In light of recent discussions about adventure game puzzles, and spurred by a conversation I was just having with RLacey, I've come up with the following hypothesis:
What we term as "puzzles" in a well-designed adventure game are actually an aspect of its plot, rather than a discrete gameplay element.
My reasoning is as such: if we attempt to differentiate what makes an "adventure game" different from a "puzzle game", we tend to find that the puzzles in the latter can exist and be enjoyed separately from any kind of narrative framework. This is not the case with adventure games, because the same puzzle in one game is not guaranteed to be as fun to solve when present in another game.
Generally speaking, we think of puzzles in adventure games as obstacles to getting to the end of a story. And yet, many non-interactive stories -- mysteries in particular -- work in the same way. The very purpose of a plot, after all, is to produce a conflict for the protagonist to resolve at the end. Puzzles and plot in an adventure game, therefore, are
one and the same, with the only difference being that it is the player who resolves the conflict at hand, rather than simply the protagonist. Hence, I'd like to eschew the agreed-upon
definition of "story+puzzles+exploration" in favour of something like "story+exploration", which I believe is more accurate.
This definition makes a lot of sense in my mind, because the majority of complaints about adventure game puzzles are that they clash with the narrative in some way... whether it's making the player character do something that's contrary to what we've come to know about them or having to accomplish a task that has little to do with the main conflict of the story. Likewise, it extends the definition of what one can actually
do in an adventure game when we think of the different kinds of stories we can tell besides mysteries... which means more innovations for the genre.
Thoughts, anyone?
