Where have all the puzzles gone?

[Stupot]

I just came across this quite interesting article.  Haven't finished reading it yet, but it discusses one topic that arises on these boards every one in a while... why some games just seem to lack any decent puzzles.

It's quite a nice essay in a similar vein to Vince's 'Why Your Game is Broken' series. Then goes on to make case studies out of a nice selection of commercial adventures.

It's in two parts.
http://www.metzomagic.com/showArticle.php?index=851
http://www.metzomagic.com/showArticle.php?index=852

Sorry if this is old for anyone, but I'm finding it interesting and thought I'd share it.

[twentyfour]

Cool, thanks Stupot!

I'm slowly working out the (few) puzzles for my game. I've found several great lists of what to do, and not to do, but the examples in the article really help a put a lot of those rules in place for me.

[Snake]

Great! Thank you as well, Stu! I love all this stuff. I think the whole Adventure talk and chat forum should be full of these conversations.

[bicilotti]

Nice one Stu (also, your avatar rocks)

[Vince Twelve]

An excellent article. Nice find, Stu!

[densming]

Wow, great article.  Along a similar vein, here's an article that was posted recently about adventure game puzzles and common pitfalls.  http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/features/451/

[Kastchey]

You might have already figured out how to solve a particular puzzle, but depending on how well the parser for the game in question was designed, good luck figuring out what words to type in to make your character execute the solution. Also, the Web as we know it today was only an inkling in the eventual founding fathers' collective imaginations. So if you got stuck, the only recourse was to get a like-minded friend to pitch in with some fresh ideas.

Ah.. so very much true. I remember it took me days to finally make these delivery guys bring the wine in Larry 1, and my friends were no help either. I guess it was beyond us 12 year olds to figure out it was a HONEYMOON suite 

[kaputtnik]

I just had brief read, and what the author describes as "excellent puzzle design" in Day of the Tentacle (which is true for most of the game) is in fact pretty evil puzzle design in his first example.

"Now, we know that George is reputedly fond of chopping down cherry trees."

Of course, American children might know that George Washington chopped down cherry trees by the dozen, I didn't look it up but I suppose it is some kind of mythical story. I played DOTT in English first, and I was so completely stumped by the solution of that puzzle that I had to get the German version and look how they managed to make this accessible. And they solved it in the most horrible kind of way: You have to insult George Washington in a dialog that he could not even cut down a cherry tree to save his own dying grandmother. I rarely resort to that kind of emotional release, but in this case I can not prevent a heartfelt WTF?

[Hudders]

Isn't the fact that George likes chopping down cherry trees explained in the dialogue anyway? If it isn't, I have no idea how I worked that one out! 

I haven't played DOTT in years but I still walk around doing George Washington impressions: "well, waddya know? let's go chap the shucka down!" 

[Stupot]

Yeh, I'm pretty sure it is explained eventually.  I played it for the first time fairly recently.  I know nothing about the founding fathers, being an ignorant Brit, so I wouldn't have been able to work that out for myself.

[kaputtnik]

Yeah, I guess I must have missed that bit of dialogue back then - but still: Why would they localize the German version like that? I guess it was a mistake on the translator's part then, not looking up the cultural context of the joke/puzzle.

[Hudders]

Why would they localize the German version like that?

They didn't localise it, that's how you get him to do it in the English version as well.

Hoagie says: "I bet you've lost it. You couldn't cut down a tree to save your grandmother."

Maybe it's not an idiom used in German but in English it's pretty clear what he means, (he could have just as easily said "you couldn't cut down a tree if your life depended on it").

[Eggie]

When George says "I only cut down CHERRY trees" I remember collapsing with laughter at the absurdity of it all. What a difference hiring voice actors who can actually act can make.

I don't think you need a pre-existing knowledge of American folklore to understand, you can piece it together.

[kaputtnik]

Phew, I must have really missed something when I was playing DOTT the last time. But you're right, the puzzle does make sense, and now I also seem to remember George saying he'd only cut down cherry trees, at that point not collapsing with wild laughter but sitting still in sheer confusion, shaking my head at another joke that had been blocked by the language barrier.

And also: That grandma saying does not make any sense in German, which is probably why I remembered it in the first place. Conlusion: Good article, spot on.

[blueskirt]

Don't blame yourself too much, the conversation in DOTT at some points were strange, sometimes it might seems like you exhausted all conversation options but as soon the conversation was over, if you talked with the NPC again, you'd see dialogue options you did not discuss during the previous conversation. Other times, you'd only get one opportunity to ask a question to a NPC (which wasn't much of a problem since the NPCs in DOTT were mostly a source of jokes). Both of these happen when discussing with Ben Franklin. It's possible that you encountered one of those problem when discussing with George and the game never gave you the hint regarding the cherry tree.

Nice find, Stupot. A possible explanation to the degradation of puzzles might be that while early adventure games featured good puzzle design, it was the story and the humor that marked the players' imagination the most, and when puzzles marked the players' imagination, it was the particuliary bad puzzles that did the most. To a point where a lot of gamers and designers associate "adventure games" with "story" rather than "story with puzzle", and recent adventure games developers compensate the bad puzzles with great stories.

Also it took the genre a lot of trial and error until it got to Monkey Island and DOTT. Most probably adventure developers don't have the designing experience required to make a good adventure game and are simply emulating the mechanics of classic games in the genre without truly understanding what they are emulating, the basic rules and what made these games so great in the first place.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I'd like to see examples of this 'alot of trial and error' you speak of, because virtually all of the early games had puzzles that:

A) Were not confusing for me

and

B) More or less used logic, even if it was game world logic


The reverse of these traits, in my view, became more prevalent as the genre matured rather than in its infancy (text adventures, early graphic adventures).  Especially early on, I found graphic adventures to have very logical and often clever puzzles because it all hadn't been done before.  It could also be that people were less demanding when there was less variety of product to go around, which could be said of just about anything.

[Ghost]

Also it took the genre a lot of trial and error until it got to Monkey Island and DOTT. Most probably adventure developers don't have the designing experience required to make a good adventure game and are simply emulating the mechanics of classic games in the genre without truly understanding what they are emulating, the basic rules and what made these games so great in the first place.

That's like saying after twelve years of learning to cut really small gears and assembling them into a fine clock, a craftsman would have difficulty to build a small clock in a new colour, but with the same mechanism. Graphical adventure games were never new, they are a (somewhat logical) evolution of Interactive Fiction, which had produced some brilliant designers when the first steps towards graphics were made.

[blueskirt]

I'd like to see examples of this 'alot of trial and error' you speak of

I'm not sure what I need to re-explain. It took a lot of trial and error for the adventure genre to pass from Colossal Cave to Monkey Island, which is, with Myst, the formula which is mostly used nowadays. If the adventure games formula had been perfect from day one, Ron Gilbert wouldn't have writen that list of reasons why adventure games sucked back in 1989.

That's like saying after twelve years of learning to cut really small gears and assembling them into a fine clock, a craftsman would have difficulty to build a small clock in a new colour, but with the same mechanism. Graphical adventure games were never new, they are a (somewhat logical) evolution of Interactive Fiction, which had produced some brilliant designers when the first steps towards graphics were made.

Just in case it wasn't clear enough the first time:
Most probably adventure developers today don't have the designing experience required to make a good adventure game and are simply emulating games made by older and more experienced developers without truly understanding what they are emulating, the basic rules and every little details that made these games so great in the first place.

To use the clock analogy, just ask yourself who would be more experienced as a craftsman:
Someone who spent years to create, improve and perfect clocks, or someone who 10 years later simply replicate the best clock the previous craftman did without truly understanding why he did it that way?

And before somebody rip me a new one, the last paragraph in my previous post was written with big budget commercial adventure games in mind here, like the original article discussed, not indie developers.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I wouldn't consider Ron Gilbert's opinions the end all and be all on any subject.  By his own admission he's a disenchanted ex-designer, and honestly he's a has-been who worked on a couple of really great games and then disappeared into obscurity.  Secondly, there wasn't a massive design leap between Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken and Monkey Island; in fact, aside from visual and audio improvements, the changes were very small and incremental and mostly involved combining similar verbs to streamline the UI, so again, I don't see this trial and error you speak of (or any proof that Maniac Mansion made in 1987 is inferior to Monkey Island made in 1990 from a puzzle design perspective -- I argue that the reverse is true, if anything).  Aside from the diminished complexity and richness of multiple character combinations/puzzle solutions found in Maniac Mansion and Zak, the game formula for Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts adventures has remained relatively unchanged.  The progress toward a more linear single player experience that holds your hand through puzzle solutions isn't really what I'd define as improvement, just change.

[Huw Dawson]

On the DOTT subject; wasn't the victim tree visible from the window Washington looks out of from the camera's viewpoint?

- Huw