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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
...
...as opposed to ancient gamers? Preindustrial gamers? Renaissance gamers? Pre-war gamers?
Advice: on VPS providers
Plenty of modern games are based around puzzles, they're simply more organic to the game environment and therefore not as noticeable. I don't think it's a matter of modern games not having enough patience, I think it's a matter of gaming evolving into a more immersive and holistic experience.
Or perhaps one called Portal? I hear some people played them in 2007.
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
I'd say that Portal by Valve pretty much dispels this argument. Gamers aren't tired of puzzles. They've simply gotten smarter and like being challenged rather than bored over mindless running around and pressing buttons to make doors open.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Did you just totally miss Professor Layton and the Curious Village?!?!?!?!
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
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.
Give it enough time and things will eventually come full circle, people will get tired of the same old shooter with amazing graphics and frankly thats what it's been for the last 7 years its been mostly about shooters with big guns and dazzling graphics. Today thats not good people want great gameplay mechanics, just look at the Wii, which reminds me of the good olde days of when my family and friends would crowd around ye olde Atari 2600. The good puzzle adventure games had their day after the Atari's sunset, give it some time and they'll be back.
That's why Portal was so wildly unpopular, right?
I think it might be a reaction to the highly arbitrary puzzles in past adventure games. Remember FFX and the arbitrary puzzles it forced you into every once in a while, they were maddenly arbitrary and added nothing to the game. Many of the Sierra games had random arbitrary puzzles as well. This is par for the video game puzzles. They add nothing and simply provide a barrier for people. There were a few interesting puzzles but largely they were senseless and distracting. I don't really want to play the towers of Hanoi every 20 minutes so I can open a locker with ammo. I'd prefer not to have to figure out that I need to insert a spatula into a anti-matter reactor so I can power a jar opener to access a gob of acid to eat through a door. If you left it optional, then maybe; but stopping the story and game to play some ridiculous puzzle or some arbitrary item combination is not fun.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Having non-randomized puzzle elements in games made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and hint sites.
Today, any such content is rapidly bypassed by most. To some degree that is a pity - games like Cruise for a Corpse were great experiences. But alas, the genre just requires too much self-command to be viable.
Of course, randomly-generated puzzlers are still with us - perhaps with increasing computer power, and more sophisticated AI, we will see a revival of randomized puzzle-like adventures?
I have always thought that the old Sid Meier title Covert Action is the best blueprint to follow to revive the puzzle-based action-adventure genre.
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!
The author misses his puzzles, and now yells at the neighbourhood kids to get off his lawn.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
God of war 1 and 2 were even balances of puzzles, timing battles, slaughtering minions, and bosses with predictable patterns. Aside from the minions, that could be considered 3 types of puzzles.
Portal mentioned twice is good, but additionally there were sorts of puzzles in half life 2.
Zac and Wiki, one of the best known hidden gems on the Wii is a point and click puzzle game.
Zelda and the Phantom hourglass certainly has it's share of very VERY innovative puzzles, making good use of the touch screen and even at parts the FOLDING of the DS (it says to touch a symbol on the top screen to a map, after about an hour of tapping everything in the dungeon I realized it was just you had to close, then open the DS, brilliant nintendo!) and I'm aware that the rest of the series relied on puzzles too.
Metroid prime 3 had quite a few puzzles and that's an FPS (although some who drink too much nintendo koolaid inist it's it's own "FPA" genre.)
Lego Star wars had many.
Halo 3 did not. Katamari didn't. Mario doesn't so much.
Furthermore, Tetris has been sold well on every system ever, Lumines is quite popular, Meteos did well...
In my limited experience, puzzles are still a staple of many, in fact I'd even say MOST games (aside from racing and strict FPS.) The author only mentioned two games to support his argument, and the fact that kids don't like puzzles. Well, kids don't like a lot of good stuff. When I was a kid, I thought macaroni and cheese was the greatest thing ever invented, so did my friends, yet you never saw any articles suggesting that fine dining is going extinct because MacDonalds does well and a lot of kids think steak is gross.
He's obviously picking a few games that don't have puzzles in them that he's played recently and jumped to the conclusion that developers and gamers all have ADD and don't want puzzles. He's wrong.
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
But unfortunately IMHO many of the later games (including some later offerings from Infocom) copped out and instead of eloquent puzzles they offered painful trial-and-error puzzles or puzzles so obscure and obtuse that you really had to buy the hint books, call the 900 number, or otherwise "cheat" or you were not going to solve the problems. Far from wonderful puzzles, these are just crude hacks disguised as puzzles from writers who either can't or will not take the time to design graceful puzzles. To come up with an absurd series of idiotic steps that a player must somehow recreate to accomplish the goal, with no logic behind doing these either in the real world or in the game world other than that's what the author has decided you must do, is hardly a valid puzzle. It's just an ego trip for the author and the reason for the decline in supposed puzzle games. And as at least one commenter here pointed out, there are still some good puzzle games, such as last year's Portal.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
all alike.
Actually, that is a pretty good description of slashdot.
AccountKiller
I think you've confused PUZZLES with TEDIUM. Memorizing (or writing down) a map isn't puzzle solving. It's data storage.
paintball
In those days the game world was smaller, and a single person could, through diligent gaming, acquire a thorough knowledge of every character class.
Take L30n4rd0, the wizard/technologist/tank/healer/DPS/accountant. And he was good at all of them.
Nowadays there's just too much to learn; you have to specialize :(
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet