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

Puzzling Problems

Woohoo, first blog post. I’ll try to write this so that it isn’t too embarrassing when I become famous (a process I’m willing to give another three years to develop). I’ve been a loyal reader of JDiH almost since it first began, so I’m really excited about this opportunity.

I recently played through Half-Life 2: Episode One. I was attracted to the oversized DVD case on a shelf in a North Carolina GameStop for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to see if some of those Source mods are all they’re cracked up to be, and I was under the false impression that Episode One was a cheaper way to get the engine (Half-Life 2 is actually now the same price as Episode One). Second, I have a fetish for experiencing stories out-of-sequence. I think it started when I saw Return of the Jedi before A New Hope and solidified when I chose to read The Silver Chair before The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I bought the game, which is rated M, and I was carded for first time in my life and found that totally hilarious when I was a block away and realized why she had asked me for ID (I had paid in cash, so it wasn’t that other reason).

I probably don’t have to tell our readers that the game is good, albeit short. We’ve all already heard about that. This isn’t a review of the game, but some thoughts about game design in general that were raised for me as I crowbared and gravity gunned my way through enemies and puzzles.

Puzzles. In a way the term seems to me too broad to single-out any particular feature of game design. After all, isn’t gameplay always about figuring out what to do to effect the desired result? Are King Koopa’s patterns of jumping, breathing fire, and tossing hammers not a puzzle? When my little brother goes for ultralisks three Starcraft matches in a row, is he not challenging me to solve the puzzle to stop the pwnage?

On to sharpening the term into something useful. While there is always some element of "figuring out" involved in playing a game, some challenges are set aside as "puzzles," and furthermore, some games are categorized as "puzzle games." Should I really be using so many shudder quotes? Generally, they are a sign of n00bliness, but I think these are warranted. My first thought for a definition of puzzle is that they are the less action-packed challenges. This was my experience with the puzzles in Resident Evil 4, but the definition doesn’t account for fast-paced puzzle games like Tetris. As I try to nail down what we mean by a puzzle in a game, I see endless variety that refuses to stand under one umbrella. Sometimes you know what you want to do but not how, sometimes you know what means are at your disposal but not what you are supposed to do with them. Puzzles can be obvious side shows or fall completely within the mechanics of the rest of the rest of the game. I am tempted to say that puzzles are those a challenges that have one definite solution, a quality that sets them apart from such obstacles as an AI-controlled enemy, which can be beaten in an infinite number of ways. However, great puzzles have multiple solutions and beating many AIs boils down figuring out how they tick a la simple puzzles.

This brings me to another point, which is the realism of Half-Life 2, even running the game at a lower resolution than it can be, I felt like I was there, in those corridors and windowless death traps. It was stunning, which made me all the more agitated when my creative solutions to various puzzles (I can use a word even if I can’t figure out what it means. . . what? stop looking at me like that) didn’t pan out because of cracks in that realism. Not every object was counted as an object by the engine, for instance.

Is Half-life 2 a bold step toward the perfect realistic, absorbing shooter, or does it merely cut a little closer to an unbreakable limit in game design? No matter how many solutions Valve could think of and program into the game, gamers would think of more which wouldn’t work. Is it possible to break that limitation and create a far more open-ended game in the spirit of Half-Life? I hope so, because I would totally play that game.

As for my little tussle with the word "puzzle," if any of my esteemed colleagues or one of our devoted readers could enlighten me as to what sets a puzzle apart from other challenges in games, I would be delighted to hear about it. I have some other thoughts about puzzles I plan to discuss at some point, and frankly, I’d like to know what they are.

Signing off not as creatively as dkaufman,

me