A Puzzling Matter

I've been thinking about puzzles lately, asking myself what a good puzzle is and trying to remember some good experiences I've had with puzzles. I've always enjoyed puzzles of all different sorts but despite my enjoyment of them I am always flustered by them. But that's the point isn't it? Spending 20 minutes looking from every angle, trying to think outside the box and scanning your knowledge banks for an answer, ANY answer. You almost start to seethe with the stress of ignorance and then BANG! Suddenly everything is clear and the painfully obvious answer mocks you with its simplicity. Either that or you've finally snapped, given in to the woodpecker in your brain. Maybe it took minutes, maybe hours or days, but the great thing about puzzles is that they have the ability to humble even the smartest of people.

"Fuck you brain, fuck you..."

They can bring us together too. I can't tell you the amount of times a pair of fresh eyes has helped me solve a puzzle. Most of the time I'm too happy it's been solved to care that I didn't do it myself. A perfect example of this is the Professor Layton series of games. My girlfriend and I have played every one of them together and are considering getting a 3DS just so we don't miss out on the next installment of the series. It's a big thing for us and we love it, sitting up for hours at a time, trying to find a comfy position so that each of us can see the screen and losing our voices for reading out every piece of text to the other. There are so many occasions where one of us would take a toilet break or food break and return, only to instantly blurt out the answer to a puzzle that the other one of us had been poring over. At the same time, there are many puzzles where both of us have racked our brains and come up blank. It reduces us to a level of equal standing and yet the act of getting an answer right becomes a team effort. It's the same as a sports fan's team scoring a point and the fan celebrating. You become involved in an effort that was completely independent of you. You might as well be cheering on the rain or a dog for pooping.

A double whammy of awesome up in here!

So this is what I want to design, puzzles that bring people together, frustrate people but that they don't feel cheated by in the end due to the puzzle not being clear or requiring the player have knowledge outside the context of the puzzle. And I don't want to use Skinner Box style rewards either. Sure, it works and it keeps people playing but not for the right reasons. Professor Layton utilises this Skinner conditioning by making the puzzles essentially unrelated to the plot except in certain cases and only allowing the player to progress the narrative by solving a puzzle. It's a very obvious, in-your-face way of moving the plot forward. A more subtle approach is to integrate the puzzles into the narrative, it's a much more transparent method of progression. The next step up from that is using the outcome of a presented puzzle to actually determine the plot. I'll use the example of an adventure game. Let's say the player needs to gain entry to a door blocked by a bouncer at a nightclub, if the player doesn't solve the puzzle before the night club closes (or within whatever time limit is set) the player would simply fail in most games and have to start again. But what if the game took that failure and then integrated it into the plot somehow? And I'm not simply talking about branching decision trees, I'm talking about a game that dynamically reads the state of a puzzle; it's percentage of completion, what options a player has tried (multiple solutions are a must), how long it took to solve or whether they give up, and it uses that information to craft the narrative. The player didn't get into the night club? Well then the character you were trying to track has exited out the back door and gone to another location. The only way for you to find out where is to question the bouncer or attempt to sneak in when the bouncer finishes his shift and review the security footage. That's a primitive example, but it begs the question, can it be built? A Decision Engine, capable of moulding a tale based on each player's experience. Of course this can't be applied to the entire narrative, simply linking plot points together is enough to create a seamless experience but one that a designer retains some creative control over (plus a truly dynamic story engine is a little beyond the capabilities of even the most costly AAA titles).

Tom Hanks' character in Big wanted a dynamic story engine for his

comic book toy

Chris Crawford discusses something akin to this in the first edition of Richard Rouse III's book,  Game Design: Theory and Practice when he discusses his Erasmotron tool. He talks of the tool being a dynamic story engine where the player controls speech and actions that affect the outcome of the game and the path to the end but this is all linked between some unchangeable plot points. It is this kind of thing I would love to design, though I feel like it may be a lifelong endeavour as opposed to a project. It's something to consider for my dissertation next year at least. I wonder if I'd be able to get a primitive version of it up and running, perhaps use it as a basis for my next game. But maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew. I'll make my mind up after Wednesday perhaps, too much else to think about now.