Interesting article. As a user, I find a lot of video game puzzles hit-or-miss. They often are either too easy, where I don't get much satisfaction from solving them, or they're too difficult,...
Interesting article. As a user, I find a lot of video game puzzles hit-or-miss. They often are either too easy, where I don't get much satisfaction from solving them, or they're too difficult, where it's not worth the frustration of trying different (wrong) things over and over. Must be a nightmare to balance for puzzle game devs.
Print media puzzles, like crosswords and sudokus, can often skirt around this problem by just labeling their puzzle as beginner or advanced or whatever. And I guess many puzzle video games can do this too by just making an easier puzzle one of the first levels and then putting the harder puzzles at the end. But whenever there's a story involved, and you need to solve the puzzles in order to progress, that's when things can go wrong quickly, I feel. Because then the devs have to cater to all skill levels at once, or be able to provide enough hints/assists to make it solvable for everyone while still remaining just interesting enough to not be boring.
This discussion of puzzles in interactive fiction is also relevant for other kinds of games. Graham Nelson created Inform.
Interesting article. As a user, I find a lot of video game puzzles hit-or-miss. They often are either too easy, where I don't get much satisfaction from solving them, or they're too difficult, where it's not worth the frustration of trying different (wrong) things over and over. Must be a nightmare to balance for puzzle game devs.
Print media puzzles, like crosswords and sudokus, can often skirt around this problem by just labeling their puzzle as beginner or advanced or whatever. And I guess many puzzle video games can do this too by just making an easier puzzle one of the first levels and then putting the harder puzzles at the end. But whenever there's a story involved, and you need to solve the puzzles in order to progress, that's when things can go wrong quickly, I feel. Because then the devs have to cater to all skill levels at once, or be able to provide enough hints/assists to make it solvable for everyone while still remaining just interesting enough to not be boring.
Must be difficult.