Even then, some elements can be outside of those ramifications, e.g. superko rules in Go, or rewarding T-spins in Tetris.
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This is exactly what I mean- I didn’t mean to say that the player should be frontloaded with every mechanic at once. I mean things like Half Life, where the gravity gun is introduced right before you need it, same as the other weapons, the scout car, etcetera. By the beginning, I mean the beginning of the first puzzle that the tool is relevant in.
Obviously including the “dormant artifact” or “mysterious cipher”- in this case, the revelation of its purpose is the same as the introduction.
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You don’t want to make the player run all the way down the highway before they get access to the car which makes fast travel possible, same as you don’t want to give them access to a car that can’t go anywhere and then not bring it up, even when they can use it.
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While this is often true, I think this can be a bit too reductive a metaphor.
A puzzle is an impediment to the player’s goals. While use-the-thing-to-open-the-other-thing type puzzles are common, a lot of the time the impediment to overcome is the player’s incomplete understanding. The puzzle can be about unlocking a new epistemic state within the player, not changing anything about the game world. (Consider a lot of the puzzles in games with magic systems like The Wand, or games like Her Story, or Return of the Obra Dinn.)
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I’ve always liked this Mike Selinker quote:
A game is an activity where, if fairly constructed, two sides given the same advantages will have a roughly equal chance to win. A puzzle is an activity where, if fairly constructed, one side will have all the advantages, except that the disadvantaged side is expected to win.
(or this one)
People solve puzzles because they like pain, and they like being released from pain, and they like most of all that they find within themselves the power to release themselves from their own pain.
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Tetris is more about reflexes than considered problem-solving. Lots of arcade-style games involve rapid choices that depend on rapid coordinated motor control; they’re not puzzles as such.
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I agree. Furthermore a good puzzle can yield partial, instructive success whereas a strict lock-key obstacle can only resolve the “yes this key” or “no, not this key” question per attempt.
Like all the subsidiary deductions in a Sudoku determine the quality of the puzzle. If you just had to choose all the squares simultaneously, that’d be way too hard. Maybe very pleasing if you get there, but highly unlikely that you will.
There’s an old Erdös quote: “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back!” A nice puzzle has a narrative of push and pull, with your eventual success.
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If within a game you were presented with a locked door you wanted to pass and a keyring with a number of distinct keys, you could try each key, one after the other, until you happened to find the correct one.
That would be an obstacle, but not a puzzle. No amount of thinking about the situation would provide you with a clever way of getting past the obstacle, or even make it simpler. It’s a mere matter of mechanically testing each possibility.
Now, if putting the wrong key in the door were lethal, but there were a subtle clue in the designs of the door and the keys that indicated which one was correct, and detecting it required paying attention to detail combined with intelligent thinking, that would be a genuine puzzle.
Jigsaw puzzles are puzzles because they’re not merely about searching through a pile of pieces looking for a shape match. You’re expected to use the image on the pieces to anticipate what the correct piece looks like, then search for something that looks right, in order to test for the correct shape (which is often difficult or impossible to judge by sight alone). If the pieces were blank, and there were nothing to the task but testing pieces… that wouldn’t be much of a puzzle, either.
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There are lots of exceptions to this. Most would agree the original Pac-Man is a game requiring “rapid coordinated motor control”, but it also requires learning patterns. I consider myself to have pretty good motor control from decades of playing a large number of games, but I never had the patience or desire to learn those patterns and as a result I can only get a few boards into the game. Is Pac-Man a puzzle? I would say yes; sort of.
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This has been a very interesting discussion to watch unfold; Thank you all for your responses.
Armed with some of this knowledge I’ve drawn up most of the first chapter for The Manik, and it seems… Actually pretty manageable. I might talk about that in another post.
Also, I started playing Dreamhold, because it was the first IF I think I touched, and I never finished it.
Thank you!
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Lots of professional sports involve high-level strategic thinking, analyzing opponents’ past performance and choosing approaches that maximize success.
That doesn’t make football or tennis or baseball ‘puzzles’. The majority of the activity is still the exercise of physical skill and capacity; it’s only once saturation of that requirement is met that strategy becomes important. I’m told that Wayne Gretzky was only a middling player as far as physical skill was concerned (at the professional level, which is still far beyond the average hobby player) but his dominance of hockey came from an ability to grasp the flow and position of all the players and place himself at locations best suited to manipulating that flow.
Arguably Gretzky approached part of hockey as a puzzle that had to be solved in real-time, but hockey as a whole is a physical sport rather than a puzzle.
Chess can be considered a puzzle, although it can’t be solved rigorously enough for a “right answer” to be defined as far as we know. Tic-Tac-Toe is a puzzle, and it’s so trivial it’s boring once its very limited strategy is understood.
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It also helped that nobody wanted to fight Dave Semenko. 
that’s a fair critique of the claim that tetris is a puzzle, but everyone in the more general population conceives of it as a puzzle game, it’s categorized as one everywhere. what do you think of that? how do you square that circle?
I personally think that the fact you can take the reflex needs or time limits out of some puzzle games and make them trivial to solve does not preclude them being puzzles. For ex, even though Majora’s Mask & Minit are classified as “action adventure games” they are essentially giant puzzles and that is not reduced by you needing to run around to the right places at the right times. The time limits are built into the puzzles.
Yes, taking those limits out would make them easy as pie. but that would be like making Myst’s clues for its spacial puzzles right next to each other in the same zone instead of scattered on a map across bridges and buildings–you’re taking out the core conceit. Solving something under a time limit, or with limited resources or abilities, is an optimization puzzle.
eta: talking about this with husb and he pointed out that tetris is an extended problem solving puzzle involving long term planning and concentration. advanced tetris players will also know how frequently certain blocks appear and when.
he also just pointed out escape rooms re: time pressure, he’s so smart
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Anything that requires strategy would be a puzzle then. Life would be a puzzle. As I type this post, I’m strategizing over which words to use to best convey my thoughts. Typing this reply is a puzzle.
I see where @Melendwyr is going with his logic and I feel that if you apply a definition too broadly, the word loses it’s meaning… and usefulness. If a game requires reflexes as the primary skill, then it’s an action game, even if strategic elements exist. Tetris is considered a puzzle game because categories work best at a surface level. Tetris looks like a puzzle game a glance, thus it’s more useful to say it is one than to confuse people.
There are very clever, analytical people who simply cannot play Tetris because it’s difficulty lies in reflexes. If there was a more broadly accepted category of “action puzzler”, that might be more apt for Tetris. However, at the highest levels of Tetris, reflexes are king. For example, the required technique to manipulate a Tetris block in the end game levels is to hold the buttons down lightly and roll/tap your fingers underneath to effectively push the controller into your thumbs.
Now this isn’t to say that strategy doesn’t involve solving something (a puzzle), but what does saying that essentially everything is a puzzle accomplish? How do you square that circle?
There is also the opposite (and even less broadly accepted) category “thinky puzzler”.
Even though neither of these genres are very widely used, their existence is a symptom of (what I believe to be) the fact that both Tetris and Sokoban are puzzle games, but not the same kind of puzzle games.
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@tvil
Yeah, subcategories are usually trying to provide utility when the broader categories fail to describe necessary nuance.
I’m curious. To those who find it useful to acknowledge puzzle games more broadly, what kind of puzzle game is Doom?
Now how does a thinky puzzler contrast with a puzzly thinker?
Personally I was surprised to see that Tetris is a puzzle game, but it’s on Wikipedia so it must be true.
I’m totally fine with saying “Life is a puzzle” or at least “Life is full of puzzles.” and with calling effective communication a puzzle.
That said, I’m also fine with Tetris being a different kind of puzzle from the kind typically found in IF, just as a Rubik’s cube is a different kind of puzzle from a Jigsaw or a riddle is a different kind of puzzle from a sliding block puzzle. Of course, categorization is hard, and no matter how well thought out your categories are, there’s probably something out there in idea space that won’t fit nicely into your scheme.
Also, I wonder what the Tetris isn’t really a puzzle types think of the Signal and Target modes from the Gameboy Color version of Magical Tetris Challenge. Info can be found at:
But the basic idea is that the piece that clars a line in Signal Tetris causes blocks in the floor benath it to change color and you have to change the floor blocks to match a pattern displayed below the floor, while Target Tetris gives you a predefined sequence of pieces you have to use to clear all of the target blocks on the screen. Admittedly, as far as I know, these modes are exclusive to Magical Tetris Challenge GBC, a version of Tetris with a Mickey Mouse theme that was probably overshadowed by Tetris DX and passed on by all but the most hardcore Tetris and Mickey fans(Heck, I’ve only played it via emulation and probably would have gone for the N64 version if I hadn’t been playing it on a device that was limited to emulating 8 and 16-bit systems.
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Brand new taste! Improved gameplay! Infinite difficulty levels!
Try our new puzzle game Square that Circle !
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> SQUARE CIRCLE
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