That’s not an obstacle. That’s walking.
> GO NORTH
You step on a rake...
I’m just messin’ with ya. 
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Cf. Kingdom of Klein (1984) or The Lost Crystal (1987) or indeed any other game by Melvyn E. Wright. 
I happened to stumble across this talk recently and I think it’s very relevant to this thread. Might be worth checking out if you want to see someone drill down fundamentally into what makes a game a game.
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Having to type a walk command is an obstacle, compared with winning simply for starting up the game.
I was gonna put this clip in my Narrascope talk mentioned above, but discarded it when I realized embedding video in powerpoint is a huge mistake.
Video context/spoilers
A clip of an episode from the children’s TV show, Steven Universe. In this episode, the main character, Steven is trying to solve an obstacle course “test” given by his magical caretakers, the Crystal Gems. Previously, he was under the impression that this test could be failed, so he tried really hard to do it “right”. After a mistake that doesn’t seem to change the outcome, he himself tests out the previous obstacles and sees that they don’t have any penalty or way to lose.
Video description
The main character, Steven, presses random tiles on the floor in what appears to be an obstacle course, which play a song. These open up a set of stairs from the floor. However, no matter what tile he presses, it plays the same song and has the same result. At the end of the clip, he frustratedly exclaims, “It didn’t even matter?!”
This isn’t a puzzle.
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That’s not an obstacle. That’s the complete and utter absence of any obstacle.
HAL9000 nailed it in a humorous way with this reply to my post:
The rake is an obstacle. It’s something in the way inside the game world. Pressing buttons on your real life keyboard isn’t an obstacle, and neither is turning on your computer.
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Within the game, your avatar or character or whatever you’d like to call it isn’t in the place they need to be to win the game, and they need to take an action to change that. That action is moving north – whatever the command is conceived as being, there is an obstacle that must be overcome.
It’s a stupid obstacle, of the sort that a mathematician would call a trivial case, but it’s the minimum possible example short of automatically winning. If we consider the idea that any obstacle is a puzzle, that’s the simplest possible obstacle and simplest possible puzzle.
You’re quite right that it’s absurd. That’s how reductio ad absurdum works.
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You stand in a room... with rakes strewn about. There are
four directions you can go, each looks just as dangerous
as the others.
> GO NORTH
You step on a rake... but it does not fly up in your face.
You have chosen the path with the rake tines facing down.
You win!
I rest my case. 
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I know we’re arguing from different perspectives, but I’m having fun, and maybe we’re touching upon a meaningful distinction here.
Consider a real life example:
- I’m standing on the sidewalk in front of the library entrance. If all I have to do is step forward to enter the library, I encounter no obstacle. I just walk forward.
If, however, there has been a mishap involving a stepladder and a clumsy librarian and one of the bookshelves has fallen over, leaving piles of books strewn all over the place, not to mention the shelves themselves, forcing me to climb over them to cross the blocked entrance and enter the library proper, then I have had to overcome an obstacle.
An equivalent game scenario:
- The throne room is to the north. If the main character, from her in-game perspective, only has to step north and sit down to claim the throne to win the game, she has encountered no obstacle. Nothing was in her way.
If, however, there is an Imp sitting on the throne who has erected a magical forcefield blocking the entrance, and the heroine has to climb through the airducts until she can drop an anvil on the Imp’s head from above before screwing open the grate and carefully descending from a rope to the throne, then she has overcome an obstacle. Stuff was in her way that prevented her from just walking and sitting.
I view obstacles as in-game stuff that is in the way.
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I would argue that, if the point is to claim the kingship, not being on the throne is an obstacle to that goal – and it’s overcome by moving to the throne and sitting down on it.
That’s a pretty minimum obstacle; I’m straining to think of something even more minimalist and I can’t do it.
I think Save the Date offers a counterexample, in that one of the “high value” endings (I don’t think there’s a single “best” or “good” ending) involves deciding not to play the game. The overall gimmick of the game, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is that the protagonist is trying to go on a date with a woman he likes. But every time he goes on the date, something terrible happens. The player character (in addition to the player themselves) becomes aware of the weird time loop structure of the gameplay…starting at the same moment before the date, making choices, and something terrible happening. One of the obvious choices then becomes just not going on the date, which is to say stop playing the game, to break the cycle.
But with the caveat that this only “works” given a specific framing that is, having completed several other playthroughs previously I think that constitutes a sort of “minimal path” to a “successful” endgame state.
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Take a single action, win the game. That’s pretty minimal.
I love Save the Date so much…
Well, I think the hook here is that “win the game” in this case is specifically the case in which the player takes no action. That is, all actions lead to a sub-optimal outcome.
There’s also a separate “good” ending that involves modifying the source code to specifically enable a pollyanna-ish “happy” ending, which I suppose involves taking no in game actions.
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The real puzzle was the friends he made along the way…er, or something like that.
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I’m obviously having fun too. Too much, I suppose. 
I like using clearly defined terminology. If you get one word being used with a different perspective/context, semantic arguments start taking precedence over the real crux of the discussion.
- A puzzle requires some ingenuity to solve.
- Having the answer prior to is not solving a puzzle (there’s a difference between completing something and solving something).
- An obstacle is something that hinders progress (and may or may not require ingenuity).
I think we are on the same page, to be honest.
Here’s a feather-ruffler though. Once a puzzle is solved and upon revisiting it, it’s then merely an obstacle.
* mic drop *
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If we want to get into clearly-defined and -delineated terminology…if there’s a combination lock that you’re supposed to solve various equations to open, but you can also open it by guessing 12345 based on general knowledge (it’s one of the most common passwords), is that not actually a puzzle, since it didn’t require ingenuity to solve?
Being serious for a second, Not all obstacles are puzzles. An obstacle might simply be clearing snow off your driveway, sorting laundry to locate your missing sock, or finding a good parking spot. Those aren’t puzzles - at least in real life. They could definitely become puzzles in a game, but even then they needn’t be.
A puzzle does require choosing a correct solution from a set of choices. The answer itself can be an action, a number, a word, or almost anything. A choice does seem to be required, but is it sufficient? Choosing an answer to a multiple choice question fulfils that definition, but I’m not sure the SAT is really a series of puzzles. What else is needed to turn a multiple choice quiz into a puzzle?
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An educated guess, by definition, requires some level of ingenuity.
I don’t think many puzzles (as popularly known) meet your criteria, e.g. sudoku. Many puzzles requires logical or mathematical reasoning, but that isn’t exactly ingenuity.
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