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Original post by Wavinator Quote: 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?

That's like punishing people for playing honorably :(

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Original post by sunandshadow Quote: Original post by Wavinator Quote: 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? That's like punishing people for playing honorably :(

Do you think something like this should be free?

I was thinking of something like this-- let's say that you can't find (or don't want to look for) something in the game. What if you could hire an NPC scout to look for you? There could be interesting gameplay associated with this, such as factional ties, degrees of risk, amount of funding, etc.

What I imagine wouldn't be instant and might be a challenge (say to get and maybe even retain the best scout).

The biggest objection I can see to something like this would be how it could potentially devalue puzzle solving. If you can just pay the blasted scout, what's the point? Moreover, why would I even be whining about players googling the answer???

The difference for me would center on the advice you gave earlier about binding the gameplay to the narrative. If you could have a scout, there's now not only an alternative to puzzling out answers but some amount of strategic depth (where to look, who to hire, what risks to take, etc.). In theory that would deepen the overall game.

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Original post by Wavinator Quote: 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. 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.

Hmm. I personally dislike games with a very large playspace and open-ended games, so I'm not entirely sure if I can answer this without letting my bias into it. But I would say yes, level-capping locations is fine - make them too damaging to a low level spaceship or something? Too much gravity, too cold, not enough light for a pertially solar-powered ship, inside a strong magnetic field...?

As for rewards, should be easy to think of some alternate type. You gould give the player 10 of X resource of their choice, or a ticket required to participate in a minigame, or free fuel/teleport cost, or comsumables that give a speed boost for the next 20 mins, or free repair of all gear, or increased rep with a faction...

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Quote: 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.

o.O I was thinking more along the lines of some colored blocks that you have to slide around to make a pattern, or sand bags that you have to use to balance something, etc.

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Original post by Wavinator 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.

I bet there were times that I decided to simply do something else, and these were probably the "puzzles" or quests that were not required to reach the "end of the game". In Morrowind this is a little tentative, because you are free to ignore the main quest, but there is still a predetermined pathway put in by the developers which is designed to reach a maximum climax, and ignoring it doesn't mean it isn't still there.

Yet this pathway included some things like looking for an entrance to a path to a dungeon, based on only a rough description. After searching wildly for a while (all that red...) it felt much more rewarding to my experience in the game to bypass that block via other means. (Looking up teleportation coordinates to the beginning of the path I was looking for.)

I guess the moral of my story, even though it's been said previously in the thread, is that having a possibly tedious requirement like that will be more likely to be solved outside of the puzzlemaker's intention. Because, let's face it, the people solving the puzzle are ultimately invested in seeing the puzzle solved, and not so much adhering faithfully to the puzzle designer's restricted pathway.

Kind of like a mouse who goes around the maze to get to the cheese.

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Original post by Wavinator I agree with you in sentiment but there's a difference between using a hex editor, which requires a tiny bit of knowledge (starting with what hexadecimal even is) and firing up IE/Mozilla/Whatever and typing "<Game Name> <Puzzle/Quest/Item Name>" (Morrowind Mantle of Woe for example).

I really don't think there is. If there was a general desire for patches to convert games into push-to-win buttons, they'd be widely available. It only has to be programmed once for a given game, after all. So why the wide availability of walkthroughs and strategy guides -- which must take a hell of a long time to research and write -- and the virtual nonexistence of push-to-win patches? Why the existence of sites like UHS, which are annoyingly circuitous to use as a walkthrough precisely because of the careful, measured way in which partial information is doled out?

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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.

You're worried about something that isn't really a problem. The age of hints is by no means new. Myst came out in 1993, and has sold six million copies -- despite the already wide availability of walkthroughs and strategy guides through online services like AOL and Prodigy. With a walkthrough, Myst is winnable in under two minutes. It has a built-in push-to-win button, basically. How many people do you think do that, rather than play through the actual game?

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Original post by Sneftel Quote: 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. You're worried about something that isn't really a problem. The age of hints is by no means new. Myst came out in 1993, and has sold six million copies -- despite the already wide availability of walkthroughs and strategy guides through online services like AOL and Prodigy. With a walkthrough, Myst is winnable in under two minutes. It has a built-in push-to-win button, basically. How many people do you think do that, rather than play through the actual game?

I'd even add that I played through Myst multiple times, more than enough to see every ending. The world it created was beautiful. The puzzles weren't just in the world, they were part of it, they were part of the story telling or world building as sunandshadow suggested. "A frozen planet circling a failed star" has a poetry to it. I'd want to find that clue to re-experience hearing of such a thing. I'm reminded of (re)watching Titan-AE, watching the scene where the Gaoul hold Cale's hand to the sky.

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Original post by Wavinator 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.

Well, the meat varies, I suppose, and may even be hybridized. For instance, when I play Bionic Commando: Rearmed, the meat is a combination of the physical dexterity to tap out the controls to perform actions at precisely the right instant, the perceptiveness to see an enemy begin an action and respond, and the spatial reasoning ability to find a way through the maze-like maps. Sometimes I get to a boss (having navigated the maze), but then my reflexes fail me - I'm simply not fast or coordinated enough to recognize the enemy beginning an action and respond with precisely the correct counter. It's not that I'm not smart enough, but that the game has layered this meta-game of physical dexterity that I'm not enough of a "gamer" to overcome.

This is where I abandon the game, because I'm intellectually capable of completing the challenge but can't live up to the finger speed of a 14-year old. Or something. (At least, until I decide to try again.) Worse, I'm given a finite number of chances, before I'm forced to navigate the entire maze again: I've used up all my lives, so now I have to work my way through the level I've already overcome just to flail against the boss I can't. Now I'm being doubly penalized for failure to unlock a (physical) puzzle: not only do I have to try that puzzle again, but I have to re-try all the puzzles leading up to that puzzle.

Whether players will be driven to walkthroughs is really a matter of how severe the punishment for failure is. It is when the penalty for failure seems disproportionate, relative to the player's available time and interest, that they basically say, "Fuck it, I'm googling this shit!"

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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?

It's going to vary by player. Some people (like me) will deeply immerse themselves in the diegesis, and as such will enjoy such challenges. Others skip over doled out narratives, wanting to "get to the action" - and then are upset when they don't possess the knowledge to answer a cognitive riddle.

One way to ameliorate this effect is to provide automatic journaling, such that all information given to the player (and then some) is accessible in a record, perhaps with additional explanation that serves as hints or reminders. Jade Empire for Xbox did this well (I play very few RPGs, so I don't know what other games did it, or if they did it better, though I assume KoTOR does as well, since they use the same engine): every character you met, every conversation you had was recorded in a journal that you could review at any time, with bonus observational details about characters thrown in to make sure you didn't overlook them. Now, when your player encounters a puzzle, you can place an on-screen hint to "look in the journal/log" for help.

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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?

Well, now I shall wax philosophical. [smile]

I don't really enjoy games much, anymore. The benefit of playing them continues to fall in comparison to the time cost. Fans of gaming like to make a fiscal cost comparison between, say, buying a game for $50 and paying $12 to see a movie, but a movie will cost maybe 3 hours while a game asks for 20 or more. As you get older, time is what you have less of. At my stage in life, I feel like too many games introduce needless interface variance to distinguish themselves from their competitors, lightly attempting to mask the fact that they're really not that different. (Caveat don't play RPGs.) Is one FPS really so different from another? Is one racing sim so unique, considering that many of them provide the same real-world tracks?

The area where games have the greatest opportunity to differ is in story, but games are a remarkably inefficient means of delivering a story. Yeah, the story is "interactive" in games, but that really just means that you can select different pre-written branching options. We need to do a lot more innovating in terms of dynamically generated narratives to really make this worthwhile. Even in most "story-heavy" games, the bulk of the play experience is non-narrative - and in the one case where that isn't the case that I can easily think of, MGS 4, many people complained, "If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie!"

I feel that the tension you see with respect to your design and player behavior is simply a reflection of the dichotomous relationship between narrative and interactivity. Perhaps the solution is to make the more narrative-heavy and knowledge-puzzle aspects of the game optional, so that those who would Google the solution otherwise don't even have to in order to "finish" the game. Those that enjoy such things, however, would seek those aspects out.

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Original post by Oluseyi The area where games have the greatest opportunity to differ is in story, but games are a remarkably inefficient means of delivering a story. Yeah, the story is "interactive" in games, but that really just means that you can select different pre-written branching options. We need to do a lot more innovating in terms of dynamically generated narratives to really make this worthwhile. Even in most "story-heavy" games, the bulk of the play experience is non-narrative - and in the one case where that isn't the case that I can easily think of, MGS 4, many people complained, "If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd watch a movie!"

The sort of "story" that I think is the best fit to games isn't so much narrative as discovery. Something like the "story" told by architecture or landscaping. Not so much a sequence of events as a sequence of experiences. Myst is one of the purest examples. I think Portal is also very much like this. I think the key feature is that this sort of story is driven by interaction. The story told by architecture, by its nature, requires you to move through the world and interact with it.

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Original post by Wavinator Quote: 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.

It really depends on the person playing the game. If the game only involves complex brain busters and the player is not that way inclined, then they may have made a mistake buying your game, and they're probably not likely to continue playing either way. If they do, and they use cheat lists, is that really your problem? You made the game for people who like thinking. Maybe marketing didn't convey that well enough.

If you're trying to make a balanced game, and the game play is fun, then those players who don't like busting their brains but are enjoying the rest of the game are likely to enjoy it just as much after looking up the cheat list. I'm one of these people. I'm not that smart, and a lot of puzzle confuse, then bore me, so I cheat and go back to enjoying the part that requires skill or just plain playing, and enjoy the story (if there is one). I do this in MMOs because most of the hints in MMOs are either bad or require you to know 30 other people who are legends of the game. I did this in Baldur's gate, and even in starflight, granted, not until a few years ago because there was no internet when I bought the game, but I still never completed it. I found some of the settlements but I never got close to working out what the cause was. None the less, I still loved starflight for the bits I played, and I thought BG1 & 2 were awesome.

To answer the question, I think we need to make a distinction between puzzles and the types of games they're in. If the puzzle itself is intuitive and easy to understand, that's a good thing. If it's beyond difficult and generally frustrating, it might drive people to use Google.

The second only concerns multi-player games and it's the reward. Granting titles and achievements and other advantages over other players is going to drive people to use Google when they otherwise wouldn't have.

Take this for example:

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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?

What if you got $500 for completing the crossword. Would you look then?