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Original post by OminousZounds There will always be people who cheat purely to reach the end goal as quickly as possible. I don't consider myself one of those people, but I have cheated at games before. In those cases, the common theme was that it was simply -too tedious- to not have done so. (e.g. traveling in Morrowind, in some cases...)

Yes I know what you mean, especially in games where you're searching for something. But I wonder whether or not you'd have considered either doing something else or giving up if you couldn't cheat. Morrowind's a great example because in that sort of game you can at least go do something else if you can't find that one obscure person or thing you're looking for.

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Original post by nerd_boy If the puzzle is responsible directly or indirectly for one of these achievements, then they'd be getting acknowledgement for something they did not accomplish. This is a problem for people who actually earned the reward or those who've attempted to earn it but haven't for lack of cheating.

I had not thought of that but that's a good point as well. It would be like those people I've heard of on XBox Live using an exploit or glitch in a game like Call of Duty to get themselves to the top of leaderboard rankings.

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As for the solution? Random-generation/procedural-puzzles(same thing?) would be the only answer I can think of at the moment. Or even creating puzzle like scenarios/environments. I guess something along the lines of Mirror's Edge, only procedurally generated, or some manner of randomness that would affect the process.

Haven't played Mirror's Edge so I'm not sure I follow (unless you mean the navigation gameplay?).

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Original post by BLiTZWiNG I'm with sneftel on this one. People will by your game because they want to play it. Make your game for them. But you know what, so what if people put up the answers to your puzzles. People who buy your game still deserve to play it how they want to play it. Those that don't want spoilers wont go looking for them.

Okay but imagine gameplay built around a scavenger hunt, where you're collecting items to ultimately end the game. If the items are at fixed locations and you get stuck, you might be tempted to bypass the in-game gameplay and just pull up that *one* thing you're looking for.

Maybe this is just by blinkered thinking, but the very fact that there's a whole list that tells you what to do and where to go kills a bit of the impetus to forge through and solve the string of puzzles leading to the goal.

Note that I'm making an assumption here that probably only applies to games farther in the adventure category than anything else. If you have a skill based game it's not in my mind as much of an issue because even if you know what to do there's still gameplay in doing it.

But if the gameplay (if you can call it that) is in figuring out what to do and where to go, then a cheat page can kill all that gameplay in a glance because it does the thinking for you.

I have the WikiCheats page for a game bookmarked. I am in no way a representative sample of any gamer, but the inevitable learning curve inherent in far too many game interfaces compel me to seek out the solution. I don't care to learn how to juggle the buttons just right to play; that's a meta-game, where the real game is the strategic decisions. I tolerate some meta-games because I learned them when I was younger (the absurd control schemes for Street Fighter, for instance), but now I just want to get to the meat.

If your game is easy to play and solving a puzzle comes down to player intelligence rather than developer irony, then most people will play - and solve - your puzzles on their own. If, on the other hand, you make references to obscure non-diegetic information, then not only will players Google the solution: they should.

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Original post by Daaark I do crossword puzzles all the time. The answers are printed upside down a few inches away. So are they useless?

Not that I don't take your point, but what if they were printed right side up next to the puzzle?

I understand what you're saying, but I think what I'm still not happy about is how easy it would be to task out and just type a few keywords. It's a bit like quicksave-- yes, you don't have to use it, but many find it very tempting.

I have not played a purely information based game (that is, where advancement was information, such as clues to solve a puzzle or the location of keys) in a long time, so maybe I'm worried about something that has no real solution. I suppose if someone googles and screws up their game you can't stop them, but I can imagine that turning into a lot of negative word of mouth.

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Original post by sunandshadow I personally love having puzzles in a game, but rewarding with info just isn't going to work because of the ability to google.

Starting to agree with you more than I'd like to. Here was my premise-- you have a VERY large play space (stars, planets, surface sites, etc.) which acts as a sort of barrier to straightforward progression, meaning you can't just stumble upon what you need because it's statistically unlikely. So as a reward talking to people and doing quests for them would, at the most basic level, clue you in to WHERE things were.

But if you can just google this, then the gameplay is going to work only for whatever percentage of gamers that can keep themselves away from google. And I'm not sure I have faith that that's a significant majority of those I'd be targeting, especially when I factor in that part of this progression is gearing up.

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You should, at any rate, be regularly giving the player info all the time, not making it hard to get. Also there should never be any penalty for failing a puzzle or reward for solving it as fast as possible and it should be easy to re-attempt it, otherwise you yourself will be pressuring people to cheat at it.

If information won't work as gameplay then what it seems that I will probably have to do is either somehow lock or level cap locations and rather than handing out hints and coordinates, the game's denizens will probably have to hand out the equivalent of keys or XP that opens a lock. THat's not really what I wanted for something that's aiming to be more of an open ended RPG, but it's prolly the lesser of two evils.

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If possible make the design of the puzzles contribute to your worldbuilding, such that even players who cheat at it gain some story immersion from it.

That's a good idea.

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Make sure the puzzles are not just numbers, ick. The most important thing about puzzle design is to make ones that people will enjoy trying to solve, and can solve intuitively from studying the puzzle itself, no outside info required.

Yeah, I had in mind layers of hints that keyed on facts of the world over just numbers, stuff like an item can be found on "a frozen planet circling a failed star near the Proteus sector." In my mind that would have you learning that brown dwarves are failed stars and that if the planet's frozen it's nowhere near the sun. Stuff like that.

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Original post by Oluseyi If your game is easy to play and solving a puzzle comes down to player intelligence rather than developer irony, then most people will play - and solve - your puzzles on their own. If, on the other hand, you make references to obscure non-diegetic information, then not only will players Google the solution: they should.

I love your perspective because I'm so against it, and I have a suspicion that it's far more popular than mine. So it's good to be challenged.

We often hear these days about gamers pressed for time. A sizeable chunk of the population wants to play but only has a set amount of time and wants to, as you say, get to the meat.

But what is that meat? If I'm talking about some sort of open ended adventure, is the meat the character advancement, or is it the completion of a specific sequence that drives narrative forward or what? I know it relates to whatever is most rewarding, but I'm not sure I'm correctly grasping the distinction you're making in what I quoted.

Non-diegetic information would be (I think) things that have nothing to do with the milieu created by the game world. If I relied on knowledge of past presidents or baseball scores that would obviously be something they should google. But what about when a game is imparting real world information and imbedding it in the story? If I use some fact of astronomy, available through a character in the game, for instance, where does that sit?

Not trying to be obtuse here but what I'm getting at is this idea that we don't have time and we want to get to the meat-- so if you have to stop and learn something, even if it fleshes out the universe, but that process takes time, is that something that you would feel should just be googled?

I google answers to video games when I've gotten frustrated trying to figure it out in-game. This has happened for everything from finding my way out of a zombie stage in Half-Life 2 to beating the level of Karoshi that was just a big letter K.

Rewarding people for figuring out puzzles is fine, despite Google. Just make sure that if they've worked at it long enough to get frustrated, you make it easier for them. Give them more hints.

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Original post by swiftcoder You might be underestimating the value of clever randomisation - sure, the cheat guide can tell you *how* to solve the puzzle, but it can't tell you the answer. As a (very simple) example, there are a few combination locks in Riven which are randomly seeded, and they can still take considerable time to solve, even with a guide. A more complex generator, which can randomise placement and content of clues, becomes very tricky to reliably document.

You make a good point. One solution I was actually thinking of was whether or not I could uniquely randomize the game map, as it stands in as a sort of overall "meta-puzzle" provided what's in it is intelligently referenced by the information givers of the game world. So your game map would be unique from mine, and the holders of information would vary as well. If that were possible, cheats would be useless.

Not sure I'm that smart, tho, and I don't know that that's really a nice solution. It would also be obscene to debug.

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Original post by BeanDog Rewarding people for figuring out puzzles is fine, despite Google. Just make sure that if they've worked at it long enough to get frustrated, you make it easier for them. Give them more hints.

What do you think of in-game hints which cost in-game resources?