A couple of Agatha Christie puzzles will follow…
Here’s an Agatha Christie puzzle (from a short story):
The blue facts are given by Christie. (If you want to try to solve the puzzle yourself, only read the blue facts). The grey facts are deductions the reader has to make. The yellow fact is an abduction the reader has to make, and is also the core of the puzzle. The green facts are objectives, not explicitely given by christie but implicit.)
Here’s another Christie puzzle, taken from a short story:
Blue: facts given by Christie. (i.e. the clues)
Grey: deductions that the reader has to make.
Green: purpose of the puzzle (explain why Derek killed himself).
(I suggest to first try to solve the puzzle yourself, only reading the blue facts)
Note: unlike previous puzzles, this does not involve abduction (the yellow box in the previous pictures) and therefore it can be solved with forward reasoning.
I read (almost) all posts in this topic - which I never saw, there seems to be a lot of topics from July and August that I never read - and I found it to be an interesting discussion… but.
But the focus on “puzzles and what reasoning is behind them when the player solves them” conflicts with my experience with Monkey Island 2.
To be honest, I learned right now that sawing the peg leg was needed to get the carpenter out of his shop. So, did I solve the puzzle by sheer luck?
No. I’d say by role playing. When I played Monkey Island 2 I was being Guybrush Threepwood, a sly young pirate. I had a saw in my inventory. There was a sleeping pirate with a wooden leg in front of me. It was the obvious thing to do, since I was Guybrush Threepwood. I wasn’t even thinking “this might advance me in the game”. I was just thinking “yeah, let’s see how you like it when you wake up and find out your leg is gone”.
The same goes for imprisoning Kate. I didn’t attach the poster thinking “let’s put her in jail so I steal her stuff”. I did it because I thought that was an extremely piratey thing to do, making innocent people go to jail.
My experience with those “puzzles” isn’t then “I solved an obstacle in my journey”, but “I did stuff for fun that later happened to luckily help me in my journey”. It happens in a lot of plots anyway, in movies and books, that a character takes advantage of something that happened in the past without any insight on the future consequences.
Focusing just on puzzles and reasoning destroys the feeling of “freedom” or, let’s say, “open-worldness” (is it even a word?). You are now reminding your player that you’re feeding him riddles instead of making him live an adventure.
1 Like
I understand, but if I can offer a contrasting vision: in the real world, when you combine things randomly, you will not produce anything useful. When in a game I solve a problem as a side effect of combining two things that “kinda seem to fit together”, I am reminded it is “just a game”.
That’s also true, I agree.
Five years ago we moved to our current apartment only to find out we couldn’t drill the ceiling to put lamps. We had to buy screw-in hooks, but there were only four in the shop and we needed five. So I took some spare parts from my arsenal of Ikea leftovers and combined a screw with a hanger to create a hook.
But that’s only because I knew I had to make a hook. In a game, if you’re brute-forcing “use screw with hanger” and get a screw-in hook, that doesn’t make sense unless you already know what you need to do. So I agree.
But still, that’s true for strange and unusual combinations. I don’t think “sawing a peg leg” is an unusual combination, the problem is just that you’re doing it just for fun instead of for a reason.
I think this is more a problem of puzzle and game design rather than interface design. In the “Ikea hook” case, you could force the player to provide a reason / an objective to the action, but I’d probably redesign the whole puzzle so that the hook isn’t created by combination, but acquired someway else.
Exactly. And in your example it would be a problem of the story: The game has to provide all necessary information you need to solve a puzzle. For example it should tell you the reason why you have to install a/the lamp.
(btw: I like your puzzle, you should make an adventure game 
)
Interesting bit: in my first post, I assumed the opposite. I said that Guybrush had no reason to saw that leg (apart from making the carpenter leave). And therefore, if the user tried to combine saw and leg, without understanding why, then he was playing out of role. And now you argue that sawing that leg is really playing “in role”, because it’s a"piratey" thing to do. Interesting. It’s a different conception of what it means to play in role. (If you were in Westworld, would you say that shooting everybody , because you know they can’t harm you, is playing in role?)
But in a sense I understand: Monkey Island is not a realistic world, it’s a funny world. And in a funny world, to play “in role” can mean to do funny things.
So you are saying: since sawing that leg is an action that makes sense to do anyway for Guybrush (because it’s a piratey thing), then the problem is in the puzzle. (They should have designed the puzzle in such a way that the action to solve it is not an action that makes sense to do regardlessly. ). Right?
Not really. I mean, the “problem” is that you know it’s a solution for a puzzle, and you (the actual you, seguso, not an hypothetical you 
) don’t like that there might have been people that solved it without knowing why.
My view on that particular puzzle is that it works not as an explicit puzzle chain (“I need to bring the carpenter out, I make him work on the peg leg”) but as some kind of universe-related chain of events (“I did what I felt like doing, and it also happened to bring the carpenter out of his shop”). I was totally unaware that it was a puzzle, but it didn’t disturb my suspension of disbelief.
This isn’t true for combining puzzles like the screw and the hanger. In that case, I completely agree with you: there’s no “universe-related” reason at all (unless the player really understood the key to the puzzle) to combine them, so either you accept that some players will solve it by randomly clicking, or redesign the puzzle, or redesign the interface to take into consideration the reason why you’re combining them (like a “I need a screw-in hook” entry in the “thought space” @LowLevel cited).
Ok… then you are basically saying that you don’t consider that a puzzle. You are not supposed to know why you saw the leg, how it will be useful. As you say, you are supposed to realize later that “it happened to be useful”.
No no, I just think there is an in-character explanation for that behavior even if I was blind to the puzzle. I was just giving a third possibility - you gave two: you solved the puzzle or you just clicked stuff hoping to advance in the game, I add “it made sense anyway”. In the combining object example, this third interpretation doesn’t exist.
Ok, you are saying it’s a puzzle but it doesn’t matter if the player solves it with the other logic, (“let’s just do a piratey thing”), because that logic makes sense anyway.
(And the gag is not lost anyway, and the game still works as a whole, and puzzles are not everything)
1 Like