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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.
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."
I have a rule I use to distinguish good puzzles from bad puzzles: If the easiest method for solving the puzzle is a breadth-first search of the entire possible-solution space, it's a bad puzzle.
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.
Exactly. And having a leprechaun kill you a couple screens away from the end of the game just because you forgot to pick up a four-leaf clover in the second screen of the game isn't a challenging puzzle, it's just fucking sadistic.
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
I think you've confused PUZZLES with TEDIUM. Memorizing (or writing down) a map isn't puzzle solving. It's data storage.
paintball