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[Shad0]

[META] Off-Topic Ramblings

[ScarpeGrosse]

Holy Hypotenuse, Batman I'm not sure we should keep such a good discussion topic to our EDOC lonesomes

Anyways, I first have to say how much I agree with the points you've outlined above. The elegance of a puzzle, in my opinion as in I believe yours, isn't in the amount of time it takes to solve it or its level of difficulty, but in how the puzzle itself is constructed - the "road map," if you will.

In contrast to the few elegant examples of puzzles you presented above, I'd like to point out an example of one that was used recently that *didn't* quite make the grade of providing a good road map, in my opinion.

The Lost Experience, for all of it's many good qualities, has thus far, been a little weak in the puzzle department. The game appears to be a series of hunting for webpages and text boxes to input "passwords" to unlock movies and information - the pretty standard method that you find for most puzzles in ARGs. (OT: I would argue that there are only two types of puzzles found in ARGs. 1) The Password Puzzle, as above, and 2) the Meta Puzzle that involves the activity of putting the story together.) TLE puzzle that I'm currently remembering as being a total "WTF" in my book goes back about a month in the game to when The Hanso Foundation webpage was still live. The puzzle involved, as usual, a password box appearing on a page within thf.org, and seemed to be pretty straightforward. Other than the fact that there seemed to be NOTHING to gauge what the password was for the players. Due to either PM brilliance or PM oopsie, the flash files for the website were easily hacked and the password recovered - "Parthenogenesis." How were the players to figure out that "parthenogenesis" was the password for the week? Because of an email/article regarding a couple of children who were said to resemble their mother and not have a father in the picture. Now, in my humble opinion, that was a pretty drastic leap - from kids having no father to "parthenogenesis" - for the players to take. Perhaps not even drastic, but almost illogical to the point of unsolvability without having access to the password in the Flash.

I think the puzzles that you point out are a good example of PMs providing enough Road Map for the players to navigate the puzzle, without providing too much information that gets in the way of the navigation. With TLE, I find that there is a lot of noise that gets in the way of the puzzles, no matter their style or format, that leaves them overall less satisfying to the player. When the puzzles are impossible to navigate due to noise or poor roadmapping, or even when the puzzles can be solved by means other than intended, there's a feeling of dissatisfaction that arises - the players feel that they're having to be led through the game. They lose the feeling of exploration, the feeling of satisfaction that arises from solving a puzzle, and, perhaps even their interest in the game itself.

We harp on the importance of context to puzzles, but I think it's just as important to harp on the design of the puzzle - if the puzzles don't make sense either as puzzles, or as parts of the game, then why are they there? Just as busy work for the players? "Here, chew on this while I come up with something relevant to the story and game..."

Also, in my very humble opinion , the importance of puzzle design is intricately linked to the game and story design itself. However important the development of a good road map is for an individual puzzle, it's 10x more important in the development of the story. ARGing should be like piecing together a story from fragments (something that ILB did extremely well) - there should be a basic roadmap, but there should also be a significant amount of "white space" in the story that allows for the players to become engaged (The second kind of puzzle I refer to - Meta Puzzles). The importance of white space gets overlooked sometimes, I feel, when PMs are developing a game to go with the storyline. Speculation among the community of players occurs when there is a chunk of road map missing - the white space stimulates the discussion of "what is happening?" amongst the players. The white space increases the mystery of the story. The white space is *important* to the flow of the story. Good novels don't spell out every extreme and every detail to the reader - the reader is left to fill those in, which makes the audience less passive in their engagement of the story.

The activity of piecing things together in a logical fashion, without being led by the nose, and arriving at an answer with satisfaction is what (I would hope) the majority of players are interested in, whether they be puzzlers or storyheads. The intellectual satisfaction of the audience, regardless of their activity level in the game, should be the ultimate goal of the PM. Without the effective road map and white space for the imagination, all you have is a bunch of frustrated lemmings.

In my opinion

EDIT - dear god, I've turned into Phaedra

[imbri]

hear! hear!

Totally and completely agree. Though, I differ a bit on the terms of it all (of course ) and add one or two...

Meta Puzzle: this was a term that I started using during Mu (though we did not incorporate a meta puzzl) and put in all my corporate training games - it's a puzzle that builds over the course of the game and is completely hidden until the last puzzle is solved and leads to meta information on the game itself. In a "popular" game, rather than a "private" game, this could lead to the credits pages.

Story Puzzle: What you called the Meta Puzzle - the putting together of the story, the gathering of information, etc.

Chapter Puzzles: Admittedly not the best term and I've called them "Logic Puzzles" in the past which was even more confusing, but is along the lines of the "password puzzle". They make some sense in the scheme of the story and serve to unlock more of the story or propel the players forward. Often these are passwords or new urls. Less often they're phone numbers and such.

Awareness Puzzles: These are not really puzzles but more just noticing stuff. For example, noticing a characters email address and visiting the website that it's from to find a new ingame site. Or seeing an employee badge and zooming in on it to get the employee number in order to log in to his account or something. These could really be absorbed into either the story or chapter puzzles. But they don't require solving a cipher.

WTF Puzzles: Ok, not the nicest of names and it may show some bias that I may have, but these are really stupid and, while there may be a purpose for them on occasion, they're usually used just to distract and occupy a player base and, if you're going to do that, why not do it with a chapter puzzle. But they tend to be almost pointless puzzles that don't make much sense in the context of the story (usually created by "paranoid character"). They may also come in the form of puzzle trails. They generally feel like they were just thrown onto the ARG as a last minute thought to fill in a gap in the storyline that had "insert puzzle here."

So, um, yeah. This doesn't really do much to further the excellent discussion and I hope I don't derail it by some sort of "you named em wrong!" "you didn't break it down enough!" type debate. But there ya have it.

[imbri]

oh, and, I love this line!

[Rolerbe]

Beyond agreeing with all of the above, I think there are three parts to the 'elegant' puzzle: First is the 'cognitive snap' required to know what you have to do to solve the puzzle. As discussed above, there have to be some contextual clues that seem obscure until you solve the puzzle, then they all just 'fit'. Second, after the inspiration that lets you think you know what to do to solve, there's some perspiration required. You still have to work at it to do it. And third, the best and most satisfying puzzles have a 'kicker'. You've solved the puzzle. You know you've solved it. But then suddenly you're not as far as you thought. There's another step to go. An afterglow puzzle within the puzzle that says "yep, you've got it -- ALMOST -- but, wait, not so fast. You didn't think it would be easy did you"?

One nice example from the ZombieGame puzzle set (not really a trail) was 'Base Pairs'.

edit: Should this thread be moved to meta? It applies to every ARG!

[Caspian]

I agree with pretty much everything you guys have been saying. Nice indepth analysis.

I'd now like to take a look at the latest edoc puzzle from a META perspecive, because I think it's relevant. If you're not familiar with this puzzle, get caught up here and then continue. Warning, I'd rather not spoiler tag this whole thing, so spoilers to that particular puzzle lie ahead...

The Queen Image puzzle had potential to keep us hacking away at it for days - or at least a few hours - but EGo got it in 40 minutes from post. I know several others had gotten the solve method, too. I was desperately trying but just couldn't read the letters accurately when EGo came through with the solve. A puzzle that goes by this quickly, like has been said above, can be fun, but I'm slightly disappointed after the last couple puzzles that we got this one so quickly. So why did this one go so quickly? Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth.

The "mask" was kind of obvious. The only solid object in the image is a Big Black Box with holes, same shape as the image with a N arrow like a compass. Also, Lyn's text pretty much said, "Use the mask, Luke!" I'm thinking if the mask wasn't solid black and wasn't a square - like maybe we had to line it up with something in the image and not cover the entire image - we would have had a little more difficulty working this one out. Plus, it'd be just a tad more elegant because it could actually be a mask shape instead of a Big Black Box ^TM .

Also, I don't get the theme of this puzzle as well as the prior two. Rhythm Method was solved using a rhythmic method. Painless was found using the beheading method. High hat was found...using a mask? Am I just not getting something?

Anyway, I still think the puzzle was well done and very interesting. I just thought it'd be appropriate to disect that puzzle here since we're talking about puzzles in a META sense. I know that we all complain when a puzzle is too hard and then we complain when a puzzle is too easy, but hopefully this will be helpful to someone.