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Puzzling Over Game Design
By Corvus | July 30, 2008
Michael Abbott and the fine folks of the Vintage Game Club have been pondering the role of the puzzle in the modern video game. Those last two links to Malvasia Bianca, in particular, ask about the relationship between puzzles and narrative. Given my own recent musings on the topic, I thought it bore a little more poking.
The gist of the line of inquiry is, “Has shooting replaced puzzle-solving as the primary game mechanic in narrative games?” Of course, I consider all video games to be narratives, but I’ll allow that some, such as Half Life 2 are trying to tell a story where others, such as Lumines, are not. For the moment, we’ll assume we’re simply talking about the former class of video game–those intentionally presenting a plot and story experience to the audience.
If we casually compare the gameplay of Grim Fandango to the gameplay of Half Life 2, or Bioshock, or even to Psychonauts, our first impression would be that games are far less intellectually challenging than they once were. Back in the day–they sure knew how to tell a great story. Now it’s all predicated on run ‘n’ gun gameplay and twitchy reflexes. I’ll be honest with you–while I loved the music, style and atmosphere of Grim Fandango–I… *deep breath* I thought it was a really crappy game.
Okay, okay. I know that’s not hip to say. I likely just lost a subscriber or two. But, honestly, the puzzle elements of the game are guilty of a major game design crime–grandstanding. “Hey, look at me! I’m clever and difficult,” they scream. “Only by escaping the bounds of logical thought can you hope to succeed,” they taunt. At no point did I feel that Grim Fandango was a world through which I could wander. Instead, it was a stage upon which Tim Schafer, the magician, proved he was so much more clever and creative than his audience. Grim Fandango has a decidedly Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style of difficulty that I don’t particularly enjoy, no matter how artfully and well it’s presented.
Full Throttle, on the other hand has much better integrated puzzles that you can mostly intuit by poking around the environment. There are a couple of moments that require you to step outside the game reality, but nowhere near as many. But it’s still seems artificially difficult by today’s standards.
And while Lucas Arts and Sierra were carefully crafting these puzzle focused games we all love to reminisce over, a little company called id Software was making money hand over fist by cranking out endless iterations of the first person shooter by refining their graphics engine to produce more and more detailed environments with which you could not really interact at all, barring door switches, supply pickups, and grizzly mob death. By 1998 when Grim Fandango was released, guess which route most studios were following?
Truckloads of cash were being driven to the studios of FPS developers. Truckloads. Every single day. The audience had spoken. Manny Calavera looked forlornly from the cover of Grim Fandango at the empty spots on the shelves where Unreal and Half Life were selling like proverbial hotcakes. Meanwhile, the shelf space occupied by PC games was shrinking at an steady rate as developers and publishers turned their focus towards the Playstation and N64.
So, this probably sounds like I’m saying that games really have backslid, intellectually speaking. That shooting has replaced puzzles as the primary form of narrative gameplay. But I don’t think the present is that dim. In fact, I think we wiped the slate a bit and started over–building better and better game mechanics within a commercially successful genre (admittedly while missing some obvious strengths of the adventure game genre).
Let’s take a look at Half Life 2 for a moment. There’s a lot of shooting in the game, I admit. But if you look at the gameplay carefully, you’ll find that the shooting is only occasionally used to directly communicate the intended narrative. Instead, environmental challenges provide the key narrative moments in the game. A canal is blocked off. A fence is electrified. A dune buggy is out of reach. A bridge is barricaded. Walking on the sand is dangerous. A sniper controls a railway line. No obvious route forward presents itself in an alien citadel. Admittedly, there is a lot of shooting going on while this all happens. But even the shooting–and I’m referring specifically to the precise verb form TO SHOOT here–is secondary to the thought processes that immediate proceed and follow the pulling of a virtual trigger.
What sort of enemy is it? How many of them are there? How much ammo do I have left? Where are they positioned? Can I get behind them? Is there cover I can use? Is there cover they can use? Should I take out the guy with the rocket launcher first, or focus on the grunts? These decisions are made on the fly–rarely does the game give you enough breathing room to sit back and think out your strategy in advance. Additionally, the only feedback these games give you about your decisions is, “you died, so that clearly didn’t work.” So while you move through a game environment, solving the relatively simple key-narrative environmental challenges, you’re faced with an entirely separate level of problem solving–getting there alive.
Now, I do find myself wishing that this extra level of violent strategy wasn’t present in the vast majority of games. Hopefully the success of Portal will spawn a series of FPS games that find other verbs for us to trigger (yeah, trigger, that was meant to be irony) while we explore their storyworlds. Even Okami would have been vastly improved if they’d found a more interesting combat mechanic. But the beauty of these games is the seamless integration of puzzle and environment. It is not always so easy to talk about an individual puzzle in terms that are separate from discussing the rest of the game–art, music, audio effects, etc. And I, for one, think that’s a good thing.
Tagged:puzzles, storytelling, video games. | 10 Comments »
July 30th, 2008 at 8:25 am
You know, I found Half-life 2 to be lacking when I finally got around to playing it. I was surprised when it was over because I felt that all I had done was fight my way out of the same situation over and over, and there seemed to me this promise that there would be something more to it.
But reading what you say about it, I think the reason I did feel that way was because there was more to it than simply shooting and moving. For example, I spent way too long trying to get my dune buggy flipped over, getting attacked by apparently-unlimited sand-dwelling creatures, because I didn’t know what I was expected to do, and the reason why was because the solution was something I already tried…just not exactly the way the game expected me to do it. Which reminded me of games I played years before that had puzzle elements. “Oops, you were a few pixels off! No real feedback though!” or “That’s not how I would have stated it…so no, your command makes no sense to me even though it was right.”
The world fell in love with Myst-like games, and I couldn’t stand the disconnect between the game world and the puzzles I was placed in front of. Why is there a series of numbers on this door? Why would I have even thought to put them in some semblance of order other than because every other screen had a similarly random puzzle? On the other hand, a game like Half-life 2 had me figuring out things that made sense within the context of the game. Even if it was sometimes frustrating, it didn’t feel like a crossword puzzle that I could put down. It felt more like strategy and tactics, figuring out how to proceed with fewer casualties, or as you say, just surviving.
I’d like to see non-combat-oriented games do more to incorporate puzzles into the world of the game and not just tack them on. Finding the loose brick in the dungeon or the phone number behind the shower curtain in Maniac Mansion made sense to me. Playing Myst (although I admit that I didn’t play much of it since my friend was the one who let me borrow his computer) didn’t.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I largely agree with you, though I would say that year 2 of Grim Fandango presents basically exactly what you’re asking for: a world you can explore and puzzles that make sense to the player and the world, not just the designer. The rest of the game… not so much. Probably the disjoint nature of puzzles and the environment contributed to the fall of the adventure game, though it was certainly significant that shooters and the like added a visceral thrill that adventure games were decidedly lacking.
Thinking about it, it sort of seems like the last bastion of adventure-style puzzle solving might be the survival horror genre. The puzzles there aren’t nearly as detailed in most cases, but they feature the same sort of impenetrable, occasionally world-breaking logic.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I was consistently surprised to discover that the Half-life games rely on puzzles in their play. Episode One is rife with it. I found it impossible to enjoy as a result, personally, but fascinating all the same since it flatly contradicts the claim that puzzles are dead.
I think what actually happened here is not that shooting replaced puzzles, but that explorable 3D worlds replaced 2D worlds and static environments.
There was, however, a shift in the play away from solely using puzzle chains – this was sensible, because most people (9 out of 10 players, approximately) just can’t solve a puzzle chain more than few steps, so the old adventure game format was doomed once the larger audience was reached.
And now, welcome to the irony, because the FPS are no longer the best bet for a wider audience. It’s taking a while for the industry to understand this, but the FPS games are going through the same marginalisation as the adventure game – albeit, with a far larger ultimate niche i.e. they will remain profitable far better than adventure games could.
All I have time for today. Interesting discussion, though!
July 30th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Sparky and Chris already contributed most of what I wanted to say, though I would add chapter 4 to Sparky’s suggestion of chapter 2 in Grim Fandango as examples of well integrated puzzle-based play. I, of course, disagree with your characterization of GF as a “really crappy game,” but I guess you expected that.
Chris’s point, I think, is especially apt. Handing a gamepad to an novice and telling her to play a modern FPS game will result in the same quizzical looks and frustration many “hardcore” players have when faced with an old-school adventure game. Both are wrapped in conventions and pre-set expectations that can be difficult for newbies to navigate.
For me, it’s not really about intellectual stimulation; but rather about gameplay elements and experiences available to the player. I buy your idea that explorable worlds can offer their own brand of intellectual engagement, but most FPS games I play these days establish a very predictable framework for that, and then repeat ad nauseum. Cleverness, in either puzzle-adventure or FPS games, is what I’m looking for, and I don’t find much of it in the boiler plate FPS games I play these days. On the other hand, maybe by the end of the adventure game heyday, some of those games tried to be a bit too clever for their own good.
We’ve had some good conversations about this topic at the Vintage Game Club, so please feel free to pop over and check out what we’re up to. And, as always, thanks for provoking me to think hard about games, Corvus.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I think there is a fine line with puzzle solutions being clever and just being esoteric. I’m the same way about Grim Fandango and Hitchhiker’s Guide. Combining obtuse puzzles and death traps (in the latter not the former) became frustrating fast. I have never managed to beat an adventure title(with exception to Phoenix Wright and the new Sam and Max episodes) without resorting to a FAQ guide page.
I thought that Prince of Persia (and to an extent ICO) did a good job with making the puzzles a challenge of the player having to figure out a way to get around in the enviroment, which sounds similar to the description of Half Life 2. Would you say that we should move away from the classic adventure style of a puzzle being an obvious deterent(the big door example or guard on a bridge) and make it more blend into the gamespace? What is your opinion on puzzle based fights , where a boss can only be beaten by figuring out the correct way of hurting them.
Talking about Portal I think one problem with having heavy puzzle elements in action games is that the fanbase is split in a sense. Action gamers want fast paced segments, puzzle fans want a slower experience, the challenge is to create something that both groups can enjoy.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
@Michael I have to confess that my claim of GF being a “really crappy game” was mostly just me being provocative. I did run into the show stopping bug at the end of disk 1 and gave up on the game without looking back, but even though I didn’t care for it much–calling it “really crappy” is a stretch.
I agree with your assessment of most FPS games. I don’t use HL2 as a pinnacle of the type of game I’m looking for, only as a widely recognized example that the shooting isn’t really the mechanic that replaced the puzzle. Give me an ICO or SotC any day!
Also, I’m earlobe deep in projects, but I’ve registered on the forums and I plan on stopping by as often as I can!
@Josh ICO and SotC were both puzzle games where the puzzles were more integrated into the environment, as far as I’m concerned. I do hate the “this door is closed until you perform some arbitrary task” concept. Particularly when you can break down or lock pick other doors in the environment. Like so many things–puzzle based boss fights can be a delight when handled properly, as in Wind Waker, or a nightmare when handled poorly, as in Super Paper Mario.
July 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Going back to HL 2 (hoping this road hasn’t been too worn already), as the episodes went on, I was taken with the impression that Valve feels that it has been saddled with the “need” to give guns to the player when they really seem to wish they didn’t have to. I suspect I am like many players in that I only used the non-gravity gun weapons as a backup, and leaned on the gravity gun for most of the combat.
As compared to the original Half-Life’s set of weapons, I never felt like I was using the “traditional” weapons tactically, as a response to different situations or enemy behaviors. It was usually based on how much ammo I had.
The gravity gun is a more “puzzley” weapon, as it often required players to pay more attention to environment, and usually allowed for more clever methods of defeating enemies (throwing objects covered with exploding darts back at Hunters who had fired them, using a radiator as a shield and a projectile, etc.)
If they had completely restricted the player to the “push/pull” verb the gravity gun allowed the player, I think HL2+episodes would be able to outline clearer expectations with their puzzles and make them feel more “in-world.”
Additionally, the clever usage of a supersciencey tool fits a lot better with the role of an MIT-educated theoretical physicist than having 10 guns strapped to your back.
July 30th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Re: Zelda vs Mario, while I have an idea of what your saying. How are the puzzle fights in Galaxy poorly designed compared to the Zelda series? I do enjoy the boss fights of Zelda, I’m just curious about how SMG doesn’t compare to them.
July 30th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
@Sam Whole heartedly agree. I <3 me some gravity gun and I used it whenever it’d do the trick.
@Josh Didn’t say SMG, I said SPM. But in general–Zelda only requires you to perform the devastating trick attack correctly about three times. Some bosses have two tricks, each of which needs to be performed about three times. SPM required you to pull off the trick endlessly until their life points were worn away. This didn’t start to really irritate me until the final levels of the game.
July 31st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
In regards to Grim Fandango, I’d postulate that the reason Years 2 and 4 have a better feel to them, less puzzle-y, is that they are the most relational sections of the game. Year 2 especially. There are a lot of characters, each of which Manny has some sort of relationship with. He’s established himself in the community, and then he has to use all of that to achieve something (follow Meche).
Puzzles have to remain contextual so that the player doesn’t feel they are being forced to do something out of character. In many cases, the relational puzzles made more sense because there wasn’t a need to make outside-the-box connections. You simply had to understand Manny, and then figure out the motivations of the other characters. Relational puzzling.
When it comes to puzzle-gaming inside of FPS’s, it mostly seems to boil down to: push a button, pull a lever, make the physics engine work. Physics puzzle are okay, but there are only so many ways that a teeter-totter can be interesting or challenging.