Types of Adventure Game Puzzles... how does this look?

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BigCows
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Types of Adventure Game Puzzles... how does this look?

#1 Post by BigCows » Tue Aug 07, 2007 4:36 pm

Would appreciate some input from the community here, I'd previously written up an article on adventure game interfaces that was featured on justadventure, and I was working on one analyzing the different types of adventure game puzzles.

I won't cut and paste the whole thing here, but this is the outline in case that might give you a reason to check it out:

0. Introduction
1. Types of Adventure Game Puzzles
1.1 Interaction Puzzles
1.2 MiniGame Puzzles
1.3 Pattern Puzzles
1.4 Inventory Puzzles
1.5 Sequence Puzzles
1.6 Recipe Puzzles
1.7 Implicit Information Puzzles
1.8 Other Types of Puzzles
2. Features of Adventure Game Design
2.1 Expanding and Narrowing the Scope of the Game
2.2 Cleaning out the Inventory
3 Examples of Adventure Games by puzzles included

Open to suggestions on naming, and as to how well my classification scheme works.

BigCows
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#2 Post by BigCows » Mon Aug 13, 2007 8:31 pm

I put a summary of QFGIV's puzzles along with KQ5 and KQ6's if anyone's interested, my 76 viewers who have yet to comment

JohnWWells
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#3 Post by JohnWWells » Sun Sep 02, 2007 10:05 am

I think that the classification is slightly arbitrary. If a puzzle involves pushing sliding blocks around in a separate window, it's definitely a minigame puzzle. The crate-pushing in Broken Sword 3 is probably a minigame puzzle, even though it uses the game's normal interface. But is pushing a single crate up to the wall a minigame puzzle or an interaction puzzle? What if figuring out the right crate to push out of fifty requires careful logical thought?

The "implicit information" puzzle is also an odd class. Suppose the main character sees a piece of paper with this pattern on it:

^VV^^^V

And the following text:

"USE THIS PATTERN FOR THE SEVEN SWITCHES!"

Now, if the PC automatically flips seven switches in that pattern - but only if the paper has been seen - that would seem to be an implicit information puzzle. But if the player takes the trivial step of doing it manually, it's suddenly a pattern puzzle. Likewise, if a PC automatically remembers a password, it's an implicit information puzzle. But if the player has to manually type it in, what is it then? What if it's backwards? And what's the difference between a password and a physical key that gets automatically used? What if there's no explicit inventory in the game, or it only contains keys?

I think that the "implicit information" subgroup makes too much of the player/PC divide. Text adventures occasionally contain tricky deductive puzzles that require the player to think carefully about a number of clues that have been received so far, and then do something appropriate. A major puzzle in Slouching towards Bedlam is, on some level, an "interaction puzzle," but really depends on the player coming to a critical realization and making a conscious choice to do an action that is actually pretty trivial to execute. The only reason the player hasn't done this action yet is that no cues were given to perform it, but it was always available. So, in some ways, it's like an implicit information puzzle where the password is a moment of insight. In many ways, all of the best puzzles are like that.

It IS useful to tabulate information on what sorts of puzzles have been used or overused. In pathological cases, an entire game may consist of one puzzle type, done badly, as in The Seventh Guest. But I think that game designers are better off trying to be really, genuinely creative in the way they write puzzles than to adhere rigidly to these categories.

My favorite sort of puzzle is, I think, the "story puzzle" - which is rare in graphic adventures. It's a puzzle where the action that the player needs to perform is non-obvious based on the information immediately presented, but becomes clear in the context of the entire game. The player has to figure out the story, in other words. Some of the old Infocom mysteries allowed you to arrest anybody at any time, but only solving a mystery, amassing evidence, and arresting the right person got a good ending. Technically, this is a combination of Implicit Information (event triggers from clues) and Interaction (> ARREST MR. X), but that isn't how it plays out.

Another fine story puzzle: The big puzzle in Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web.

The "click-on-everything" mechanic of graphic adventures makes story puzzles much harder to pull off, and so they are rare. But they are alive and well in text adventures.

BigCows
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#4 Post by BigCows » Tue Sep 04, 2007 7:48 am

JohnWWells wrote:I think that the classification is slightly arbitrary. If a puzzle involves pushing sliding blocks around in a separate window, it's definitely a minigame puzzle. The crate-pushing in Broken Sword 3 is probably a minigame puzzle, even though it uses the game's normal interface. But is pushing a single crate up to the wall a minigame puzzle or an interaction puzzle? What if figuring out the right crate to push out of fifty requires careful logical thought?
It is a tricky distinction to make between puzzles based around simple "interaction" with an object and when you're required to interact with a number of objects in a complicated way to solve a puzzle. If the game takes you out of the normal interface to play some "minigame" that's clearly an example, and if it involves configuring gameplay elements in a manner not based around simply trying everything, I'd place that in a different class.

And my categories for puzzles aren't so much a rigid classification system as a useful way to describe the difference between puzzles that expect you to interact with the available objects through the game's built-in verbs and puzzles that expect you to do something more complicated in arranging gameplay pieces.
I think that the "implicit information" subgroup makes too much of the player/PC divide. Text adventures occasionally contain tricky deductive puzzles that require the player to think carefully about a number of clues that have been received so far, and then do something appropriate. A major puzzle in Slouching towards Bedlam is, on some level, an "interaction puzzle," but really depends on the player coming to a critical realization and making a conscious choice to do an action that is actually pretty trivial to execute. The only reason the player hasn't done this action yet is that no cues were given to perform it, but it was always available. So, in some ways, it's like an implicit information puzzle where the password is a moment of insight. In many ways, all of the best puzzles are like that.
I think we may be talking about "implicit information" puzzles in a slighly different sense. Just to give some examples of what I mean:

A key or a sheet with a password written on it is used to gain access: Inventory Puzzle
The player character, once told the password, is automatically able to provide it in the appropriate situations: Implicit Information puzzle
The player has to manually enter the password, figuring it out/deducing it from one or more clues: Pattern puzzle.

The same goal could be accomplished with any of these methods, having the "key" function as an inventory object, having the player character automatically handle the interaction, or having the player themselves keep track of and remember the password. Pattern puzzles also allow you to make the inference from the clues to the password itself to be a little more subtle, since the inference doesn't have to be made explicitly in the inventory or implicitly by the PC.

The reason I think implicit information puzzles are worth their own category is they can be used for situations when the player character is able to do some action the PC would have previously been unable to, simply due to acquiring new information. Rather than using an inventory object like a note saying "NPC x gives you permission to do such and such" you can simply perform the action without the extra step. It doesn't allow you to do anything an inventory puzzle wouldn't do neccessarily, it just hides the clutter of the inventory.

And ideally the solutions to all puzzles are somehow inferred from the game's world, it's just that for this puzzle type the inference has to be made by the player's character, rather than the player himself--the puzzle should be unsolvable until the PC received the neccessary information, transforming a useless action into a useful one.
My favorite sort of puzzle is, I think, the "story puzzle" - which is rare in graphic adventures. It's a puzzle where the action that the player needs to perform is non-obvious based on the information immediately presented, but becomes clear in the context of the entire game. The player has to figure out the story, in other words. Some of the old Infocom mysteries allowed you to arrest anybody at any time, but only solving a mystery, amassing evidence, and arresting the right person got a good ending. Technically, this is a combination of Implicit Information (event triggers from clues) and Interaction (> ARREST MR. X), but that isn't how it plays out.
Interesting. Since I classify puzzles according to what "unlocks" the solution (interaction, inventory, solving some miniature puzzle, repeating some pattern, or making use of some information provided implicitly to the character), I'd probably classify that as an implicit information puzzle. But it's definitely a good example of how figuring out the solution to a puzzle can have a much broader scope than just a self-contained riddle.

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