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Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles?
Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles. "Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."
http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
I don't know why
I have an odd fascination
with this little java game
There are no puzzles
there are no goals
it's not quite a painting program
but it's not quite a game either
I've found the opposite for myself. As I've gotten older, I have less appreciation for killing that last boss, and prefer some puzzle solving/creative thinking in my games.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Just look at the Wii.
But there are also is a strong culture of arrogant shooter gamers that think "If it doesn't have bleeding edge graphics and a ton of violence, then I don't call it a video game. No, I don't care that the Wii is outselling my personal favorite brand of gaming device. They must be sitting unused in closets. Stop telling me statistics. I'll cover my ears LA LA LA LA LA leave me alone and let me play my shoot-em up game and look down on all other gamers."
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve. I guess Myst could be compared to modern games where you have to complete quests and such. But in Myst you had to complete these tasks or you couldn't progress in the game. I do think that kind of game play is gone.
I ran a D&D campaign recently with a younger crowd. I created it myself, and naturally incorporated a plethora of puzzles, riddles, and number games in it. But whenever the players got to these things, they'd often resort to just trying to fight their way through whatever mechanical obstacle stopped them.
I think a lot of it has to do with the games that this generation is being brought up on. There's not much strategy or thinking needed for Halo, team fortress II, etc. These newer games through out puzzles and storyline and replace them with better graphics and bigger worlds. Even RPG's these days are less puzzle oriented, and more grind oriented. Thus, most gamers have a mentality that if they can't figure something out they probably just have to overpower whatever it is that is stopping them.
Compare that to the games that older generations were brought up on (Nethack, Mist, older rpgs) and it is pretty obvious to see why this newer generation doesn't endorse puzzles like some of the older peeps here do.
While those are both a couple of my favorite games, the word puzzles really put me off to playing them anymore. Not only do they lose any value once you've memorized them, originally figuring them out merely took a small app (wrote mine in QBasic) to search a dictionary for words that contained the letters you were staring at. It didn't take much effort.
However, the first chess puzzle in 11th hour was absolutely great. I remember drawing out the board and moving pennies around trying to figure out the solution... and then the click, when I finally realized that it is more or less a path with a fork in the road. Genius.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
GameFaqs made games easy for some, meaning game creators added some challenges that can ONLY be solved by zealots, which pissed off people, meaning most people use walkthrough for the puzzles. (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy, where you need NOT to get 4 crates to get the best weapon in the game)
Some challenges are absurd, or blocks the user and are required to continue to play, which means people tend to get to the Faqs again after a period of time.
Some "puzzle" games are all the same crap (I'm looking at you, website I need to change the address to continue by looking at the source code) ... meaning people get annoyed by these puzzles.
But frankly, I _love_ a good puzzle game, and I _love_ to solve challenges, when they can be really solved, like all the friends I know.
But you are right, I hate cheap-@$$ puzzles, I hate copycats of all the same style, and I hate looking at a game for a good hour and not being able to figure out what to do at that point. Up your game while creating your puzzle game and you will have people happy to figure out all the intricacies out of it.
Cheers!
Compare "Portal" with, say, "Zork" or "The Bard's Tale". The puzzles involved were quite simple and mostly involved wandering around in the dark desperately drawing maps until you found the clue hidden in one corner of a dungeon just so you could answer the riddle one level up and in the far corner, but the level of player involvement is significantly higher.
You don't see players making detailed hand-drawn maps of every level of Portal, complete with precise notes, just so they can solve the puzzles. Gamers today just don't have the patience for it. Even online RPGs, the last stronghold of the fanatical mappers and note-takers, have all given up and provided automatic mapping tools which even a brain-dead cat sleeping on the keyboard could use.
As the article and its accompanying comments mention, the market for involved puzzle games didn't shrink, it just didn't grow with the rest of the industry. While there may still be a market for a few thousand people who like Monkey Island, there are also now millions of people who think that Halo is about as complicated as a game can get before their heads explode. Welcome to today's market.
It's not that people don't like puzzle games, it's the manner in which they've been used in games lately. In many games they're nothing more than an annoyance, with variants of the same puzzle appearing over and over again in a desperate attempt at stretching the game out and make it seem longer. I have no patience for this sort of thing at all and doubt many people do. If you want to make a puzzle game, or incorporate puzzles into your game, you'd better not make them annoying, mandatory, and long. That sounds like an honest job description; how could anyone not hate that?
I loved Portal by the way. All the puzzles were different, and the rewards for completion (the humorous voiceover and further interesting puzzles) were excellent.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
A current game franchise that uses puzzles as part of the narrative is "The Nancy Drew Mysteries". http://www.herinteractive.com/prod/index.shtml You play as Nancy (and occasionally as some of her friends) in first person and solve mysteries by piecing together clues. The puzzles often unlock the next clue. The game is addictive (because of the puzzles, mostly) and a lot of fun.
-todd