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[Gbutton]

Types of puzzles in an ARG

[Nighthawk]

The world of online ARGs is a limited medium, and as such there aren't as many options as there normally would be. That is why you see 90% of the puzzles in an ARG involve some sort of encryption/decryption; it's the easiest thing to transmit across the 'net and doesn't involve a physical object.

First off, I feel your division is accurate.

"Obscurity" is... well... obscure. One thing is having pop culture knowledge; another thing is coming up with a possibility that is simply logical. In some cases you have all the information right there in front of you, and it's a matter of thinking analytically to solve it while not necessarily having to use any outside piece of information.

Also, one could argue that *every* puzzle is "timed" because it can't go on forever. If a puzzle does not get sovled promptly, there will come a time when an outside entity needs to advance things. I know of people who have been contacted directly by PMs in order to advance an otherwise stalemate of ideas and move the game along.

If you're going to divide puzzles, they fall in to one of these categories:

- Knowledge. Be it pop culture, historical, etc... Some information from a third party that is necessary to proceed.

- Analytical: problem solving and reasoning, using the puzzle components themselves, without a need for external influeces.

- Procedural: performing an action that leads to a discovery. For example, finding a MySpace page for a character. These are arguably not "puzzles", for that matter, as the PM does not make much an effort to hide them in the first place.


LGL's Rubix's Cube puzzle is an example; I had originally thought of mailing the cubes out because I somehow imagined that they would need a visual tool in order to think in three dimensions. As it turns out, someone posted on the forum the possibility of it being a Rubix's Cube before I myself even received the physical cubes, so it was kind of a moot point. But, theoretically, the Rubix's Cube puzzle could have been solved without even knowing what a Rubix's Cube was (most of the people that received the cube weren't even born when it was first released) or making the correlation; that information wasn't necessary to the solve; in fact, I provided enough information for people to create a cube on their own.

Gardner Project had a similar thing, where we had to put the neural network together as a 3D pyramid, but that ended up being a Maguffin more than anything (the 3D result itself served no practical purpose or use).

[Gbutton]

I really like your definitions, they are pretty brilliant.

I still feel like a time constraint has some impact on the type of puzzle, though I will admit that it was presumptuous of me to assume it was a type of puzzle.

This leads to the question of what influences a puzzle? What makes it more difficult for the players to figure out. In terms of knowledge puzzles it would be the obscurity of the fact needed, for all three time constraints would add the extra challenge.

What else can a PM do to ensure that his puzzles are not blasted through too quickly.

P.S. The best thing I can think of for procedural is what 42 did in the dark knight game with Ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com, requiring a certain number of registered e-mails before the game could continue. Though i'm not sure what to call this type of road block.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

If it's of any help, I did an email trailheads experiment, last year that (I think) has a lot of information along the lines of what you're looking for. It was really just a test for viability of email as a trailhead medium, though. So keep that in mind when looking at it. One of the bigger factors really does appear to be the amount of time a given player has been playing ARGs. That seemed at least as important to keeping the momentum going as anything else, once it had been "acknowledged" as a game.

There were, essentially, three puzzles. None of which were ultimately solved or used excessively specialized knowledge. Funny, really. As they were *this* close.

[Nighthawk]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Not screaming "I'm a puzzle" was one of the main constraints for the email, itself. The PDF was another matter, though. I don't think anyone had any trouble recognizing that as a puzzle.

[krystyn]

The narrative itself can also serve as a long-term and non-obvious puzzle, playing out and becoming more and more solved as time goes on.

It's a good thing ciphers, codes, and really hard math problems are not requirements for an ARG puzzle, or I'd never get to play or solve anything.

[Jas0n]

[Arcas]

[krystyn]