A Puzzling Development

Riddle me this,

Defining things has never been easy for me. In English class a couple years ago, we had to write a paper on "Art" and "Life", so I set about attempting to answer a question humanity has been struggling with since the first cave paintings. What I came up with was simultaneously too broad and too complicated to be taken seriously; hell, I didn't even know what I was talking about at points. With that in mind, please bear with me as I attempt to address the point raised in the previous post.

As it stands in the industry today, a puzzle is an obstacle that impedes the player's progress but poses no danger from AI-controlled enemies. I am not talking about cave-ins or anything else a developer uses to funnel user's progress that may be overcome through glitches and tricks. They usually fall outside of the normal range of action; for instance, in RE4 no puzzles really involved blasting Zombies. They were either "find the artifact for this door" or fairly simple mini-games in low stress situations, like Ashley's tiles. This seeming inability to integrate the action mechanics with more mentally taxing activities is unfortunately common.

It is this separation that I believe truly define puzzles. In a Zelda game, first you clear all the enemies in a room, then you go about figuring out what needs to be done to proceed. The same goes for God of War, or Metroid Prime, or just about any adventure game. In the commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode One, Valve talks about using them to break up the action, to avoid "combat fatigue". The situations are generally not threatening and let the player use something other than their reflexes for a bit.

Another common feature is the relative ease with which more can be solved. Sure, there may be a time-limit imposed, but no developer is insane enough to make puzzles terribly difficult. A lot of people play games for mindless, instant gratification; if they get frustrated and give up, chances are they won't buy the sequel. Thus, appeasing the lowest common denominator becomes the business model and games become dumber.

This is not to say that there aren't aspects of games require some thought. I love finding opponents that I can't just hack to death, but rather require some mental activity. However, stunning an electric jelly in Link's Awakening before stabbing it does not qualify as a puzzle. Nor does learning Dullahan's attack pattern in Portrait of Ruin, or grabbing a grenade out of a Zombine's hand with the Gravity Gun in HL2: Episode One.

Some genres, like racing games, SHMUPs and fighters, are devoid of puzzles. They have no need for such contrivances because they offer a pure experience. The core gameplay is what attracts fans and anything else just gets in the way.

On the other end of the spectrum are, of course, puzzle games. The way I see it, a puzzle game is about establishing patterns or reaching a goal. Your objective and tools are clearly defined from the beginning and do not change throughout. The challenge usually comes from an omnipresent time constraint and increasing complexity. This encompasses everything from Monkey Ball to Lumines to Minesweeper.

It is difficult to generalize about the state of puzzles in gaming and will only become more so with time. There are plenty of examples of inventive puzzles to be found throughout the medium's history, don't get me wrong. Hopefully, as technology progresses, developers will be able to integrate action and brain-teasers more thoroughly than ever before.

But I'm not holding my breath.

I'm not sure how thorough I have been or if I can back up what I wrote, but I'm too tired to continue musing. Comments are welcome. Criticism is scorned. You know how we roll.

Good, or Don't Be,
The Cruel Angel's Thesis