easier or better clued, then reviewers say it was too easy. Sheesh. You can’t win.

I also like this quote in @pieartsy’s MUO link: “Try not to resort to a walkthrough”. Doing so doesn’t make you feel smart. I never use walkthroughs, as that takes away the challenge. The only exception is if I get really desperate, then it’s anything goes.

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I did a quick Google search and there are lots of references to this concept in the last ten years or so, mainly in the realm of puzzle design.

One of the earlier references was a talk titled ‘Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface’ by Randy Smith at the Game Developers’ Conference 2009. I’m sure the original quote pre-dates that.

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I don’t think “the illusion of competence” is the right term, yeah. It’s very easy to make an unsolvable puzzle: generate two random prime numbers, show the player the product, and ask them to give you back the original numbers. But what does that really accomplish?

A bit less metaphorically, a lot of puzzles in IF (or mysteries in tabletop games) are easy to solve if you know exactly what the author intended. But the trick is making puzzles/mysteries that are fun to solve when you don’t have that information—and that’s a question of the author’s competence more than the player’s!

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It’s not quite the right term, but it gets at something meaningful. A player who solves a puzzle by brute force will not feel competent. (Even if this is easy, like trying all six permutations of three objects.) A player who solves the same puzzle by spotting a symbol clue will feel like they accomplished something. If the symbol clue requires a layer of interpretation, the feeling is stronger.

But this feeling is not the same as difficulty in any absolute sense. This is why, as you say, game puzzles generally don’t involve proving Fermat’s Last Theorem! Or whatever.

The design goal here is arranging clues so that they can be spotted, and with the right balance of “player can figure it out” vs “player doesn’t figure it out instantly”. Pretty much all of puzzle design is a matter of walking this tightrope.

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