Week 16 - The art of game design

Jesse Schell.

Puzzles:

- Puzzles are in all forms of games. A puzzle can be which door to go through or which upgrade to grab.

- The "puzzle" of puzzles:
| Puzzles are a part of games but are they a game?
~ "Chris Crawford once made the bold statement that puzzles are not even really interactive, since they don't actively respond to the player."
This is compared to when man first found penguins (they're birds but can't fly?!)

- Scott Kim
| "A puzzle is fun and has a right answer"
~ The irony of that is that once a puzzle is finished it ceases to be fun!

- Puzzles vs. Games
| The main reason people don't class puzzles as games is because they aren't re playable.

- "When a game has a dominant strategy, it doesn't cease to be a game, it just isn't a good game.

- "A Puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy"

- GOOD PUZZLES

#1 Make the goal easily understood.
#2 Make it easy to get started.
#3 Give it a sense of progression.
#4 Give it a sense of solvability.
#5 Increase difficulty gradually.
#6 Parallelism lets the player rest (making the player stop and think, best way to avoid anger/rage-quits is to give multiple puzzles at once so if one appears too challenging they move onto another and still get a sense of achievement. (A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS REST)
#7 Pyramid structure extends interest (series of small puzzles which contribute to the completion of a larger puzzle.)
#8 Hints extend interest.
#9 Give the answer.
#10 Perceptual shifts are a Marmite (you get it or you don't).