Puzzling Through Puzzles

Brainy Gamer is asking a question that, as an adventure game fan, intrigued me: are puzzles dead?  BG argues that modern games have eschewed puzzles in favor of twitch-action FPS’s and combat-heavy, reflex-oriented skill requirements.  Although I wouldn’t disagree per se, I think he’s both oversimplifying the transition and perhaps understating the true magnitude of the change.

First off, I think it’s inaccurate to claim that games have become more “twitchy” with time.  Such a statement fails to account for the whole host of purely twitch titles that represented gaming historically: classic titles like Xevious, Prince of Persia, Gauntlet, Smash TV (to pick a few randomly off the top of my head) were entirely centered in this type of mechanic.  Early console games were even more guilty of this - there were few if any puzzles to be found in Super Mario Bros. or many of its ilk.  I suspect that BG is thinking of the golden age of adventure games, rather than gaming as a whole, when he makes his critique - there was a period where simulations, RPGs, and adventure titles were predominant, but let’s not assign them too much weight.

However, where I think he probalby understates his case is in the overall transition of gaming from the perspective of its goals. 

 Games used to try pretty hard to make you fail at them.  Partly, this resulted from an arcade-specific design philosophy aimed at separating you from your quarters as efficiently as possible.  And partly it was simply the ethos of the times: as anyone who cut their teeth on early titles like Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man can attest, beating some of those early games was a heroic accomplishment.  Even as we moved into more free-form games, this philosophy persisted: RPGs required a ton of time invested in them and could quite easily kill your entire party as a matter of random chance; adventure/action hybrids like Zelda assumed that you would die innumerable times before succeeding.

Adventure games were extremely difficult as well: they were often criticized for the illogical nature of their puzzles and many people had to resort to walk-throughs to avoid completely stopping their experience.  I remember plenty of times where, upon reading the solution to a particularly difficult puzzle, I would curse the idiocy of the designers as I failed to understand why the puzzle worked even after reading the solution. 

And that’s the real cause of the change.  Games today are designed to be, if not less challenging per se, at least more forgiving of the individual player.  Hence damage systems like those in CoD or Gears of War: you can still lose, of course, but it’s generally a rule that if you’re willing to spend the time to make slow and steady progress through the game, you have as many chances as you want.  Checkpoint systems prevent you from having to master a single level over and over again; you can just replay a particular portion of it until you get it right, cross it off your list, and forget about it.  This also explains the use of environmental puzzles like those in Tomb Raider: sure, you may need to solve a small logic problem to pass, but the solution often follows established genre tropes (light/dark, water/fire, symmetrical shapes, etc.) and limits the puzzle pieces available - as opposed to an adventure game of the old school, where you might have to traverse a vast landscape over and over until you determine exactly where you’re supposed to be at that particular time.

Making sure that people who think differently can still enjoy a gaming experience is what’s behind this change.  Having to run yourself into a wall every five minutes just isn’t that enjoyable.  I look forward to future adventure games tweaking the formula, like Sam and Max is starting to do - I’m sure someone will eventually get it right.