[Squinky]

Originally Posted by Periglo

Same here! I have been reading this thread and, sorry, but the beginning sounds like wishful thinking. Sure, it would be nice if puzzles were integrated into the story and part of it.

Exactly, and that is why I have the word "well-designed" in my hypothesis. Not all games are well-designed.

[MoriartyL]

Well, there are two ways to look at puzzles which aren't useful for storytelling. One is to say "That's okay, it's not part of the story.", and the other is to say "That's bad storytelling.". That's what this all boils down to.

[Ascovel]

Can stories be described as "well-designed" too?

[Squinky]

Certainly. Critics of other storytelling media deal with just that.

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Periglo

Sure, it would be nice if puzzles were integrated into the story and part of it.

I would have to say that most of the puzzles in Ten Little Indians were integral to the story.

[noelbruton]

I read an article on another gaming site that proposes calling the 'puzzles' in an adventure game 'challenges', in order to distinguish from the minigame.

For 'Rhiannon' we've pretty much eschewed the minigame for challenges that to varying degrees are associated with the inventory and plot. It means we can't give a precise description that says that puzzles/challenges are always related to the story or not because there are degrees in either direction and I'm sure that's the case with most adventures.

Take two doors. Door One is just locked. You have to find the key, which is not a key as such but a means of opening the door. You saw it somewhere, but at the time, you didn't know you needed it. Now you have to remember where you saw this, and put the door and it together conceptually first, physically second. That's a puzzle.

Door Two is also locked. But this time you are being kept out by the antagonist who refuses to open up. The antagonist has reason and motive for doing so and only when you overcome his reasoning, will he have no choice but to release the door. That's a plot, part of the story.

Two locked doors. One is a puzzle, the other's part of the plot. My point is that the question of whether or not the puzzles are part of the plot is never straightforward. I feel a Johari window coming on.

Cheers

Noel

[Lee in Limbo]

Originally Posted by rtrooney

I would have to say that most of the puzzles in Ten Little Indians were integral to the story.

Some stories are puzzle-type stories, where the act of solving puzzles is intrinsic to the plot, and it simply couldn't have been done another way and still have the story work. Other stories are not.

AGs rarely make that distinction. Instead, they take just about any plot they can get their hands on and gussy it up with puzzles whether they're needed or not. AGs often put the cart before the horse, and AG fans rarely call them on it, because puzzling has become some sort of sacred cow.

We talk about whether the puzzles were any good, and about whether they were integrated into the story well or not, but we rarely if ever ask the question, 'Did this story really need puzzles to reach its objective?'. The automatic assumption is that the only stories worth telling in AG form must needs have puzzles. Anything else is just a dreaded interactive movie, no matter what or how many other forms of interactivity are available. Somehow, any other forms of interactivity are seen as trivial, no matter how much more realistic and sensible they might be. Puzzles trump them all.

Video Games will continue to be overlooked by the masses as being anything other than an expensive, childish diversion, unless and until we loosen our strict definitions of what these things must be in order to pass muster. Our definitions must change, or Roger Ebert's edict will remain a self-fulfilling prophecy. So long as we keep treating them as games, that's all they'll ever be.

The solution isn't to make puzzles fit in better with the plot, or to make only plots that require puzzles to be resolved. The solution is to treat puzzles as one of many tools for telling interactive stories, and to accept that, sometimes, they just aren't going to fit.

[Periglo]

Originally Posted by Lee in Limbo

The solution isn't to make puzzles fit in better with the plot, or to make only plots that require puzzles to be resolved. The solution is to treat puzzles as one of many tools for telling interactive stories, and to accept that, sometimes, they just aren't going to fit.

Very interesting entry, LiL (even if very short, for your standards ). I couldn't agree more with your point of view: we seem to be stuck with puzzles as the main triggers to make the story advance. I just wanted to add that there is an additional option that has also a long tradition: action.

Action is another well-known way by which the player may interact with the game. Many classic games resorted to it (e.g. from Lucas Arts), many new ones do (Dreamfall), and I find myself drawn to AG-like games that are basically all action: Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, maybe Torment... Unfortunately, there aren't so many of these.

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Lee in Limbo

Some stories are puzzle-type stories, where the act of solving puzzles is intrinsic to the plot, and it simply couldn't have been done another way and still have the story work. Other stories are not.

AGs rarely make that distinction. Instead, they take just about any plot they can get their hands on and gussy it up with puzzles whether they're needed or not. AGs often put the cart before the horse, and AG fans rarely call them on it, because puzzling has become some sort of sacred cow.

We talk about whether the puzzles were any good, and about whether they were integrated into the story well or not, but we rarely if ever ask the question, 'Did this story really need puzzles to reach its objective?'. The automatic assumption is that the only stories worth telling in AG form must needs have puzzles.


The solution isn't to make puzzles fit in better with the plot, or to make only plots that require puzzles to be resolved. The solution is to treat puzzles as one of many tools for telling interactive stories, and to accept that, sometimes, they just aren't going to fit.

The debate about what constitutes an Adventure Game has been raging for ages. The fact that we are participating in this discussion is evidence that a concensus has not been reached, and will likely never be.

That said, the A in AG is Adventure. In the example I noted, "Ten Little Indians," the author of the book, Christie, solved all the puzzles for the reader. The reader became an active participant simply by turning the pages and watching the plot unravel in the way the author decided it would.

By adding the G word, Games, into the AG equation, something else happens. Games, by their very nature imply winning and losing, keeping score, etc.. I.e., competition. Even a simple one-person game such as basic solitaire poses the question "Did you win or lose?" Over the years I've heard all of the following applied to the experience of playing an AG: "It only took me four hours to complete the game. Did anyone do it faster?" "I scored 9340 points. Did anyone do better?" "I only had to resort to a walktrough for five puzzles. How many times did you need help?"

So what is the easiest, and perhaps only way to include the concept of gamesmanship into AGs? Puzzles.

They may be closely integrated into the story, e.g., Ten Little Indians. Or they may be totally extraneous to the story line, e.g., Myst. (The latter assumes the presence of a story line, which, of course there wasn't")

There is no question that there are two different approaches taken when designing an AG. The first, and the one I am most familiar with is practiced by people such as Josh Mandel. (Contributor to many of the favorite Sierra games, as well as Callahan's Crosstime Saloon and the recently-released Insecticide.) That is, lay out a fairly concise plotline and design puzzles that integrate well into that plotline so that the player can move from A to B to C.....to conclusion.

The other method is to have an inventory of 50 or so puzzle contrivances, and try to develop a "scenario" that will allow them all to be played in some pre-ordained sequence until the game concludes. Some of these games are fun. I loved Shivers and the first Myst. The reality is that these games could easily have been put on a puzzle compilation CD similar to a Hoyle's Card Game CD, and nothing would have been lost in translation.

[Lee in Limbo]

Hmmn. Short answer fails. Okay, let's try this:

The thing about Adventure Games is that they are and have always been about problem solving (and exploration, but that often involved mazes, which most people (not me) seem to hate, so we'll just skip that for the moment). I consider myself a die-hard Adventure Gamer, if an atypical one. The problem I'm trying to solve now is how to reclassify what passes for problem solving in AGs, because AG developers tend to go for one or a combination of four basic routes; retrieval, reconstruction, manipulation and interrogation. These tactics have come to define the genre so completely, the comparative lack of them is seen by some as a deficiency, when in fact it might just be an effort to redress the balance to what was perhaps the original intent for these games, before technology advanced enough to provide other options.

1) Retrieval often gets dismissed as a Fed Ex quest. Re-entering past rooms to find that one item you overlooked before (Shivers comes to mind here), or pulling items out of your voluminous pocket that you didn't know for sure you'd need (just about any Adventure Company game, for starters) are old stand-bys, but folks never tire of complaining how tired they get of these, especially if there's also a pixel hunt involved. This is compounded if Retrieval is combined with Interrogation in order to 'unlock' an item you couldn't interact with or see before. Excessive walking and talking in AGs is generally discouraged.

2) Reconstruction usually involves inventory puzzles, either to repair a device we need to manipulate (TLJ water heater puzzle?), or to construct an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to perform a task we are seemingly incapable of performing ourselves (TLJ rubber duck puzzle, although my favourite example is the tea chest puzzle in Temujin). Most of us are used to these, and only some complain about when they are handled badly (i.e. if too much Retrieval is involved).

3) Manipulation usually involves some arcane device that has a code, sequence or pattern that must be deciphered to activate or calibrate it. These particular puzzles are what I often refer to as abstract logic puzzles*, even though some of them are perfectly reasonable given plot elements that call for such an instrument. Puzzle Gamers almost universally love these (the only complaints I've ever heard from Puzzle Gamers are if the puzzle doesn't work properly, or you have to interrogate lots of NPCs or travel around too much to learn how to decipher the codes or patterns properly. Oh, and slider puzzles. Am I the only guy who likes these?). Word people prefer them only if they stress language over symbols or numbers (e.g. riddles and anagrams). Story people generally find them almost universally intrusive and unnecessary.

4) Interrogation, which some logic-oriented puzzle gamers complain about, I think in part because (if done well) it uses a different set of tools that not all puzzle-oriented people are adroit at (i.e. semantics and inference). Often, gleaning information from well-written, heavily dialogue-based games can be so dangerous (especially in AGs, where they need to be translated** into several languages), as the possibility of the audience missing clues (particularly if the game was written in English, and English is not the player's first language) increases exponentially if any euphemisms or colloquialisms are used. What I see in games now is, when dialogue is used, it often so clearly states what the player needs to hear that the conversations feel completely forced and the interactions are entirely unrewarding on any level save the objective one.

It seems to me that a fair number of adventure game devs' first thought is to simulate the act of performing any important task by presenting us with an abstracted mini-game, which at best is a clever transformation of the act we are trying to perform into a challenging activity (the odious but perfectly reasonable keyhole puzzle in Still Life comes to mind here), and at worst is a laborious (and transparent) waste of time that could better have been used performing a perfectly reasonable task instead (game board puzzles in games like Riven come to mind here, though I didn't mind them as much back in the days when I'd only played two or three AGs).

Logic puzzles can be fun if designed with an eye towards entertaining, but so often become these overly complex beasts that are only fun for the most ardent puzzle gamer. Puzzle design in AGs is largely predicated on the philosophy that all AG players want to be challenged by largely mathematical/geometric/pattern recognition abstractions that they can test their wits against, and will be happy enough to receive their snippets of story as a reward for having circumnavigated another abstract logical conundrum. The ideal audience for such games are those that become immersed in puzzle logic conundrums, and derive great pleasure from unravelling them according to the rules.

This completely ignores the fact that quite a few of us are not engineers or mathematicians, and not nearly as highly inclined towards scientific problem solving processes. A little dab'll do you, but real Puzzle Gamers often want more (witness Dreamfall, which has a number of puzzles, but too few and too straightforward for experienced AGers to take seriously). It's the only reward for playing to some, while others of us are actually trying to get into the story itself, if there is one (let's not quibble about the relative merits of AG storytelling to date).

It's one thing to ask us to reconstruct a gemmed tiara to use in a museum to see a hidden clue, as ludicrous as that may seem in our common experience --the conventions of adventure stories have used such trickery for centuries-- and another entirely to ask us to learn an alien language on the fly to perform some action that can't even be seen and studied without crossing to another part of a giant room entirely (or whatever you were supposed to do in that one big chamber in Schizm where I got stuck and gave up. Yeah, I totally have issues with that game).

It's like some Game Devs see every problem as a mini-game, and have trouble thinking of innovative ways to set up a problem and resolution without devising a mini-game. As such, it's become so common that it's now expected, and any 'game' that doesn't have enough of these Reconstruction/Manipulation mini-games is dismissed as less-than.


* A type of logic puzzle that only occasionally comes up that I'm both fond of in principle and yet vexed by is the standard cryptography puzzle. Coming a cross a device that can't be operated unless you've learned to decipher the language or symbology used is both highly intelligent and yet very frustrating for some of us. I'm middling at best at these myself, and yet, if it fits the story, I'm fine with it. I often am forced to use walkthroughs or at least UHS to get myself around these if they prove too complicated for my weak brain. Schizm comes screaming to mind here.

** I often think that translators need to work with the original writer very closely to come up with satisfactory translations that retain both the information and the spirit of the conversation while remaining relevant to the culture it is being introduced to. As well, I think writers need to learn from and be prepared for the troubles of localization. But ultimately, if the dialogue reads like an instruction manual, it might serve the game's needs, but it will never endear itself to anyone. If you have to use this tool, use it well, or get someone else who can.

[Lee in Limbo]

Now, I've made some gross generalizations here, and know that there are no hard lines between Interactive Story people and Puzzle Gamer people. We all come to Adventure Games for a wide variety of reasons and experiences. When I criticize, I'm really just trying to spell out what I see as an imbalance, based on a time-honoured expediency in these games that has become so ingrained that we rarely challenge it. I know some people really just love their puzzle games.

I also know that some people, who might not think of themselves as Puzzle Gamers, are nevertheless quite happy with the status quo, because they've come to love Adventure Games, puzzles and all, as being a unique and immersive experience, and are loathe to see the status quo questioned or threatened in any way. Incremental innovations are appreciated, but radical new approaches are treated with skepticism and often rejected out of hand if the experience is changed too much.

I play and enjoy these games myself (although I'm still currently suffering from some anxiety issues that are making it difficult for me to complete most Adventure Games, whether I like them or not), and have been known to enjoy puzzles, including some mini-game challenges, if they didn't hold up the proceedings too badly. However, I'm one of these people who gets thoroughly engrossed in the narrative and environmental aspects of these games. I find that too many clever but ill-placed mini-game segments can really spoil the effect for me, just as too much dialogue or too much walking can really ruin the game for more goal-oriented players. I'm not in the majority around here when I say this, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who has ever felt the way I do about these games.

I don't want to entirely eliminate a significant and successful form of gameplay from a medium that has largely come to be defined by this gameplay. I just wish I heard more voices intelligently discussing other alternatives to mini-games in Adventure Games. It's one of the reasons I had been scrambling around looking for another name to use for these things, so we could get away from treating them as mere games, and start diversifying the interactivity some more.

Puzzles have their place, and some stories just couldn't do without them, no matter how contrived they might feel in the context of our mundane existences. People keep secrets. People sometimes go to outlandish lengths to preserve their secrecy. Da Vinci wrote his journals backwards. Criminals have been hiding loot and leaving clues and maps in legend and fiction, if not history, for so long, it might as well be fact. Codices go back centuries. Secret societies have supposedly been with us for millenia. And your significant other might have emails from someone you don't approve of in a folder buried so deep on their hard drive, you'd have to spend all day digging them out, if you can understand what the funny names they use for a filing system mean.

The amount of reasoning needed to circumvent these kinds of obstacles sometimes calls for some serious lateral thinking. But they don't all have to lead to a mini-game. Sometimes, the answer is to use a sword on the knot.

[rtrooney]

Nice recap. Although we will agree to disagree. On a few points.

[MoriartyL]

I was dreading that block of text, but it was a good read. Tell me, what sorts of new gameplay are you looking for? Would you be okay with a strategy section, provided it absolutely fit the plot? How about luck, in stories that call for it?

[Ascovel]

Originally Posted by MoriartyL

How about luck, in stories that call for it?

You mean a luck parameter like in RPGs? Fallout, Quest for Glory etc. ?

[buddi]

I think puzzles can be very important to storytelling. For me, a good story is one that creates a world. In a game like Myst or Neverhood (these are the first two that come to mind) most of the puzzles consist of interacting with the environment to find out what works, by solving the puzzles, you learn how that world works.

Inventory puzzles and dialogue puzzles force us to be exhaustive in dealing with our environments. Although this can be exhausting, if the environments are rich and the characters well developed, solving these puzzles brings us into deeper interaction with the game and reveals more of the story to us. Games like Darkness Within and the Experiment have way more backstory than is required to simply solve the puzzles, but only by reading everything and searching exhaustively will you uncover the whole narrative that fuels the story.

Even puzzles that seem obstructive or irrelevant to the development of the story can give the player a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that makes them feel more invested in the game.

[MoriartyL]

Originally Posted by Ascovel

You mean a luck parameter like in RPGs? Fallout, Quest for Glory etc. ?

No, I'm talking about luck. You're given several choices, you have no way of knowing which is better (even with a walkthrough), and your decision has consequences. I say that an adventure's story is made up of every bit of gameplay you put in, and the quality of that gameplay depends entirely on how good the story it creates is. Random chance could be an important part of a good story; therefore, I say that pure luck should be encouraged (in moderation) in adventures. But I wonder if anyone here, even "progressive-minded" people like Squinky or Lee, would agree with me on that. Adventures have been turned into a very strict formula, in which such gameplay would be unexpected and shocking.

[Ascovel]

Originally Posted by MoriartyL

No, I'm talking about luck. You're given several choices, you have no way of knowing which is better (even with a walkthrough), and your decision has consequences.

Wouldn't that approach demand extensive story-branching unless most of the choices would lead to the player's immediate death (not a good idea)? Sure, it could be very cool, but the developer would have to spend much more resources and time on a project. It might be doable if the consequences of your lucky or unlucky choices were subtle. Like if you get a nice banana from a tree or a rotten one. I can see it working with Kheops adventure games were you usually have lots of alternative solutions to puzzles.

[Squinky]

Originally Posted by MoriartyL

Random chance could be an important part of a good story; therefore, I say that pure luck should be encouraged (in moderation) in adventures. But I wonder if anyone here, even "progressive-minded" people like Squinky or Lee, would agree with me on that. Adventures have been turned into a very strict formula, in which such gameplay would be unexpected and shocking.

Well, since you specifically asked me, I've played with randomisation before, but not necessarily in the context of consequences, so I think it could be interesting. Hence,I would encourage luck-based outcomes to the same degree as I would encourage any other gameplay innovation -- that is to say, show me a working prototype and then I'll make a case-specific decision as to whether it enhanced my experience of that particular story.

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by MoriartyL

No, I'm talking about luck. You're given several choices, you have no way of knowing which is better (even with a walkthrough), and your decision has consequences.

I'm not sure that's possible. Flip a coin. Heads you take path A; tails it's path B. Assuming the game's designer want's you to complete the game rather than come to a total, unequivocally frustrating standstill, each coin toss will inevitably take you to the same endgame. And somebody with enough time will write a walkthough that will take you through every option.

Think Post Mortem. The route to the endgame was totally based on which dialog you conducted with the hotel clerk. Was it luck that you took path A rather than path B? Not really. Both paths ended up in the same endgame place.

[MoriartyL]

You seem to be having trouble with the concept of luck. Pure luck means randomization- you can play through the game twice in exactly the same way and get different results. This would be done to create a sense of uncertainty and fear, which is dramatically useful.