This blog is written for the assignment of the GSND 5110 course. We are required to write out our thoughts about some reading materials.
I just read the 14th chapter, Game Mechanics support Puzzles, and there are quite a lot of stuffs I don't agree with. Let's go through them one by one.
Something bothers people about calling puzzles games. A jigsaw puzzle doesn’t feel like a game nor does a crossword puzzle. Would you call Rubik’s Cube a game? Probably not.
This book keeps trying to separate games from toys! Of course, I can't argue that games are toys, but I wouldn't agree that what's a toy couldn't as well be a game.
I'm not getting into some ontology bullshit but if you'd like to know some fancy terms, go watch this Vsauce video. For my articles I'd like to keep words simple and understanable to my readers.
The point is, a game (by a strict sense) is a form created by people playing. Of course this word is also used to express derived concepts, like what's made to deliver a game, e.g. a digital game; but what I wanted to say is that, it's totally reasonable to say that when a person is playing with a toy, they are playing (no particle here) a game.
Think of a wooden chair (the Vsauce video's argument). Is it a chair? Or is it just a pile of wood manufactured into certain shape? But when you sit on it, you are using it as a chair. Whether you admit it or not (you could still say that you're just sitting on wood), it is, de facto, in a human sense, being used as a chair. So what is a chair? Is it a certain type of matter? No. There are no chemical substances specifically called "chair". It is merely just a concept lying in people's minds. But when it got reflected on substances in real world, we could say that the concept exists.
Also, think of chess. Could you say that chess is not a game? It is of course a game, there're even world-wide competitions every year! Okay then, what do you think chess boards & pieces are? Toys because they are meant to be played? Well then we run into a contradiction. Why does Rubik's Cube being a kind of toy couldn't be a game, while chess could?
Going back to the ambiguity I mentioned earlier: People also call things that are made to deliver a game, a game. So, a chess set is made to deliver a chess game, so is a Rubik's cube made to deliver a game of solving it. And this definition doesn't contradict with a toy's definition, so I say, a toy is totally possible simutaenously a game!
A young Chris Crawford once made the bold statement that puzzles are not even really interactive, since they don’t actively respond to the player.
Human mind has limitations. Like when playing chess, it is not possible for a player to calculate every variation from a position. So for each move they made, they could always gain "new" information, even though it has always been there. It doesn't matter whether a puzzle interacts with the player or not; what matters is that whether the player could dynamically gain "new" information from it. I think it is valid to say that in this sense, the puzzle is interacting with the player.
To take an example: Nintendo's made a Mah-jong game in the old times for their FC machines. Due to performance limitation, it was clearly impossible to let the NPC really "calculate" what tiles they should play. So instead of developing an AI system, they simply set a random number based on the difficulty, granted each NPC a set of winnable tiles and let them win after that number of rounds. These NPCs were not at all interacting with the players, yet the players did feel like they were competing with intelligent opponents.
From this point of view, puzzles are just games that aren’t fun to replay.
Certainly there are many replay-able puzzles! Sudoku, take one as an example, is always replay-able.
Puzzle Principle #1: Make the Goal Easily Understood
To get people interested in your puzzle, they have to know what they are supposed to do.
NO.
I personally like a genre of puzzle game where the player is put inside an open environment and they have to figure out the goals themselves by interacting with the world and collecting information, and I'm on a game project of this genre.
But designing this kind of game really require some skills on making the world complete, so that the player could crack the puzzle in many different ways; otherwise it's just an unfair mental bully on the player by the designers.