Mechanics vs Narrative

[Babar]

Sorta stemming from the thread about adventure games that came up recently, I started thinking again (have I done this before? ) about the mechanics in adventure (and other sorts) of games, and how they're quite often at odds with the narrative, something that really shouldn't be happening. One of the incredible things about games as a medium is the inclusion of INTERACTION to all the other story-telling tools. The idea of having the participants involved in the story by actually acting it out is a great thing for immersing the player into the game's atmosphere, the characters, and make the plot feel more meaningful to them. But if that interaction actually takes away from the story, it is kind of broken, then, isn't it?

Just to make sure we're on the same page:
Trapping a cat to get its hair to make a disguise moustache to pass off as someone else breaks the immersion for me.
Chasing and repeatedly whipping a rodent to direct it into becoming bait to clear a forest path breaks the immersion for me.
Having to extract numbers from a vague poem found nearby to enter a passcode to get through a door breaks the immersion for me.
Getting into a "race against time" with a wet towel to sprinkle it on some clay to harden a mould to get through a door breaks the immersion for me.
Having to connect one name with a totally different unconnected name in your "memory inventory" just so you are able to realise that you can use it as a unisex name to get by someone...that breaks the immersion for me.
(and to give a non-adventure example) Acquiring 10 kraad rabbit skulls to give to a local sorceress so that she'll help you further in your quest to save the land breaks the immersion for me.

Now in and of themselves, these little situations might be funny to me, or I might be happy that I was able to solve them in such a "neat" manner, but how do they work overall towards the narrative the game is trying to weave?
These sort of absurd situations might work in an absurd game, like Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island. They were full of absurd situations, and it fit right in to find absurd solutions to those problems. But then what about more serious (or at least non-solely-comedic) games? Do such mechanics make sense in games involving shadowy conspiracies, Freemasons, Templars, the occult, etc.? One would imagine that maybe once or twice you may come across a situation that would benefit the story and game from an absurd solution, and the story may be better off for that, but the examples I gave aren't unique or one-off situations. Those entire games are set up like that.
Or is such stuff simple accepted as part of the genre and ignored as such (like I wouldn't complain that no one approaches me from and I can't fire towards the side in a 2D platforming game)? I'll admit, I had less problems with such games when I played them originally..I don't know if that has changed because I'm older now, or maybe because the potential for story-telling has increased or what.

Any suggestions of some non-solely-comedic games that bucked this trend? I suppose some of the more dialogue-focused games would count among them...

Or more importantly, any suggestions on how to overcome this problem?
I realise "design better stories" would be the overall answer, but it is a bit vague to be helpful . My general method of creating puzzles is as explained by Rodekill's tutorial (incorporated here). I write out the story as a series of obstacles, and then fill in the plot as the solution to those obstacles (as well as the gameplay in terms of solving puzzles). If the obstacle or the solution is too simple, that puzzle becomes less meaningful as a form of gameplay, but if the solution is too convoluted, then you get into the possibility of the silliness of it all breaking the immersion for the player.

So how should it work?

[Snarky]

But if that interaction actually takes away from the story, it is kind of broken, then, isn't it?

Just to make sure we're on the same page:
Trapping a cat to get its hair to make a disguise moustache to pass off as someone else breaks the immersion for me.
Chasing and repeatedly whipping a rodent to direct it into becoming bait to clear a forest path breaks the immersion for me.
Having to extract numbers from a vague poem found nearby to enter a passcode to get through a door breaks the immersion for me.
Getting into a "race against time" with a wet towel to sprinkle it on some clay to harden a mould to get through a door breaks the immersion for me.
Having to connect one name with a totally different unconnected name in your "memory inventory" just so you are able to realise that you can use it as a unisex name to get by someone...that breaks the immersion for me.

I see these examples as quite different from each other.

1. (Gabriel Knight 3) - Infamous for being silly, for making no "real world" sense, and for requiring a huge illogical leap to find the solution. Granted.
2. (Indy and the Fate of Atlantis) - The problem (way forward blocked by snake) and solution (chase a tapir towards it as "bait" to get it away) seem perfectly in keeping with the Indy universe to me. The puzzly part of it (getting it through the maze) is a little artificial; having animals behaving in a deterministic fashion does require some suspension of disbelief. I don't see this as a big problem, though.
3. (Not sure which example you're thinking of, but there are many of them) Fine as a puzzle, but the believability relies heavily on context: Is this something that whoever made the code lock/key would actually design, or is there some other reason provided for why the coded key is there? (There's a puzzle box in Conquests of the Longbow where you have to type in the answer to a riddle, and it makes sense because it's the kind of codes and secret locks you might imagine was used by messengers between scheming nobles in the middle ages.)
4. (Broken Sword) I don't really see a problem with this one, unless you feel water would realistically have been easily available somewhere else in the vicinity. It's solving a realistic (could plausibly occur just by chance) and relevant problem in a realistic way, isn't it?
5. (One of the Blackwell Games, isn't it?) I can see how the UI, the way the game forces you to express your insight, might have been obtrusive here, but the puzzle itself seems fine to me.

So I'm not seeing a common thread of design problems between the examples.

[cat]

I don't know, some of the puzzles mentioned are more appealing to me than having to read long dialogs and story. If I would like to play IF, I'd play IF and not adventure GAMES. Although I admit that some puzzles tend to be really stupid.

Btw, I read the puzzle tutorial on your page and have to admit that I wouldn't like to solve 10 different puzzles just to get on a plane. This is artificially prolonging the game, as are fetch quests (anyone remembering the rash cure from FotAQ?)

[Babar]

In all of them, the puzzles and their solutions are working contrary to what the narrative and atmosphere and all were building the game towards- the idea that the player, on whatever mission/goal/adventure/journey would be halted by an obstacle where the appropriate response would be to strategically whip a rodent to guide it to a certain direction, or rush around with a (sneakily nabbed and soaked towel) from one location to a far away other one, instead of getting water from somewhere else, carrying it something much more suitable, or that there would exist a place where someone is protecting their treasure in a safe/room with a code that has to be derived from a conveniently nearby placed poem (I think it was a Sherlock game, but I can't remember now), or an artificially created (through the mechanism of the GUI) puzzle of giving a name when most people would've thought of that already.

I'd say they're pretty silly even devoid of context, and the sort of silly that didn't really fit into their respective games (perhaps the Indy one maybe would've fit as an action as a whole, as something Indy might've done, if, as you say, not for the artificially lengthened puzzley aspect of it). At least for me, in most of those situations, the game would've been served better if the corresponding puzzle had been greatly reduced, or not existed at all.

Cat, I also agree that long bits of text and dialogue aren't the answer, but that is where the interactivity of games comes in. How to implement THAT as a "progresser" of the story, in a way that fits in the story and the characters and the world, rather than having what is essentially exposition-gameplay-story progression-more gameplay-story progression-gameplay-story conclusion. Although you brought to my mind an interesting thing...aside from being immersion breaking (at least in terms of narrative involvement), the examples I gave are mostly just obstacles in place to be solved to reach the next plot point, rather than methods by which the next plot point can be achieved.

[Anian]

It's hard to find that middle ground between "puzzle" and just a weird unusual thing you'd never do in real life because in RL you have a vastly wider number of choices. Then again when you make the puzzle way too obscure, it will jolt the immersion, not matter what, it breaks the momentum of the story and removes fun elements.

The things that is problematic - not everything is universally obscure or weird or unnatural. Personally, BS1 puzzle with the wet towel to moisten the powder is actually an okay puzzle, yes, of course I'd probably use an empty plastic bottle to transport water, but it's still well within borders. It's of course much easier when a player notices a puzzle (ah, I need water) and figures out what the solution is quickly (I know where I saw a source of water, hmm, towels can hold water -> solution), the longer time it takes to figure out (I'm not talking decrypting notes and such), the more noticeable the "puzzle" is going to be.
But again, that time needs to be calibrated, so the puzzle doesn't seem just like a game prolonger/fetch quest.

[Fitz]

Anian raised a good point about the limited number of solutions for a given problem in a game - most commonly just one. Of course, giving more options is problematic, because different solutions could mean the story branching out, and it might be hard to get it back on track (if, for example, you used -- and effectively lost -- an item that you were supposed to use later on). But to use the example with the towel -- what if you had the option to transport the water with your hands cupped? Or -- just hypothesizing -- a skullcap? Or, say, the Holy Grail that you just happened to find. That wouldn't destroy those items -- and the towel that you didn't use could be used to dry the Holy Grail before putting it back into your inventory. Another example: why do you need a key for a door? Even the most rickety, termite-ridden bunch of planks, barely nailed together? Wouldn't it be more intuitive to just kick them open? I know, I know, it's an adventure game, and you're supposed to think harder than that -- but let's say there's a timer inside the game's code, and if you haven't found the key in 30 minutes, the game would let you just kick the door in.

[Babar]

But if that is the case, what is the point of having the door there at all?

[Fitz]

Hm... The door is there just to mess with your mind: you see it as a barrier -- more so metaphorically than physically, sometimes. And that's what adventures are about: challenging your brain! To think outside the box. But requiring a key to open the door is an example of thinking "within the box", so to speak, isn't it?

But considering non-linearity purely as game mechanics: think of Fate of Atlantis. At one point - I forget which exactly, and what it was about - you could choose between doing/saying three different things, which determined the gameplay later on: there was one path that emphasized thinking, one that included a lot of fist-fights, and one with some teamwork. That was a clever thing. Metaphorically speaking, it didn't simply give you a door. It gave you THREE doors. Or - depending how you look at it - a door, a window and, let's say, a chimney?

[Gribbler]

On the side note, the decision to implement that branching gameplay paths in FoA supposedly extended game production time by half a year.