Defining Puzzle Games

[Bucky]

Continued from here: http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=9845#9845

This is because "puzzle" is not a videogame genre. It is quite a complicated issue to explain, and it presupposes knowledge of videogames which no one other than me currently has, but I will get around to explaining it quite soon, and all the relevant issues that go with it.

I'll take a stab at it.

First, my working definition of "puzzle" is an atomic scripted section of a (usually single-player) game designed to exercise the player's reasoning skills. Icy probably has a more precise definition for which my argument may not work, but my definition will work for now.

Puzzles can fit into nearly every game - shooters have bullet patterns that require some reasoning to survive, jRPGs can have scripted bosses who require you to carefully plan your attacks, anything with a physics engine allowing you to move objects can make you play a sokoban variant etc. It's fairly unusual in several genres for a single-player game not to feature puzzles.

Then again, some games are heavier on puzzles than others. Portal, Zelda (any) and to some extent the Touhou series are puzzle-rich for their genre. Conversely, games like Tetris and Bejeweled don't really contain puzzles at all. After a bit of time figuring out the interface, they require very little reasoning.

Games designed for depth should try to make the player think all the time. The game should be some mixture between 'puzzle' and 'reflex', but with a near-constant puzzle-like component as different game elements come together to make you invent new tactics on the fly. They may contain explicit puzzles, but the player should be engaged in furious problem-solving everywhere else, too.

However, there are episodic games which test reasoning skills alone, which I can't classify as anything but puzzle games. Sokoban, Bridge Builder and a few others qualify.

[Lochlan]

I don't know where you got your definition from, but let's use Webster's:

1: to offer or represent to (as a person) a problem difficult to solve or a situation difficult to resolve : challenge mentally ; also : to exert (as oneself) over such a problem or situation

I assume that icy says "puzzle" is not a video game genre because every video game is a puzzle.

I think you're too caught up in both the single-player experience and what a game "contains." A two-player game is as much a puzzle as a single player game, I don't see the significance in whether you're competing against a human or AI.

However, there are episodic games which test reasoning skills alone, which I can't classify as anything but puzzle games. Sokoban, Bridge Builder and a few others qualify.

You can't classify them as anything else because they are unique and there are no widely-used names used to define their genre. (I would describe Boxy-Boy for the TG-16 as being a "Sokoban-like game.") What genre would you have put Dune II in immediately after its release? You wouldn't becase it was a unique game and there was no need to categorize it.

Calling Tetris or Magical Drop a "puzzle" game is equivalent to calling them "problem-solving" games--which isn't saying anything at all. "Puzzle" is a catch-all for games we haven't given a proper genre to. It's revealing that a "puzzle" game could be either an action game (Tetris) or not (Daedalian Opus).

[ganheddo]

Calling Tetris or Magical Drop a "puzzle" game is equivalent to calling them "problem-solving" games--which isn't saying anything at all. "Puzzle" is a catch-all for games we haven't given a proper genre to. It's revealing that a "puzzle" game could be either an action game (Tetris) or not (Daedalian Opus).

What should be noted, is that Tetris (in contrast to the turnbased Sokoban) isn't a "pure puzzle game", because of the "action" (the dexterity needed to play it well).



Quoted from this thread:

Am I to take it that you would categorize platforming as being Action and/or Puzzle? I'm thinking Action-heavy stuff would be like Mario or Sonic, and Puzzle-heavy stuff would be like Prince of Persia or Shadow of the Colossus.

All the games you mentioned are action games. If reflexes are involved it's action -- and there's nothing to think about.

Puzzle games, on the other hand -- pure puzzle games -- do not involve reflexes, just as pure strategy games do not involve them. But of course you also have real-time strategy games, and action puzzle games, which fall somewhere between the four grand categories (which are really two, if you think about it, which ends up being one in the end, a merely conventional distinction, like all dualities -- but I'll explain all this in detail in the articles...).

In the end, then, to repeat, all the games you mentioned are primarily action games (so no need to call Mario or Sonic "action-heavy", as in "action-heavy action games" which is a pleonasm), and as for Prince of Persia and Colossus; I wouldn't call them "puzzle-heavy" -- in fact, I wouldn't even call them "puzzle-light". They are just a 2D and a 3D action game, respectively.

A "puzzle-heavy" action game, to give you a comparison, would be Tetris for example. A "puzzle-light" action game... tough call. I'll let you know if I come up with any good examples.

The grand categories he's referring to (quoted from an earlier post in the same thread as the quote above):

Basically, what it comes down to in the end, is that there exist four major categories of videogames: Action, Strategy, Puzzle, and RPG. Those are the four fundamental categories of videogames possible, and they will never change.

But as icycalm said, at the end you could say that there are only two grand categories (I'd guess "action" and "thinking/logic") and that even this would be a merely conventional distinction.