You can’t fool me, that’s an Eric Eve game.
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i find it hilarious that this thread with the stupid name is still alive, thanks guys
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In Tetris you’re fitting differently-shaped blocks together so they combine into a single larger shape. That’s the definition of a jigsaw puzzle. Tetris wants you to create continuous lines across the screen and there is time pressure, so it’s an action-puzzle.
Doom is a maze with obstacles, locks and keys.
Any definition has its ad-absurdum limits. The same way you can probably classify any game as “interactive fiction” (Super Mario Galaxy has a fictional plot and I interact with it!) I can say “I must solve the puzzle of assembling my carafe filled with water with this machine and put coffee and a filter in it and know what button to press…” It’s a valid comparison for discussion, and could be a legit puzzle in an IF, but at some point overgeneralization can make definition less useful.
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Ha! Love it! 
I’m guessing the demons trying to kill you fall under “obstacles”. 
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The definition of a puzzle isn’t my hill to die on, but I want to explain how I think of it at least.
A puzzle is designed to require a certain amount of cognitive effort, in the Thinking, Fast and Slow sense. Very short time limits are incompatible with puzzles because there’s no time to put forth that effort. Succeeding in Tetris is a matter of applying a repertoire of learned moves, which have been practiced to the point of instant recall. That’s the opposite of solving a puzzle. Puzzles involve figuring something out, whereas games like Tetris are about knowing the answers already.
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I don’t know how to address this properly without just quoting the rest of my post that you referenced. I said some puzzle games, cited examples, explained my reasoning for these examples, and gave comparisons to other games, such as Myst’s spacial reasoning puzzles. I was not using the definition too broadly. I was quite specific.
I do realize that I was not specific here, but I meant in a game, not like, eating food from your fridge when you forget to buy groceries (that’s an optimization problem, not a puzzle game). but then we get into “What is games, really”, and that’s another can of worms, lol.
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the sequel no one asked for but everyone secretly wanted
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Well…
I used to make levels for the original Doom and Doom II.
I have one that is nothing but puzzles. One puzzle is a chessboard you have to cross to get a door key. There are a few enemies in the room, but the real obstacle is the board. Lots of squares have invisible walls, crushing ceilings, and killing radiation. There’s only one correct path across the board and brute forcing it is quite difficult. I had to take special care in the design because there were so many two-sided linedefs that if I allowed a direct view of it from outside the room it crashed the engine.
Edit: I wanted to add that the correct path is clued, and follows the rules of chess.
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My only beef is calling twitch/reflex games games “puzzle games”. I have no issue with identifying puzzle elements in games.
When we look at Pac-Man or Tetris, we look at the problem presenting itself at the moment. Do I go left, right, up or down to have the best chance of survival? Where should I place this block shape to give me the best options moving forward? That is a problem to solve. That is a puzzle.
Making it so you have a split second to solve the puzzle, makes it a reflex scenario outside the realm of a puzzle. Which is why the puzzle aspects are usually very simple in action games and not worth calling them puzzle games. A puzzle game should allow the user to progress using mostly cognitive reasoning. Anything beyond that makes it a hybrid game at most (equal challenge of puzzle solving and reflex) and not an actual puzzle game in most cases (like, placing blocks to make a line)… otherwise, every game would be a puzzle game.
@Mike_G
Your chess map Doom puzzle sounds brilliant by the way.
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I am constantly resisting the urge to just copy-paste the section of Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein talks about the definition of “games”
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What are your opinions on high-level Tetris (where people hard drop pieces immediately, having seen the pieces in the next list)? It’s very fast to the point of being reflexive rather than contemplative.
Thanks! Post-college, I had a group of friends where we’d all make maps and then trade them with each other. Mine were the most technical - I’m proud to say I could do things with the vanilla Doom engine that most of the group thought impossible. Unfortunately I have the artistic ability of a rock so my levels always felt like glorified tech demos rather than cohesive creations. One of the group and my best friend was an artist. She used to take my technical tricks and make the most amazing levels out of them. She died suddenly at 30, way too young. I stopped making levels after that. Sadly most of the work is lost now as we never sought to distribute them to a wider audience.
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I think, if given more time, they would not have hard-dropped it. I think the prospect of the next piece being the piece they really wanted distracts them just enough that it causes a slight hesitation. At that point, it becomes safer to hard drop (faster solution) and have a split second more to perhaps “contemplate” things. However, I think it’s bordering on the edge of muscle-memory (reflex, in a generic sense) due to the simplicity of the problem being solved.
I’m not a good arcade game player. My reflexive button mashing skills are terrible. However, I did play football for quite awhile and was competitive as a defensive lineman. Seeing the action in the peripheral, feeling the shift of weight of my opponent against me, speed versus power, defensive techniques, counter maneuvers… it all became second nature. There was no time to contemplate anything. It was all reflexive and the determining factor was mostly, could I pull it off before my opponent caught on? Though there were “puzzles being solved”, I was not “solving” anything in the moment. I was trained. I think Tetris players are trained, in that regard. Muscle-memory, basically. If they took a moment to truly contemplate things, I think their game would be over quickly.
To put it another way (and ruffle feathers), I don’t think high level Tetris players are particularly good puzzle solvers. (Edit: I obviously mean they are not exhibiting exemplary puzzle solving skills while playing Tetris.)
I’m reminded of my time playing Guitar Hero. There is a thing called flow. It’s a moment where your mind is accepting input at a faster rate than usual and your reaction is not of panic or excitement. You basically, enter a zone of effortless reaction. You’re ahead of the game and riding the wave, no matter how fast those coloured circles are coming down the pipeline. You can almost think about other stuff while in the zone. I wonder if Tetris players experience flow while they play.
Okay, a lot of the “Tetris is not a puzzle game” rhetoric seems to focus on world class play being more about memorizing patterns and fast reaction times than actively thinking about the optimal positioning of each piece as it falls.
And at that level, perhaps it’s accurate to say all the puzzling has been removed from the equation.
But similar can be said of other games/puzzles. Imagine a speedrun of Zork I where the player types in a solution to the whole game from memory as quickly as possible or speedsolving a Rubik’s cube. At the highest level, these tasks are mostly about muscle memory, and Zork might not even have any reflexes involved unless there are moments in the game that are random and either unavoidable or avoiding the randomness actually slows you down. Heck, like with tetris, it isn’t even necessary that the one executing the optimal Zork solution or a given solving method for the cube is the one who developed them. Do all the puzzles in Zork stop being puzzles just because someone can memorize a solution to the whole game? Does the Rubik’s cube stop being a puzzle just because people have memorized sequences for moving target pieces to target positions without having any net effect on other pieces? If no and no, why would stacking blocks optimally according to a given set of moves stop being a puzzle just because top players memorize patterns that exploita particular implementation’s means of selecting the next piece?
Admittedly, Zork’s puzzles are probably quite a bit more cerebral than Tetris even at their easiest yet I wouldn’t be inclined to call it a puzzle game… Granted, people have been calling Zork a text adventure and Tetris a Puzzle game since I first learned of them as a kid back in the mid-90s, Interactive Fiction only entered my vocabulary after joining this forum, and this thread is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone challenge Tetris’s status as a puzzle game, so hard to say how I’d describe these games without ~30 years of cultural reinforcement of the terms I’m used to people labeling them with.
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There’s not a lot of randomness in Zork I but there is some:
Fighting the troll, and encounters with and fighting the thief.
At least the troll is early in the game. The thief is the biggest nuisance for speed runs since he can pop up in most places and attack you or take stuff (mostly treasures) from your inventory or from wherever you dropped them. You can’t effectively fight him until you’ve completed a decent amount of the game. It is possible to go from promising run to game-over in a single turn because of him.
World-class play is a bit of a red herring. Even low-level play requires the player to make a decision in a maximum of 15 seconds (measured from NES Tetris), minus the time required to enact it. What kind of puzzle can be solved in under 15 seconds? Reliably, by anybody, not only by experts, or with an uncharacteristic flash of insight.
This is leaving aside the authorial element of a puzzle. Not every sound is music, and not everything that makes you laugh is a joke, so I would also claim that not everything that requires problem-solving is a puzzle.
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To be fair to everyone else here, I am a deranged lunatic. I do not represent the majority of cool-minded people that frequent here.
You raise an interesting question about if a puzzle can ever stop “being” a puzzle. As I said, I’m more concerned about classifying the game itself and not its content. In that regard, I say… if the goal (challenge) is simply about completing the puzzle, then yes, that could be considered a puzzle game.
However, if completion of the puzzle is so trivial that all we care about is speed or duration, then the game itself is not a puzzle game OR not being played as a puzzle game. Speedrunning is not about completion, but strategies for speed (like a physical sport of sorts).
I guess context and optics is important to me in classifying things… as well as arguing for argument’s sake.
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I too agree that Tetris is a puzzle game. Speedrunning (completing a goal, such as finishing a game, as quickly as possible, within various parameters) is always interesting because every aspect of the game’s design is basically negated. The clever hinting used in making the puzzle solvable is just…ignored. Sometimes the puzzle itself is ignored.
Like the shrines in Breath of the Wild are undoubtedly puzzles…but they’re also puzzles that you can just boost yourself over the top of.
I think I agree with Hal here, in that the focus has to be on completing the puzzle and not about doing so quickly.
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Let me suggest another illustrative example:
Imagine a Zork-like game where all that’s required to win is to go north to the Victory Room. That’s an obstacle standing between the player and victory, the necessity to enter a single command. Now imagine that there are a hundred rooms between the starting location and the Victory Room, requiring a hundred northward movements. Does this second version have a hundred times the puzzles of the first version?
I would argue ‘no’. It doesn’t have any puzzles at all in my judgment, merely a test of patience. There’s no decision making to be had beyond the continued decision to keep playing the game. It’s not even a maze, where there are options to choose between and exploration likely necessary to win.
The game doesn’t have a puzzle, what it has is an experience. A potentially valuable experience. If there were a page to a good novella displayed in the description of each room, and going north was the equivalent of turning a page in an e-book, journeying to the Victory Room might be a fulfilling, rewarding experience. Probably much more than achieving ‘victory’, in fact – the point would be the journey, not the destination.
I think we can safely conclude that the idea that “obstacles are puzzles” is useful primarily for the ways it encourages people to realize for themselves that the idea is false. It’s a fruitful error, which is the best kind.
That’s not an obstacle. That’s walking.
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