What is Puzzles, Even?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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Hi there. I’ve had very little time to myself with which to play works of IF. I think I played a single game a while ago from A. Plotkin, and a little bit of Varicella.

As a writer who’s obsession at present is writing a work of IF, I keep asking myself- What is Puzzles? What is game designs, and what is fun?

I also ask what the proper equilibrium of puzzle to story is, but that’s a query for aother day. Sorry, my “n” key is borked for this computer, so i’m trying to avoid using it. Thanks, auto fill.

I ask because I come from a gaming backgroud of much different games- Paper Mario, TF2, half life, pokemon. I also have ADD so that may be a contributor to my eig so dese. Motherf-

In my experience with games, fun challenges are ones whose solutions (the tools to solve them) are presented to you early on. You solve the first one, and for a while, hopefully the rest of the game, you cotiue to use those tools to solve them.

I can’t get over the internal separation of ‘those games’ and text based games.

This is partially my mental disability (I’ve been told very aggressively that that’s what ADD is) causing me to think like this. I’ve not played many text games, so my knowledge is mostly secondhand, or appropriated from experience with other kinds of games.

Is this a problem that any of y’all have had? Do you have any advice? And will you tackle the big question- What is Puzzles, even?

Thank you.

P.S. What text adventures, Inform preferably, would you all recommend I play, if I find the time between the tortures of school, work, and home? Thank you lots.

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I feel like the best way to see what puzzles are like in IF is to play some yourself. Check out threads like Good parser IF to recommend to novices? or look around the IFDB for various puzzle-related polls.

My go-to recommendation is Violet because it was my first completed game. It’s short but still has the features of the classic IF puzzle (find something to help you accomplish a task), while having enough hinting to finish without outside help.

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A puzzle is anything that prevents the player from going to straight to the end in two minutes.

This is an intentionally silly and broad answer, but it’s useful to think about.

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Sometimes that’s all it takes. Now I have internal permission to get silly with it; thank you, stranger.

The mind is a weird thing.

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I recommend reading AJ Jacobs’s book The Puzzler. In chapter 2, “The Puzzle of Puzzles,” he discusses what a puzzle is and why people like them. He says,

The late Japanese puzzlemaker Maki Kaji expresses it in a beautifully succinct and poetic way:

? → !

Bafflement, wrestling, solution! That is the arc of puzzling–as well as much of art and life itself.

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To me, puzzles are defined by two things:

  • A gameplay loop—that is, they’re a thing you do in a game
  • The difficulty is figuring out the solution, not executing it

“Puzzleless” and “puzzle-light” IF, I’d say, is IF that has a gameplay loop that’s not about puzzles. The thing you do while playing/reading/enjoying it isn’t based around solving puzzles, it’s about something else.

And the second point distinguishes puzzles from games like, say, Tetris, or Call of Duty, or Civilization, where figuring out the goal might be easy, but executing it is the hard part (due to time limits, real-time inputs, convincing other players to join your side, etc).

IF has traditionally been single-player and asynchronous (you have as much time as you want to figure out what you want to do), which lends itself well to puzzles.

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Puzzles are just keys and locks.

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Puzzles are a good way to get players to read descriptions.

I think interpreting a text is a puzzle, the problem is that nobody can say when you’ve won. I enjoy such challenges.

As a more general matter of design: just as in Metroid or Super Mario Brothers, an early challenge can be a way to teach the player how to make progress. The scope of the mechanic broadens as the game progresses. I like mechanics that iterate, in other words, like magic in the Enchanter games or the various types of challenge in Hadean Lands.

Despite interface differences, great games across genres often have shared ideas about the way a mechanic expands as the work progresses.

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For a little more description (fully my long-winded theories and opinions here.)

That is basically the simplest definition: a puzzle is an obstacle of some kind that isn’t generally found in normal literature. The most common type of puzzle in interactive fiction is lock-and-key: “here’s something locked, you must find the key to unlock it.” This needn’t always be a literal lock and key - the key might be a tasty bone and the lock an angry guard dog - you give the bone to the dog as distraction so you can proceed.

Standard literature is a mostly passive experience: you read a story about characters doing things. They may encounter obstacles and decide how to overcome them, but the reader has no input. In The DaVinci Code the characters encounter and solve actual puzzles and mysteries fully on their own, though the reader might figure out what they need to do ahead of time, providing some extra immersion with the story. Or the reader might deduce and predict the outcome of a mystery before the denouement, but are basically passive witness to how the plot resolves.

Ergodic literature requires some additional action other than linear reading. There are experimental books where you might have different versions of the story on alternating pages from different character perspectives, or parts of the book might be printed backwards requiring you to hold the pages to a mirror. S is designed as an old library book but is filled with handwritten side notations in different color inks from multiple other fictional characters who’ve ostensibly had possession of and read the same copy of the book you’re holding, telling a parallel story to the printed narrative. The pages are filled with loose artifacts these characters have left for each other: postcards, tickets, a diner napkin with a drawing on it that the reader can gain extra detail from. House of Leaves is about a house that is bigger on the inside, and the book mirrors that, requiring active navigation from the reader to get through its multiple fonts, multiple points of view, unique page layout (upside down, backwards, weird paragraph shapes, a maze of footnotes) which actively resist the reader navigating straight through.

Choice narratives, best known in paper form as the juvenile literature series “Choose Your Own Adventure™” are often in second person “You see a castle in the distance.” and require the reader/player to make choices that may alter or branch the story. “If you open the left door, turn to page 45. If you open the right door, turn to page 106.” These are a specific form of ergodic literature, and the decisions the player make could be considered “puzzles” if there are good or bad outcomes based on the choices. “You see a hungry man-eating plant. If you ignore it and walk over the vines, turn to page 38. If you’ve found the weed-killer you can use that on the plant by turning to page 96. If you retreat, return to page 19.”

Parser interactive fiction such as Zork provides a navigable map and a world model, allowing the player to experiment with objects, locations, and other characters in a way that controls and directs the story. They may need to solve a puzzle, say to prevent the Thief from stealing important objects they need, or navigate a maze to discover new areas.

Interactive fiction usually employs these types of puzzles for different reasons: Some games are a fun gauntlet of logic puzzles to solve that may have little to do with any plot. Puzzles can be diegetic - you must find a key to unlock a door to proceed; you need to assemble five broken pieces of a generator to restore power and lighting so you can explore dark areas; you need to discover who killed Colonel Dijon by completing a series of tasks and make discoveries that lead to the identity of the killer and their methods which you must report to your superior to win the game.

One major use for puzzles is “gating” where you must solve enough puzzles in an area to learn enough about the plot so you can proceed to the next area’s puzzles that continue the plot. An example in graphic adventures is “The Three Trials” in Curse of Monkey Island where a panel of Important Looking Pirates requires you to accomplish three tasks to prove you’re a worthy pirate and can captain a ship, which gives you access to new areas. These trials require the player to explore the map and meet other characters in the process, providing story structure the player needs so the story doesn’t occur out of order. Puzzles can be conversational - your discussion with the guard may get them on your side so they’ll let you access a location, or making them angry could incite them to bar your way or even attack you.

Puzzles are often considered the “meat” of interactive fiction, but there are also interactive narratives that are fully explorable with no puzzles that imply a story through world building. The player will still make decisions - where to go, what to examine, but they aren’t restricted from any interactions by puzzles.

In general for IF “puzzle” is a catch-all term meaning “something the player must figure out or solve to proceed or that will provide knowledge to proceed.”

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So, a puzzle could be just about anything. I know that simple things like this might make me look silly, but it’s really important for my ability to do things without freezing up from anxiety. (I’m always worried about not doing things ‘good enough,’ as silly as that seems)

A puzzle, then, could be trying to find a way to pass a break in a steam pipe. To do this, you have to follow it until you find the valve which stops the steam, clearing the way.

Or it could be looking for a functioning radio to listen to, to get instructions for how to progress.

It probably seems obvious, but this is invaluable to me. A ‘puzzle’ can be as simple as walking around, searching for a necessary item, and the players will not crawl through the monitor to flay me alive. That’s what I’m getting, at least.

Thank you very much for your answers so far; I look forward to reading all of them as they come in!

Edit: Story is a different matter; And I’m gathering that’s what might cause the majority of homicidal computer-ghosts

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You might have a look at the IFWiki’s list of articles about puzzles. They tend to be more about defining types of puzzle and analysing particular puzzles than defining what a puzzle is, but they may give you a few ideas to think about.

Zeroing in on this:

It sounds like you’re interested in puzzle games which keep iterating on a set of mechanics or objects? This is arguable and there will be many expections but I feel a lot of big puzzly text adventures focus more on a wide variety of objects and lots of different types of puzzle. That said, have a look at games with limited parsers, especially ones by Arthur DiBianca like The Wand or Temple of Shorgil. By limiting the range of verbs the player can use, the puzzles remain thematically consistent and build on a small set of actions in more and more complex ways.

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This is probably a side effect of my modern video game upbringing.

I think about games like Half Life (1+2) and Portal when I think of puzzles, the way the tools to solve stay consistent while the issues to be solved change and grow.

Not text games, I know.

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Some of the best-designed games do have cumulative puzzles that often lead the player to discover a new method of interaction to provide an “aha!” moment, or even “cheat” (planned by the author) to solve the game.

One example is Oppositely Opal which is a one room game about spell casting, but the gimmick is another sorceress has cursed you so that every spell you cast works backwards from its original intention so you’ve got to figure out how to make that work in your favor to essentially escape the room.

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It may have been lost in the churn of my long post, but I think it’s quite common for text games, like many video games, to be built around mechanics that iterate/expand as the game progresses.

Toby’s nose, for instance, or Art DiBianca’s games. Enchanter et al, Hadean Lands, Oppositely Opal (above). Wizard Sniffer. Counterfeit Monkey. And so forth.

I think it’s reasonable to look at something like Portal, for instance, and to ask “At a high level, are there similarities between these works?”

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Feels weird to hear Tetris given as an example of not a puzzle. Granted, it’s pretty trivial to identify where a tetramino can be placed suchthat it creats no new gaps and increases the height of the pile minimally and playing classic Tetris forever would be trivial without the time limit to place each piece, but it’s still the archetypal puzzle game and what I’d predict to be the majority answer if you asked random people to name a puzzle video game.

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Yes! With very broad definitions for what the words “key” and “lock” might mean in a particular game.

@ThisKobold , re using the same method of overcoming obstacles in increasingly difficult situations:

One of my favourite examples of a puzzle IF which re-uses the same basic mechanic in more and more complicated ways is Savoir Faire by Emily Short, with its quite original magic/physics system.

Savoir-Faire - Details

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tetris is a puzzle game. it’s not a narrative puzzle game which is probably what people actually are talking about with puzzles in this thread (most of the cited examples are narrative puzzles).

I define puzzles like this in my Thematic Puzzles talk (lightly edited from my speaker notes):

Puzzles test your knowledge and understanding. While they don’t have to be outright logic puzzles, they should have solutions and outcomes that make sense in context. Understanding information previously given by the game should make solving the puzzle easier than brute forcing or guessing.

As well, there should be ingenuity involved on the player’s end – not just understanding information you’ve been told, but extrapolating that information into a solution the game didn’t outright tell you about.

Tetris qualifies for this-- if you randomly place blocks around with no contextual awareness of what you should be doing and why, then you will lose very quickly.

Narrative puzzles, are obviously, a subset of puzzle.

Narrative puzzles require you not to just understand the game’s mechanics, but to understand the fictional situation and come to a conclusion about what to do next. If you’re not paying attention to the narrative in a narrative puzzle game, you can’t solve the puzzle.

Puzzles should inherently involve meaningful choice. There’s at least one right answer which removes or changes the obstacle. There’s also at least one wrong answer, which leads to a different result than if you chose right — even if the result for getting it wrong is "nothing changes, try again”.

Now, if you don’t have meaningful choice – the player’s decisions all have have the same result, well, that’s not really much of a puzzle is it? There’s nothing to solve!

I swear I’ve put this definition on the forum before too lol.

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Unless there was a puzzle based on the initial “puzzle” being seemingly choiceless…

And some IF puzzles are more in the vein of Tetris than narrative puzzles—stereotypical usage of Towers of Hanoi, etc.

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Raph Koster wrote to great length that fun is about learning. Learning encompasses the crux of puzzles, player motivation and beyond. I have not read A Theory of Fun yet, but it is on my to-read list.

Another popular book (which I have not read either) is Jesse Schell’s A Book of Lenses. It really focuses on game design at its heart.

I don’t think you can go wrong with both of those books (or so I’m told :wink: ).

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I like the idea that puzzles is a lot like jokes, but with the part where you “get it” stretched out to the breaking point. I don’t know about game designs, and I’m not sure fun isn’t.

I don’t think text games are that different, they just often assume you already learned a set of tools back in the 80s or something.

If you look closely at a (non-text) game, you’ll probably see that it’s actually introducing new mechanics regularly, such as a new weapon, ability, or enemy. A single mechanic usually has a lot less juice to squeeze than you might think, or at least less than I initially thought. So it’s not totally true that games typically introduce a set of tools and leave it at that. Only the greatest games, like Go or Tetris, can just consist of the ramifications of a few initial mechanics.

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