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PROFESSOR: Before we move on to the rest of the topics,
maybe just some administrative stuff about the next
assignment.
So the idea is to model a system, right?
So the idea is to pick some sort of dual system.
In the past people have picked stuff like applying for
college because they knew all about that.
People have talked about any type of idea, you know,
running a nuclear reactor or something.
Specifically there's a--
but hey, any of you nuclear science majors?--
oh, perfect.
One of my favorite Apple II games was actually nuclear
reactor simulation, and it always melted down.
That's why it was fun.
But pick a real world system to start modeling.
Obviously, you're trying to find the fun.
Obviously, you're trying to make something that people are
going to enjoy playing.
But the idea is to start from a slightly different place
from where we had in the first assignment.
Now a couple of you guys already did that for the first
assignment, though.
I mean things like picking up girls at a party.
You know, modeling real systems and things.
Still haven't played yet, a genealogy game yet.
So, we're going to play next March.
So [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
The survival horror game, I would say it's not a real
world system.
It was a system.
Horror, wizards, trolls.
So, yeah, pick something within
games negotiating around--
like negotiating greenhouse gas emissions, that was one
which was really, really cutthroat.
That's what probably you imagine.
Actually I'll try to get that team to come in
later in the semester.
They did this and like talk about their card game.
It was a freshman team on Terrascope.
Let's see, On Wednesday, we're going to do the usual
brainstorming inside of the second half of the
upper-class.
You know, everybody throw out your ideas.
Come in with a bunch of ideas, we'll try to build on that.
But this time around you're allowed to actually
pre-build your team.
You're allowed to ask people, hey, you guys
want to work together?
You don't actually have to figure it out on the spot if
you don't want to.
I don't really care how you do it, as long as by Friday you
know who your team is.
And who's on your team.
Team sizes are the same.
So, any questions?
AUDIENCE: Are we allowed to simulate things that aren't
from this era?
PROFESSOR: Yeah, like normal history?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PROFESSOR: OK, not from like the future.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: Yeah, I'm serious.
This is how I think [INAUDIBLE].
OK, yes, absolutely there are no historical stuff--
but you do have some liberties.
I'm not saying that your game has to be a faithful
simulation.
You can even build your model simulation [INAUDIBLE].
But it doesn't have to be a faithful simulation, that's
certainly a poor design.
But, you know, in a sense you're trying to capture the
spirit of it.
If the point is, I'm running a nuclear reactor.
And you can sort of capture the, oh my God, it's so
dangerous , or the, oh my God, it's so boring aspect of it.
Have you actually put the nuclear reactor--
AUDIENCE:: Well, like, what's there.
And I know the mechanics of it, I think, were there.
PROFESSOR: I have been told it's not necessarily the most
exciting job in the world.
AUDIENCE: No, you just sit there and do your homework.
And every once in a while you look up.
Very reasonable.
And you get paid for it.
Like $12 or $13 an hour.
PROFESSOR: So if your whole idea of the game is let's try
to get as much homework done without letting [INAUDIBLE].
That might be more entertaining than just looking
[INAUDIBLE].
But I got my problems in then.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
You have to do [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: And besides, I think we still have a time
limit, like half an hour.
It's not [INAUDIBLE]
homework, it's really easy homework.
Really not homework.
Let's see, just a reminder for everyone who has been falling
off on the foreign posts, please make sure that you keep
up on your foreign posts.
Those things actually do affect your grade.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
one person, not one team.
If you have any--
since we're in between reading assignments right now, you can
write about the assignment.
But if you wrote up something, let's say a reflection on how
the class assignment went, that's fine.
We're not expecting more than one foreign post a week.
Of course, feel free to comment on other people's
foreign posts as well.
If a discussion or a point has been raised that's kind of
interesting, you want to kind of develop on that.
Put some thought into it.
Write something interesting you're going to keep on the
compilation, that counts too.
And that's fine.
OK, so puzzles.
So Brenda's, before we start with Brenda's, let's start
with Scott's.
What were some of the definitions, or some of the
things that Scott's game was mentioning, that were good for
puzzle design
AUDIENCE: The book or not in the book?
PROFESSOR: This was on the web page.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: --and had the right answer.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
PROFESSOR: He didn't really differentiate between puzzles
that could be generated like a pseudo-GUI or something, where
you kind of have an algorithm that lets you
create multiple puzzles.
But as long as that particular iteration had one answer.
So that was really there.
Anything else you remember?
AUDIENCE: Tactical difficulty.
Make it accessible but not super easy.
I think targeting a specific audience.
It was also the ability to change difficulty, it was
dynamic difficulty.
So some areas may actually be easier settings, and then
actually what they want to be is harder settings.
PROFESSOR: I think that was Brenda's.
But, yeah, am I wrong?
AUDIENCE: There's also the distinction between types of
difficulty.
Things where, you know, the letter puzzle you had at the
beginning where it requires thinking about
it, figuring it out.
It was patients versus something else.
I can't remember what the editor used.
But then you have things like mazes and locations where you
have to be very careful, and separate your way through.
PROFESSOR: And sometimes they bring in information from
other domains.
From outside the puzzle, it's not just like all the
information that you currently need in the puzzle.
But the interesting thing about the puzzle that he
particularly shows, is that he shows a range of different
ways to actually solve it.
None of which are actually satisfying except for the
final answer.
Which irritated me, I'm telling you.
I'm not giving you another puzzle.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
But it's kind of interesting to think about, actually, what
audience it's for those kinds of specific puzzles.
I mean, there are magazines out of there like Games
magazine in particular, but sometimes you see stuff
nestled into magazines that are not just about games.
You see stuff like crossword puzzles in newspapers and
things like that.
And now things like Sudoku and all that are way more popular
that are meant to be really in mass audience.
Whereas a magazine that is specifically targeted at
puzzle enthusiasts can be super hardcore.
With puzzles through the whole magazine then you can have a
whole range of different difficulties in there.
The assumption that you can solve something not so hard.
AUDIENCE: I'm kind of interested, does anybody know
how people in newspapers generate crossword puzzles and
Sudoku puzzles?
Does anybody know what the actual process behind that is?
I mean, I can imagine how you might do it.
You might start with the filled out thing and then
remove bits to get your Sudoku.
Or you might brute force, dictionary search to come up
with words which fit together in order to form a crossword.
AUDIENCE: What they do with Sudoku now is, they have some
computer algorithm--
and it has scales of difficulty--
and it generates a random Sudoku puzzle from your input.
AUDIENCE: Sudoku is solved enough that you can actually
just algorithmically generate [INAUDIBLE].
An actual numerical difficulty.
You scale it from 1 to 10, 10 being where where there's like
literally only one step to take in each point.
AUDIENCE: The one that took them three months to solve.
AUDIENCE: But like crosswords, there's people who actually
just get paid to sit down and generate those.
AUDIENCE: I know that Premiere takes submissions from other
people and they're edited by [INAUDIBLE].
And then people submit that and he kind of
like steps it up.
AUDIENCE: So he kind of
crowdsources crossword puzzles.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: But the difficulty in a crossword puzzles isn't
just in the geometrically how the words go.
The specific clues that they give you can be more or less
obfuscated in some ways.
And New York Times, in particular, is super
irritating with this.
They'll give you two words with no grammatical context
about how they're supposed to fit in.
So you can actually compare it to see how they're difficulty
scaling just by looking at the clues.
Not even looking at the puzzle itself.
And I thought the other thing about crosswords is, just to
bring up a point that we talked about in the earlier
class, the crosswords, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
that these are dependent upon the redundancy
of the English language.
You don't see every single letter of a word in order to
figure out what the word is.
So that if it's a word that you couldn't otherwise have
gotten from a clue, you can still get just by seeing the
letters that are available.
Because the English language is kind of about [INAUDIBLE],
redundant information.
If you dropped every single vowel in a sentence, you could
probably still make out what that sentence is.
And you don't necessarily get that with Chinese.
How many folks here have, [INAUDIBLE].
There are probably other languages here where like
every single character means a word or something like that.
AUDIENCE: Hebrew has no vowels, right?
AUDIENCE: Well, they do up until third grade and we start
dropping them after that.
So it's basically, because it is understandable without
vowels, you eventually just stop using them.
PROFESSOR: So that's interesting.
If you had a crossword in Hebrew, where you were
expected to write in the words with vowels, you probably
could actually do one very similar to an English one.
AUDIENCE: It's difficult because the vowels in Hebrew
are attached to a letter, not a separate character.
They're just down at the bottom of the lower letter.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Another thing, in a crossword the letter can make
a different sound in both.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Because a "v" could be vo, or va, or
ve, you don't know.
You only know by context.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
like "c" could be sss or ca.
Like a hard or soft c.
Or "g" could be ga or ja.
PROFESSOR: That is true, but although in English in
particular the phonetic meaning, the way how a certain
word is pronounced isn't necessarily essential for
solving a crossword puzzle.
Unless the clues happen to be phonetic clues.
You know, sounds like a fish.
So that may not come in so much to play when it comes to
finishing a part of it.
Jason, you had your hand up earlier about Sudoku.
JASON: It was a comment about the algorithmic [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: Also, one thing about algorithmic, about
Sudoku difficulty, a lot of it comes from the selected
removal of numbers.
There's not what is the final pattern going to look like
that's actually the difficulty.
It's how do we remove the numbers in a way that gives
multiple possible answers or multiple possible dead ends,
because really there's only one solution.
I'm not actually familiar with the algorithm with
which it does so.
But it seems to be very clear that there are at least two
algorithms.
One of which is very easy, which is just provide a
legitimate Sudoku solution.
And then the one that is slightly harder is now which
number is to be removed so that's it's still solvable.
PROFESSOR:: Have you all played Picross?
Someone want to describe it for the folks who aren't
familiar with it?
We can use the white board if--
sure.
AUDIENCE: I think the green one works better.
I remember green is better than black.
NICK: I'm really only familiar with the [INAUDIBLE]
3D [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
AUDIENCE:: Sorry to put you on the spot Nick, as always.
NICK: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
Here you'll have written poems.
And then they all have something [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Oh, this.
This one where you spell in the blocks.
NICK: And then given bits of information, we have to work
out which of these blocks is built and
which can be removed.
So the idea is the number tells you the number of blocks
in that row or column which has a filled block in it.
So in this case, nothing is in it's column.
This column and that column have nothing in it.
And this is probably not actually a very good example
because I just pulled the numbers out of my head.
AUDIENCE: Then you have the sums are not the same.
NICK: So it's not going to work, but you get the idea.
And things can get more complicated, traditionally
there's just, I think, three that are names.
That's there a connected block of three.
So, for instance, this, that, and that.
And I thought it had to be broken.
But if there's a three which, I think, is in a square or
something along these lines, that means there are three in
that column.
But there's a gap in there somewhere.
And then if it's like a three inch circle or something else
complicated like that.
Then that means that there are three but they all have gaps
between them.
AUDIENCE: But I've also seen versions where they have just
a list of numbers.
And those are the--
there are [INAUDIBLE] blocks of that length.
PROFESSOR: So if there's four in a column you might say two,
three, five.
Which means there is a block of two, followed by a block of
three, followed by a block of five.
AUDIENCE: And they have to have a gap between them.
PROFESSOR: And they will have to have a gap in between them.
So it's not like you can actually get a block of eight
in there somewhere.
But the whole idea is that you've got this information
that is actually redundant.
You've got more information in there than you necessarily
need to be able to figure out which box and the situation to
be filled in.
Whether this should be empty.
But it's presented to you in this obfuscated way.
The evidence, the clues that are given to you in a way that
requires you to perform these algorithms in order to figure
out which ones should be changed.
And usually that's an algorithm
you can use to solve.
Although, I think Kim was the one that was talking about
pattern matching.
But eventually as you get good at these things, you start to
recognize patterns right of the bat.
Like, that's a zero.
So that entire row is empty.
That's the sort of thing that I do that becomes
automatic for you.
AUDIENCE: So, let's see.
I don't have much left more to talk about Scott [INAUDIBLE].
Now these are, these are more generated stuff.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
So this basically is along the lines of what Scott [? Pim ?]
is talking about.
But obviously this is more physical not the pen and paper
kind of thing.
AUDIENCE: Will you print up a copy?
PROFESSOR: Oh, you want the copy?
No, because I just want you to look at this.
Look at this first, don't look at that.
Don't look at that.
So the basic idea is, let me just start with one, you get a
card that is actually a puzzle.
I wish we were doing these outside now, because we're
going to zoom this out.
But the puzzle basically just tells you how you are supposed
to set up your board initially.
So, there's a-- oops wrong [INAUDIBLE].
There's a green guy there.
This is supposed to be an easy puzzle, I hope it is.
Because I'm getting bad at this.
Red guy go to [INAUDIBLE]
I think.
Yeah, and that's the puzzle.
And there's one little square on it, and
that you have to check.
So the basic idea is you tip over the pieces so
that the guy moves.
And you don't want to be tipping over the pieces in a
way where the white guy can't move anymore.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so you're tipping over things to make a
path that he can walk along, right.
AUDIENCE: If I make a closed loop, he has
to touch every piece?
AUDIENCE: I think he just has to get to this one.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, you have to get to the red one.
AUDIENCE: There's a plus mark.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: I'm not exactly sure how to solve this one.
AUDIENCE: Yellow that way, green, yellow that way.
AUDIENCE: Wait, you're allowed to tip him over?
How do you die?
PROFESSOR: My understanding is that he needs to fall onto
another piece, actually.
So let me just confirm I set this up right, actually.
Yeah, I did.
AUDIENCE: No, so you push the yellow that way.
And then the green that way.
And the other green that way.
AUDIENCE: So put the yellow ones first?
AUDIENCE: So do the green ones first.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I don't actually have the
rules for the guy.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: How does he fall?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: He's actually allowed to move on anything
that's contiguously connected.
So, as long as you can continuously connect up to
this, you're fine.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: 10: So tip that first green.
No, other one.
And then form a path, right now, if you tip that.
Oh, there's a hole.
AUDIENCE: 11: Are you sure tip them over means more brown
spot and not--
AUDIENCE: 12: Well, if doesn't then you can't reach
the red after it.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, I am absolutely sure it means that
you're supposed to tip it over in a way that--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: 13: Tip the yellow one first.
Then move the guy out to the green.
Then tip over the green.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: That is why it's supposed to begin a
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
You can actually do it.
This is why this is puzzle one.
AUDIENCE: 14: You can even fall on top of anything?
That's bizarre.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: But, you know, this is not entirely unlike the
kind of puzzle that Scott does.
I mean, sure, this is one particular piece of plastic
that the game is designed to work with.
But basically it's just like a book, right?
It's like a book of puzzles.
So there are also solutions in here, but I find the solutions
harder to read.
AUDIENCE: The [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
was in the book.
PROFESSOR: It was in Brenda's book?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PROFESSOR: So, actually, that's probably a good excuse
to switch over to Brenda's.
Well, actually, before that I want to take
a look at the tangrams.
Everyone play the tangrams?
So, the basic idea is you've got these shapes.
Does this one get in, like this?
You've got these shapes, and if you assemble them right as
is usually described on the side of the box somewhere.
Where the heck?
AUDIENCE: It's on the inside.
PROFESSOR: I've got a big picture on the side.
Is that you can actually fit all of these shapes inside
that square.
So these are basically just a square that's been divided in
a specific way.
So once I've got this assembled everyone can just
pass this around.
Anyone who has already seen it can pass it on.
That one doesn't fit very well, but it works.
Hey, that's, ta da.
OK, so this is the basic side.
Now this is how it's been sold, at least, is that this
is actually a calendar.
So every day you get a different shape.
It's a cute little thing.
It's a pretty rudimentary geometrical shape.
Some of them have, I think this is supposed to be a
sphynx or something.
It looks like a frog.
This looks like a Pac Man thing.
So the idea is that you rearrange those particular
shapes into all of these different shapes.
And you could play the game without getting these puzzle
solutions, right?
And it talks a lot about, if you've got a toy that's worth
playing with, you've got the beginning of something that
might make a good game.
The nice thing about tipover is that it's kind of fun to
tip over things.
And the thing about tangrams is that I actually had more
fun playing with tangrams than trying to solve specific
problems just by just trying to rearrange these.
Who hasn't seen these before?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Kind of embarrassing.
AUDIENCE: You should be ashamed of yourself.
And all the work that you did is gone.
PROFESSOR: But the thing is, as a toy it doesn't really
matter, right?
Because it's just a certain piece of anything.
And you kind of want to take it apart and make new shapes
with it, like a little house.
So if you've got something that's kind of fun to fiddle
with to begin with, you've got possibly the beginning of a
game in general.
But the way how Scott was talking about it, there's this
intermediate step where it's a puzzle.
It's a toy with a specific solution that you're
trying to get to.
And a game is kind of one step beyond that where now there is
multiple solutions and competitive.
At least, that's how he's describing it.
He's not really a game theorist.
He just works with puzzles.
AUDIENCE: He talks about it in terms of a goal, right?
So then with a toy that you don't have a goal with them.
With a puzzle, you have one goal with no interaction.
And then a game is with interaction.
PROFESSOR: And possibly multiple goals as well.
But again it becomes more and more directed as toys
are very free form.
So there are people who describe games, like the Sims
for instance, as actually toys.
In the same way that you describe a doll house as a
toy, they're saying it's kind of like a digital doll house.
But later versions of the Sims added more and
more specific goals.
Like now you have to throw a party with at least five
people in it.
Or you have to attain career level five or
something like that.
I can't remember exactly how they measured it.
But that kind of has a goal.
We are going to give more and more specific things for you
to work towards.
But the Sims is very careful not to lose it's toy sense.
This adds up.
If you really want to just dick around with these guys,
go right ahead.
Just play around with them and see what happens.
AUDIENCE: Why is there a distinction for physical
objects between toys and games, but for like video
games-- like Mindcraft it is technically still a game but--
PROFESSOR: It kind of has different modes.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I guess it has different modes, but it's more
of a toy, I think.
PROFESSOR: I would say that's entirely marketing.
The only reason is people haven't figured out how to
sell digital toys.
And there are games aisles in like Best Buy and so, well,
this is a fun thing we're going to put it
into the game section.
Everyone starts calling it games.
And that's kind of the same thing with the Sims.
It's that really the Sims should be it's own genre, but
you can't sell it's own genre that well.
[INAUDIBLE]
Was there a hand over here?
OK, so let's start with Brenda's--
if it stops reading, so let's just move on to Brenda's.
And she's very specific about the kinds of puzzles that
she's talking about.
Is that these things that get in the way of a very specific
narrative experience that a game wants
to guide you through.
She describes them more as roadblocks than anything else.
But, you know, things to make the challenge higher, but
possibly so high that no one is going to be
able to get past them.
Some of her examples are things that come up as, sort
of, intermittent but optional mechanics like
hacking in Bio Shop.
And sometimes there are things that you have to solve,
especially in adventure games.
There's this, you have to combine this object with that
object and bring it to a specific location.
And then now you can proceed with whatever narrative
they've got.
AUDIENCE: She had this specific axe to grind against
puzzles having meaningful rewards or not being
completely bought in.
So, for instance, she says you should never have a puzzle
being required to open a door.
She said, solve a puzzle and then get some kind of tangible
reward like loot or something.
This is after I just spent the bus ride to New York City
playing Professor Layton's.
Which was nonstop, with on the door, it's got a lock on it,
looks like a puzzle.
So I wasn't entirely to sure what to make of that.
I thought that my Professor Layton experience was fine,
and I didn't need to get fat Layton loot from some
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: That's actually something, and there's a
really good article actually written by
Clara over in our lab.
Actually, it wasn't an article, it was the transcript
of a talk that she gave at Austin University--
I'll send on the link to everyone--
about how you can integrate, and why you should integrate,
puzzles really, really well into the narrative.
It's like really why is there a puzzle in your game at all
unless it's been integrated into the narrative?
And Brenda seems to be, sort of, providing a cautionary
tale of the--
But if you do it badly, no one can get on with the story.
No one can enjoy the rest of the game.
It becomes this one thing that prevents you from proceeding?
Is there anyone who had that moment?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: About five minutes into Mist.
I don't know.
It had some sort of cool live action video and stuff.
And it looked like it could be an interesting story.
That's kind using technological prowess of
integrating video into 3D.
And then suddenly I looked in to the picture
and I was on an island.
And then there was nothing happening and I had to turn
things to face each other.
And I couldn't figure it out.
AUDIENCE: When I originally played The Legend of Zelda.
The original one.
So they don't tell you anything pretty much.
And so the temples, you just walk around the sun, then it's
like, OK, there's a tree and a forest.
You're supposed to burn [INAUDIBLE]
and there's the entrance to this temple that you can't
proceed until you do this thing.
And so, it's just like, how am I supposed to know that I'm
supposed to burn this particular tree in the middle
of this huge map?
PROFESSOR: Did you beat any of the other--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, and they didn't say anything.
PROFESSOR: No, I mean the other Zeldas?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, actually yesterday we [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: I was just saying, so the interesting thing is
most people nowadays they end up playing, like the Ocarina
of Time, Majora's Mask, they are moving backwards.
So they end up playing the first Zelda after having
played these old ones.
So you sort of know that you're expected to do these
random things to get like across.
So I feel like it's easier for people, but then--
AUDIENCE: But with the original Zelda--
you know how in new ones they have, let's say, a wall that
you can blow up.
It's discolored or something.
In this one every tree looks exactly the same.
They use the same stripes.
AUDIENCE: If I remember correctly, though, it's placed
such that it's in the center of your screen, right?
So it does look a little bit different.
AUDIENCE: No, it was just a random tree.
It was just a whole bunch of trees.
And so you just really have to get, whatever a type of thing
to burn it-- a specific one--
and burn it.
AUDIENCE: I remember it was a little suspicious.
Because I think there was a one tile column, you kind of
navigate around just this loop.
You just entered and--
AUDIENCE: That's suspicious.
AUDIENCE: And I'll feel very frustrated by games that
require walk-throughs in order to play them.
PROFESSOR: Sure, and that was the other thing that she
suggested some game designers do.
They put the solution in the Prima Guide.
So that you have to buy the Prima Guide in order to
[INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Does Prima have a deal with the--
PROFESSOR: Oh, they must have.
AUDIENCE: They say "official" on the top for a reason.
AUDIENCE: It's also ironic, because modern Zelda games,
it's very obvious that you have to use this or that item.
AUDIENCE: You've got a key.
Use this key to open.
AUDIENCE: Oh, you got this item in the dungeon.
You have to use this item to kill the boss.
That sort of thing.
It's blatant.
AUDIENCE: Well, for people who are really, really hopeless,
there's that little fairy.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: They're usually less useful than you think.
So one big difference between the old Zelda games and the
new Zelda games is just this continual refinement in their
user interface.
And it goes all the way from little things like the notes
that you hear when you find a new dungeon.
And exactly when, precisely, you hear the sound of, you
know, too da loo--
at least I think that's how it sounds.
You know, as a clue that now you have opened a door.
That's one of those things that, if you look at post
[INAUDIBLE]
Ocarina of Time.
I think there's a couple on Gamasutra, exactly when that
sounds plays is a decision that was
very carefully designed.
And it seems to me that in digital puzzles those kinds
of, especially in some sort of narrative structure like in
Ocarina, that's the big problem
that you have to solve.
You have to give enough clues.
You have to give enough UI feedback.
And you have to think about your UI so hard in a way that
is going to make it possible so that we get all the
information [INAUDIBLE].
So, say that burning fire tree situation, if there is nowhere
else in the world where you can get that information, then
it's back inside puzzle.
If there is a guy in--
I can't remember Zelda I--
but there is a guy who actually tells you that that's
the tree that you need to burn.
But if it's not obvious, especially for someone who
hasn't encountered that guy, that that's where you get that
information it's still a bad designed puzzle.
Even though now there's a solution.
But thinking about, and some examples will be in a lot of
tech space adventures as well as text heavy graphical
adventures.
You have a, I can't solve this puzzle, but what my character
says to the player about why you can't solve the puzzle is
itself a clue.
It's like, hm, I must not have the right item.
Maybe there's something else I can use.
That's a huge clue.
AUDIENCE: I feel like digital popular games have gotten
really good at integrating hint systems in recent years.
But I can't think of any physical puzzles that I've
come across that may just not have quite been up to speed
with crossword puzzles.
That have that kind of not totally revealing the solution
but giving you a gradual hint which can help
you figure it out.
AUDIENCE: Well, mystery puzzles kind of do that.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PROFESSOR: Describe the mystery puzzle for folks who
don't have--
AUDIENCE: It's basically, it's a competition run by MIT over
IAP where teams of people compete to solve a bunch of
puzzles, like 70 puzzles, that kind of build on each other.
So you have, say, 20 base puzzles.
And if you solve those 20 puzzles you
get 20 words as solutions.
And then those 20 words become a new puzzle, and that's the
meta-puzzle.
And it kind of keeps them like that for a couple layers.
But the point is the winning team from the previous year
writes the next year's mystery hunt.
So you get all kinds of varying puzzles of varying
difficulties and styles.
A very well-designed puzzle actually does that, because
you have this thing called, flavor--
Oh, I guess I should say that the puzzles aren't like Sudoku
or crosswords.
You literally just get something on a screen or
something on a piece of paper, and you have to figure out
what to do with it.
You're not given any instructions for how to solve
it whatsoever.
And the only clues you get are either by the title of the
puzzle, by the group of puzzles that it's in, or by
this thing called flavor text.
Which is like, they say some kind of random phrase that
seems to not have anything to do with anything.
But that kind of gives you a clue about what to do in the
thick of this puzzle.
So that's kind of like what you were describing.
AUDIENCE: That's interesting, because it's really
challenging when you don't have any mechanism for giving
feedback to the person who is working a puzzle.
In Zelda, or what have you, you can see that they've spent
a long time dicking around.
PROFESSOR: It's kind of a double-edged sword, in that
particular case, because you have so many mechanisms and
now you're expected to use all of them in a game like that.
You use sound, you have to use contextual buttons, you have
to use the inventory.
The position of the player matters or something.
I've seen games where the main clues is what is the character
looking at, for instance.
And you walk around, why does my character keep looking that
way every time something happens?
Oh, that's because--
you know.
So, yeah, as far as of a lot of physical stuff, I would say
that one of the reasons is they're just starting to build
these physical games from toys.
A lot of the importance is, a lot of things you could
possibly do, are kind of built into the physical object.
And if you're building a puzzle based on what you could
do with these things as a toy, then you're necessarily
already using the constraints of what you can do with it as
a toy in order to create the puzzle.
This might be a good exercise actually, if time--
we could take a shot at this.
And just by, you know, trying to come up with
a puzzle and see.
But instead of imagining one in a digital space, try to
imagine one in a physical space.
Because I suspect what you actually get is, you get a
free language with physical puzzles.
Because things physically have interactions that we
[INAUDIBLE] from a digital puzzle.
ADAM: I feel like Coral Reef or something, and that's a
game where like the puzzle--
I mean obviously it's still a digital game-- but the puzzles
are very much physical puzzles.
Like you kind of have an idea about what--
has Patrick played Portal, of course?
Or know the idea?
I mean, you have these two portals and you understand
what the physics is going to be like.
So the puzzles aren't frustrating in the sense that
it's like, oh, you realize there's this
random statue here.
And if you pull the lever it raises the water level or
something like that.
But it's very intuitive.
It feels like a physical puzzle in a sense that I know
what will happen if I do this.
And I just figure out how to put the pieces together.
And also Portal what I think it does a really good job of,
as well as some physical puzzles do, is having a
learning curve.
Like Tangram will have some basic puzzles, or I'm sure the
falling thing, a lot of them do it.
Physical puzzle things where you like, I don't know, how to
jump over pieces or whatever, have basic levels--
basic boards--
where they show you various techniques.
And you only have to figure out one technique, and it's
very obvious what you have to do.
And later on you have to use those techniques.
PROFESSOR: Well in Tickle Her, this particular example does
something that multiple portals does really well.
Is that the very first puzzle that we did earlier only has
one solution.
And you do not get that solution unless you understand
all the mechanics of the game.
But we tried to solve it a whole bunch
of different times.
And it's like because we didn't quite understand the
rules, we couldn't get it until we understood the
mechanics of the game.
Now we can suddenly solve it.
So from puzzle number two onwards, we can't be confident
unless you know it.
Portal, and even--
actually just about any well-designed game-- but I
would say Portal is a fine example-- if you've beaten a
game, you can play through the game again with developer
commentary.
And when you show that, you actually realize that every
single fairly intuitive physical thing that you pick
up in the game had to be taught to you.
And they've designed the level very clearly.
So right in the beginning of the game, if folks can't
remember, you're trapped in the middle cell.
And the GlaDOS talk to you, and a portal opens and you can
walk through it.
What do you see out of the first portal that opens?
AUDIENCE: You see yourself going into the other one.
PROFESSOR: You see yourself going
through the other portal.
And it's like, they force you to have to look at what the
basic game mechanic is going to be before you can do
anything else that's productive in the game.
You know, you can pick up the radio, but--
So that was a design decision.
They could have decided not to make it.
They could have just made you go through that into a
different room, and the learning opportunity would
have dissolved right there.
So if you've got a copy of Portal, I would suggest go
back and page through the commentaries
because they are hilarious.
And you're also rereading good form, demonstrating in this
room, this is what we had to do in order to
make people get it.
I'm also thinking of games like Mario World I where you
don't get very far on this kind of basic
game mechanics now.
But they make it really gentle in that I don't think there
are any hits that instantly kill you.
AUDIENCE: That's exactly what I was thinking in Mario.
In the first Gamasutra article we read on late-game
abstractions, we read about a Mario world.
He's like, we expect the same kind of actions, key the
system, all the time-jumping.
And I guess you can kind of look at different things
there, like double-jumping.
And things like that in a specific puzzle.
And the physical [INAUDIBLE] also.
PROFESSOR: I mean a lot of Mario's worlds are laid out
basically as spatial puzzles, right?
It's like you know you have to get there, but you don't know
exactly how you're going to use all of the mechanics that
you've got.
AUDIENCE: In Mario 64, I think their way of solving the
impasse problem of not locking up all the content in the game
because of the one puzzle you can't get, they're giving you
so much to do that even if they don't really tell you--
even if a good 30%, 40% are going to remain mysterious to
you, you're not really going to figure them out--
there's so much [INAUDIBLE] between, you never walked off
with a significant amount of content.
PROFESSOR: So if you've got a hub-like structure you can do
any one of five different things at any given time.
Plus you have some secondary solutions, like you can always
go back to a world that you've been to before and try to
collect all the stars, for instance.
I think that's kind of what Brenda was kind of indicating.
You don't necessarily want, if you're putting puzzles in your
game, she was advocating for--
Brenda and Ian were advocating for--
something that wouldn't necessarily progress
on to the next one.
But I think that's not a requirement.
I think that's a, if you want to make your life easier, this
is what you do.
If you decide that you're up to the task, you can achieve
some really amazing effects by having your puzzles
narratively incorporate it.
Has anyone heard of the game called Eternal Darkness?
It's a sort of Lovecraftian horror game on the GameCube.
I'll sort of describe it, but basically the whole basic idea
is that you have four gods all warring against each other.
Three of them hate one of them, but then those three
also hate each other.
And most of the puzzles are just sort of understanding
that there is this mystical object.
One god defeats another god defeats another god in a rock,
paper, scissors circle.
And all of them hate this one other [INAUDIBLE].
So early on in the game there is actually a puzzle, there
are actually a number of different puzzles, where you
see the symbols of these gods.
And you have to kind of rearrange them
in the correct order.
And the rest of the game is all going to be variations of
understanding what these gods do to each other.
So those are all puzzles that inform you of
how the world works.
And that kind of works in two ways.
One, information that you've already gathered about the
world-- about how this world works--
gives you clues on how to beat the puzzles.
Beating the puzzles, finding the solutions for the clues,
gives you information about how the world works.
And that's kind of like the holy grail for a puzzle
designer in a digital game, is that you're going to design a
puzzle that's going to reinforce how the world works.
There's a chap--
who gave a talk, and I believe his name is Jeff Howard.
He came to Camp [INAUDIBLE] and gave a talk last year.
And he makes this case that games, and the logic that you
present in games, do basically the equivalent of what magic
systems actually do in the real world.
What people like cultists or astrologers do is they
basically give you logics that explain how the
world is going to work.
And while that may not necessarily be obvious, but if
it is viewed as a whole knowledge you'll be able to
understand how it's [INAUDIBLE] in you.
But more importantly you'd be able to do things in the world
that allow you to accomplish things that you wouldn't
otherwise do.
Learning a game is very much like that, it's like I don't
know how this world works but if I understood these
particular rules I could be able to
accomplish greater things.
And puzzles can be one of those things where
it becomes a test.
And it becomes a test of, just exactly how well do you
understand this?
Even if it is like in a combat game like Quake or God of War
or something.
I can understand how the combat system basically works
if I just keep mashing the x button or something.
Or just shoot everything with rockets.
But if I really, really understand the combat system,
I might be able to hit something that I wouldn't
necessarily be able to hit.
I might be able to take down a horde of enemies instead of
hitting them down one at a time.
I might be able to beat a boss.
And actually a lot of boss battles in digital games are
actually puzzles.
There's not, how well do you generally react, it's can you
figure out the pattern.
But that pattern doesn't mean anything unless [INAUDIBLE]
how all your other combat skills work.
So a boss battle in Zelda only makes sense if you figured out
how that one item that you picked up in that dungeon
works really, really well.
OK, it shoots fire.
That means that not only does it hurt them from distance, it
also lights some of the things on fire.
And that's what I'll tell the boss, basically, is combining
this leaders ability to hook up.
Like everything else that you've done before
into taking it out.
That's why boss battles, that always kind of puzzled me.
AUDIENCE: One thing I wanted to say, before I get going,
you were asking about hints and a physical puzzle.
The one thing that jumped to my mind was a couple years ago
the weekly Day--
I don't know if anyone reads it, it's like
a free Boston newspaper.
And they always have crossword puzzles.
For the longest time they were thematic, and so you would
have a guest crossword.
The first one I ever did was Hulk Hogan.
So all of the hints in the crossword puzzles are related
to Hulk Hogan.
So it's a question of, not what does this mean to me but
what would it mean to Hulk Hogan?
And they don't do it anymore, which is really depressing,
because every week it was something different and it was
like a built-in hand write as you went.
You didn't just pick them out literally, you have to kind of
contextualize it.
PROFESSOR: You can think about all the things that come with
the puzzle, that potential hook, [INAUDIBLE].
Like a title, like a data text-- as you were
describing-- the fact that you get in puzzle and mystery
crimes, they may be [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and they may
be disillusioned but it lies on a different puzzle.
Not the one I'm currently looking at right now, because
that's how [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
Metal Gear Solid has a really, really bizarre one where--
AUDIENCE: Look in the back case.
PROFESSOR: Where they tell you, oh, there's a specific
radio frequency that you need.
It's written in the back of box.
And it's like, the back of the box?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
Anti-piracy.
PROFESSOR: Yes, but it's still a puzzle.
And I was like, I know how to solve that.
I mean, it was pretty obvious, because maybe it's just me,
because it about half an hour to figure that one out.
It took me some effort.
AUDIENCE: I mean Metal Gear Solid a lot of
meta-puzzles like that.
Like when you fought Psycho Mantis for the first time.
Well, so the scene you had to do is you went to unplug your
controller and plug it into the second port because he
would read your movements.
And it was this cool, physical layer of it where you're
playing the game.
Then you realize I have to interact with the physical
world so that he can't see what I'm doing.
PROFESSOR: But that one [? cannot do, ?]
because in that particular example that one gave you a
very big clue because right at the beginning of that match
that boss tells you to put your control on the ground.
And he says, I'm going to control this
controller with my mind.
And actually, just [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: That's only if you have dualtech.
So, because on PlayStation, if you didn't he just
ignored that part.
And you didn't get that clue at all.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, and that's a problem.
But it's still very cool.
AUDIENCE: There were other clues, like you would talk
about how you had been playing certain games by reading saves
on your [INAUDIBLE].
At least not in Castlevania.
I just remember being like--
[INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So basically it's giving you a clue that there's
got to be something better about the way that you're
currently playing.
The funny thing about the radio channel is that one
really did not give you any clue that there
was something better.
It just told you about the back of the box.
It was like, it didn't tell you the back of the video game
case, right.
It's not going to be that specific.
AUDIENCE: It said CD case, specifically.
I was really confused, because I think mine came in a slip of
paper or something.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, if you buy it used or something.
PROFESSOR: Yeah, so it's anti-used game
protection, as well.
But yeah, mine was I think I actually said on the back of
the CD case, but I was playing like a [INAUDIBLE] or
something and that came in the DVD case.
So I didn't make a connection.
But if you look at the back of it, you see what the radio
frequency is in the screenshot.
One of the eight screenshots that they show to demonstrate
this is what the game is all about, there's the number and
it's just right in there.
And then key it in.
AUDIENCE: Has anyone played any of those breakout games?
Where it's lock you in a room and you have to--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, you find the thing, you find a slip of
paper and escape [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So, actually who doesn't know
what these are about?
Escape the room.
OK, so escape the room-- actually, could we bring up
something on your computer?
AUDIENCE: I have to go grab the video thing.
PROFESSOR: Oh, the video cable.
AUDIENCE: It's back there in my office.
PROFESSOR: Oh, OK cool.
Call [? Becky ?] to send it.
Escape the room games are typically flash games.
And they're kind of like adventure games because
there's usually only one room, although sometimes you have
multiple rooms.
It's a much smaller world in most adventure games.
But the basic idea is the same.
You pick up objects, you use objects in a room, and you try
to make things happen.
You know, if you haven't made anything, you are not
progressing in the game.
If you made something happen, you are almost always making
forward progress in the game.
And there is, actually, a guide for playing adventure
games written by Roberta Williams, who did the Original
King's Quest series.
And her guide is like, pick-up everything, go everywhere, use
everything on everything.
That's actually what escape the room really is.
But there's a little bit more to escape the room games, but
there's just not that many things that you can explore.
That's the idea is that you're stuck in a room.
And basically it comes down to just use everything on
everything until you figure out what comes up.
Rarely is it logical, often pretty entertaining, because
they're animation heavy.
So every time you do something right, you
get some crazy animation.
I put the fish into the mail slot and
out appears an octopus.
It's fun to watch.
For us, the kind of comparatively opposite of
those are the Grow games.
And they're a series of games called Grow.
I think the guy who does them is called Eyezmaze.
And the whole basic idea is that imagine that you have a
flower pot.
And every time you add something to
it something happens.
But the order in which you are adding things to it makes
different things happen.
And there are solutions, basically, in making the
optimal number of things happen if you do it right.
So what you can do is not a mystery at all.
You have these six things that I could add to my pot.
And I know those are the only six things I could add.
The question is what order do I do them?
And doing them in different orders give
you different results.
And I feel that these two genres are kind of linked, but
they're playing off very different things.
One of them is, I don't know what I'm going to do.
But I know that whatever I do has got to leave this space.
And the other one is very much, I know exactly what I
can possibly do, I just don't know what order to do them in.
So a couple of puzzles that you see online.
These are fairly encapsulated things.
One game is one series of puzzles.
There's not like a professor-made encyclopedia
puzzle kind of thing.
What time is it?
OK, I think I'm actually going to grab a few more puzzles and
bring them in.
But I do actually want to try to see whether we can put
together a list of the kinds of puzzles that we haven't
talked about today.
These could be physical puzzles, these could be
puzzles that you've seen in a book by their genre.
Logic puzzles, you know, of a certain kind that you either
really, really like or you really, really loathe.
And just break up in groups of--
three, six, nine, Heather [INAUDIBLE], ten, eleven,
twelve, seventeen people.
Seventeen people?
That doesn't divide at all.
OK, two or three.
Groups of two or three and just like--
AUDIENCE: Jason should be back.
PROFESSOR: OK, all right, then groups of three.
How about we--
just like--
you know, just a couple of puzzles that we haven't
discussed and a description about what they're like.
And we'll quickly run through the class to sort of give
everyone an idea of what--
As a toy, playing with a Rubik's Cube is more fun than
the algorithm to solve it.
That's not fun at all, in my opinion.
AUDIENCE: It's fascinating, you can also solve it.
But it's [INAUDIBLE], very tempting when
you look at it also.
AUDIENCE: So, one of the things you were talking about
was interactive fiction.
Text adventures.
And how sometimes they could be considered just like if
you're playing a regular adventure game but just with
text instead.
And so the puzzle could be how you interact with the world,
or it could be trying to figure out what actions are
available to the user.
Like sometimes not all actions are there.
But also in some games the nature of text gives you
different ways to have a puzzle.
Like in Lost Pig, because you're playing an orc he
doesn't know English very well.
Or doesn't have full control of language, so you're trying
to decipher his words to figure out what
he's actually seeing.
PROFESSOR: Do you have an example you can do?
To give with that to make it clearer?
Because I haven't played it.
AUDIENCE: In that game, there is one part where he's
describing a box and it has a slot.
And you put something in it and then it gives you
something out.
But the way he's describing it, you don't really know what
he's describing until you realize he's talking about a
vending machine.
He describes it as a tall box with a slot in it.
And another example we were talking about was the game
Aisle, which is you're this guy in a grocery store.
And it gives you this big prologue.
And you have one action that you can do.
So after you type in your one action, it tells you what
happens and gives you an epilogue.
And then the game starts over.
But then using the information from that epilogue, you have a
different choice of actions that you can take and
different key words to use.
And so by playing it over and over you're uncovering more of
the story until you get somewhere.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Aisle.
A-I-S-L-E.
AUDIENCE: We also thought about puzzles that were games
put into a very contrived scenario.
Like bridge puzzles, or chess puzzles, or back when the
Duelist magazine still existed they had Magic
the Gathering puzzles.
PROFESSOR: So like chess puzzles are
like, here's this board.
What was the move that led to this board.
AUDIENCE: Or like, black to win in three moves.
Something like that.
PROFESSOR: So that's like, you are now placing additional
constraints on the game.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, exactly.
It already puts you in a situation like, pretend you're
in this game.
Now, we promise you there's a way you can automatically win,
you have to find it.
PROFESSOR: There's a number of computer games like ChuChu
Rocket and everything where it does like
completely separate modes.
ChuChu Rocket is a frenetic both player--
AUDIENCE: It's a mice-herding game.
You have to get them into rocket ships,
so they go in space.
It was for the Dreamcast.
It's so good.
The idea's really simple.
A bunch of mice wander around the streets, and each player
gets to place three arrows.
And when the mice run under the arrow
they follow the arrow.
So you want to get all your mice on your ship, and want to
get the cats on the other ship so that they eat their mice.
PROFESSOR: In puzzle-mode, you have three arrows in these
particular directions.
But the way you place them, you have as much time as you
want, but there's only one right answer.
And that immediately shows you the difference between a game
and puzzle.
Right there.
Even though they are all in the same package.
AUDIENCE: So, first off I don't like jigsaw puzzles, but
Michelle loves them.
And then we also talked about whodunit's.
And I really love whodunit's because you have to pay
attention to the detail in the stories.
Like the one thing that--
I guess the example that we were talking about is, if
there's a mailman and it happens to be on a Sunday, he
probably committed the crime.
Because they don't have mail on Sundays.
And it's like small details like that.
PROFESSOR: Are you talking about mystery books or just
like little paragraphs?
AUDIENCE: Well, it's usually like a story.
And they say, oh, here's the scenario, here's the
background story, who is the murderer?
PROFESSOR: They compare it though, [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: People have parties like that, like full-on
whodunit parties.
AUDIENCE: That's very true.
I didn't see who was talking for a second.
Who's talking?
AUDIENCE: Another puzzle we came up with, was the ones
that you did in elementary school with like the big grid.
And you would have someone's name, and maybe their favorite
food, that you would give them a bunch of clues and you have
to match them.
Yes, with something like the checks and the xs and stuff.
PROFESSOR: So, that's just generally called logic
puzzles, I believe.
It's just you are given the incomplete set of information
but enough constraints that you can figure out the rest of
the information.
And really the way to solve it is just write everybody's
name, all the characters that you're given in the prose.
Write down all the characters on one column.
Write down all the things you're trying to figure out,
like who's wearing what colored shirt, for instance,
so just write out all the colors on the other column.
And just by the process of elimination, just figuring
out, usually the answers are mutually exclusive.
So if somebody is wearing a red shirt, can not be wearing
a green shirt.
AUDIENCE: So part of the much harder ones are every fourth
statement is false.
Like you don't know if one statement is definitely false.
And I've seen one where every statement is
false except for one.
And I can bring in my book and there's like [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: The worst version of it is figuring out how
puzzles see people in the world.
AUDIENCE: They wouldn't fix it before because he pushed it
out last week.
PROFESSOR: You guys want to throw in any?
AUDIENCE: Sure, we started by trying to think of all the
puzzles that we really dislike.
And we came up with a couple here.
The sliding square puzzles, you know where you have like--
Basically just a variation on a jigsaw puzzle where the
rules are more constrained.
I don't like jigsaw puzzles either.
So we're like-minded there.
And then John had a couple.
I guess there's a Light's Out puzzle.
Inside the image you touch certain areas and [INAUDIBLE].
PROFESSOR: So you've got like a grid of buttons and every
button you push will invert all those neighboring buttons.
Like implanting the top button, left and right, will--
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
AUDIENCE: And then I guess I already described the
concentric circle thing.
Yeah, their puzzles are similar that we're taking an
action on one item in the scene.
These are incredibly difficult, the concentric
circle ones, will have an effect on other
things in the system.
And typically these are used in games where there will be a
center podium with a pathway leading off.
On one side of the podium, then there will be a
concentric circle around the concentric ring with a pathway
off of that ring and another interval.
Then more and more circles to each side and you get to
rotate individual circles and that will rotate the other
circles different ways.
And you need to create a pathway.
AUDIENCE: Every time I rotate one, something
else is going to rotate.
AUDIENCE: Then it's always going right before you're
[INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: I guess three of those are examples of games
where you have to take action on an environment, but your
action has direct effects throughout the environment.
And it's just really annoying figuring out
how to optimize that.
PROFESSOR: But they are predictable effects.
It's like every time I rotate this one left, that one's
going to rotate right.
AUDIENCE: I think it's kind of funny how the context has a
lot to do with whether these puzzles are annoying or not.
Because I do enjoy Professor Layton quite a bit.
And it's the most, through an arbitrary character in order
to justifying that you're trying [INAUDIBLE].
It's just fun.
Your intention on even playing the game is that you're going
to be solving puzzles.
Not as [INAUDIBLE].
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Also, the way that is presented makes it funny in
that as well, right.
So the mafia goons come up to you and say, we're going to
stop you from coming in here unless you solve this puzzle.
Shouldn't you just shoot me?
It would solve all your problems.
No, no, solve this puzzle.
PROFESSOR: It's like they're making fun of themselves even.
All right, cool.
AUDIENCE: I'm not sure if we really commented on what we
liked or didn't like.
But some things that we came up with that haven't been
brought up yet are cryptics, which are kind of a
combination between crosswords and riddles, riddles,
combinatory games as a puzzle apparatus.
Logic puzzles in general, not just like typical logic
puzzles like that.
You can have state machines, or Sudoku, or any type of
numerical puzzle.
We also want to differentiate that a lot of those games, or
some of those games, are spatially
oriented and some aren't.
Which we thought was an important aspect, but not
necessarily definitive of a completely different genre.
PROFESSOR: I'm not sure I've seen a state machine puzzle,
actually, outside of a computer science textbook.
AUDIENCE: I know some.
PROFESSOR: I'll never ask you.
I expect it's going to be more involved than
we have time for.
By combinatory puzzles you mean stuff like--
AUDIENCE: Combinatory games.
All the games that fall under combinatory game theory.
AUDIENCE: Like Nim's.
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: These are sort of exploration, so games where
you have to see everything around you to know what is
available for use.
On the [INAUDIBLE]
so in the book they talked about
actually Zelda, and just--
So a situation in a game that I didn't like is, you're
playing a game and something happens you don't step too
fast or something.
And because of that, you get too inert.
You're in a spot where you don't have the tools necessary
to beat the enemy right in front of you.
But you also are trapped and can't go back.
It happened to me one time.
It was the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
There's an enemy, you couldn't go forward, and there was a
cliff so you couldn't get back up.
And so, since I couldn't do anything I was forced to
completely go back to the last save.
PROFESSOR: But is that a puzzle, or is that just a bug?
AUDIENCE: I mean, it's time worth expiration and
it's an item use.
So you need to get an item to go ahead.
If you have this item, then the enemy that you--
I think it was like a Rancor or something--
you could beat the Rancor or at least put it to sleep and
walk by it.
But without it, you had to try and beat it or
it would kill you.
PROFESSOR: OK, so it was a item that would have made
combat easier, basically.
But they kind of made it this one way with--
yeah.
So you see a lot of puzzle games where they have easy
reset, right.
And it's like you can stop trying to solve it and you
really screw up something along the way You hit reset
and go right back to the beginning.
Nice that the Republic has no easy reset.
You live with the consequences, I guess that's
what they were trying to go for.
AUDIENCE: All right, so we've also had a
loathing sliding puzzles--
AUDIENCE: Either with numbers or pictures, both of them are
equally annoying.
But, on the other hand, Alec loves Rush Hour.
AUDIENCE: It's the traffic red light game where you have to
fly cars out of the way to form a path.
AUDIENCE: In Professor Layton there are an awful lot of
sliding puzzles that have differently shaped pieces, or
oddly shaped pieces.
Which is slightly more interesting, or less annoying
than regular sliding puzzles but it's still incredibly
frustrating.
AUDIENCE: Well, I think the difference there is that when
you have differently sized pieces--
When you're doing just like a sliding puzzle where you're
trying to recreate an image there's definite patterns that
you keep using over and over again, because you're just
like a rotating spaces.
So it's not actually interesting.
Whereas Rush Hour you actually have to think
about things fit together.
So one other puzzle type that we haven't really mentioned,
that I actually really enjoy, is pictographic puzzles.
Where it relies on sort of your association with visual
images and wordplay and stuff.
Like, for example, you'll have a puzzle that's just an image
of an eyeball, a bumblebee, and a screen shot of Judi
Dench in a James Bond movie.
And the idea is it's IBM.
So I love puzzles like that.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so stuff like that where it relies on
someone, like a human being, actually associating
information with something visual.
Rather than it being just a straight modern puzzle where
you have this information and you use this to derive the
rest of the information.
PROFESSOR: There's R-E-B-U-S, and of course those are very
language focused even though they're image-based.
AUDIENCE: What one has the two lines and then [INAUDIBLE] in
the middle?
AUDIENCE: Well, things like that, yeah.
PROFESSOR: You had Rebus where you are trying to basically
reconstruct a sentence.
And then I forget what's the classification of puzzles
where you're given a certain lead of images and you're
trying to write enough.
But if I wrote it in--
this is not a good puzzle but just to give an example-- if I
put [INAUDIBLE].
I think there is a specific word for these kind of things.
But the whole idea is you're trying to reconstruct these
sayings or these [INAUDIBLE]
from individual theories.
So I mean, these are usually spatial to begin with.
I think there was a whole game show in the '80s
that was just all--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Australia had a show called Catch
Phrase which was--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think Catch Phrase was the show.
AUDIENCE: So we wrote a B-list of different types of puzzles,
so let's just run through them.
All right, we've got lots of different
sliding puzzle variants.
We've got hidden object finding, the variance on
Where's Waldo and then it's kind of [INAUDIBLE].
We have riddles, various kinds of logic puzzles, particularly
two of which we've mentioned before.
Several people, witnesses, give statements.
One of them is a liar, which one's the liar.
So find the hidden sinister person.
And then there's the figment property x is next to figment
property y, what order are they sitting in?
That kind of puzzle.
There's a million of them in Professor Layton.
There's these kinds of unraveling, or
reverse-engineering type, puzzles.
Where some system has been permuted and you have to
restore it to its original state.
Which Rubik's Cube is like the canonical example, I guess.
But then there's a bunch of other different good ones.
PROFESSOR: I mean that chess games is kind of in that
category too.
AUDIENCE: There's tile rotation and swapping puzzles.
One example of this is Bioshock hacking, but then
there are 1 million other variations on exchanging tiles
or swapping them around or this kind of thing.
Lots of different kinds of math puzzles.
This particular word transformation puzzle type
that I used to see all the time when I was a kid, where
by changing one letter or word per step, you had to transform
one word into another.
Mazes, jigsaw puzzles, code breaking nobody mentioned yet.
And then also, these kind of full experiment type puzzles.
I don't know how else you categorize them.
PROFESSOR: Give us an example.
AUDIENCE: All right, so I'm trying to remember how this
works but I think it is--
this one popped up on Day(9)s podcast the other day.
I only give it because otherwise if I get it wrong
then people will go oh my God, and try and puzzle it out.
So it has to do with the piece of string and burning.
AUDIENCE: Oh, the 13 minutes?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, do you remember exactly how it goes?
AUDIENCE: OK, you have two pieces of string.
You know that the whole string takes an hour to burn but it's
not linear.
You have an infinite supply of matches, how can you measure
15 minutes with this string?
AUDIENCE: One of those lateral thinking puzzles.
AUDIENCE: I would classify this under riddles, but--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
AUDIENCE: Let them go, but they both take an hour--
[INAUDIBLE]
but they both take an hour to burn, non-linearly.
AUDIENCE: Couldn't you just be lighting matches the entire
time, and see how many matches you can burn an hour.
After that, just take four to that number--
AUDIENCE: Then how are you going to measure
that original hour?
[INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: But you know that the thing takes an hour to
burn, yeah?
AUDIENCE: The whole thing.
PROFESSOR: It will take slightly longer than the
amount of time it takes to get to class.
We close by then.
It would be nice to give people time to
think about it too.
So answer on Wednesday.