Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole ponders the ‘puzzle’ and what it means in videogames

What is a puzzle? The word has become the umbrella term for any kind of videogame challenge that is not exclusively twitchy-kinetic, but it yokes together a huge range of activities. At the basic end, it’s a “puzzle” if you have to find the right key for a door, or press a couple of buttons in the right order. At the other end, it is a series of tasks so fiendish that an entire global community of players fails repeatedly at it, and the developer feels forced to dissolve the implicit puzzle contract whereby a prize is withheld until a solution is found.

That is what happened to Bungie earlier this year, when Destiny 2 unveiled a new area featuring a series of puzzles called Niobe’s Torment that players had to solve before getting some paid-for DLC as part of their Annual Pass subscription. The problem was that it was too damn hard, and players collaborating from all over the world, many of them on livestreams, failed to complete its seven levels within the first 24 hours. (To give you a taste: the puzzles involved interpreting ciphers and environmental cues and then performing certain actions: early on, a pair of wings and the letters F, L and Y wanted players to jump while typing, not a combination I ever expected would be useful in any context, real or virtual.) The next day, Bungie announced that it was “decoupling” the puzzles from the prize DLC, which would now be available to everyone. Heroically, the puzzlers soldiered on anyway, and the series was eventually solved by the community after 81 hours, even though — as Bungie then shamefacedly announced — it had been unnecessarily difficult, since a crucial clue on level seven had somehow been “improperly removed” by someone on the team. Thus another part of the implicit puzzle contract was broken: the fairness clause. We’re only going to spend our energy on a puzzle if we trust that it is logical and attainable.

The word “puzzle” itself is a puzzle, with the Oxford English dictionary saying “Origin unknown”, before pointing to some potential forebears — perhaps it is from Old English puslian (to pick out or select), or regional German pöseln (to work hard and painstakingly) or pusseln (to fiddle about). It originally meant a baffling question, an enigma, rather than something deliberately set to be solved. It is used in this old sense by Walter Scott, who in one of his novels writes of “That ingenious puzzle, called a reel in a bottle, the marvel of children… who can neither comprehend the mystery how it has got in, or how it is to be taken out.” Only later in the 19th century did “puzzles” become specifically designed, single-purpose tasks, such as sets of blocks to be fitted together, or word games called “ABC puzzles”.

It is strange, to say the least, that so many game puzzles today are direct descendants of those 19th-century magazine posers: connecting dots or shuffling letters hardly takes much advantage of the interactive grandeur of the modern videogame form. But perhaps it is not condescending to point out that, for that very reason, they are easy to populate your game with. To design and engineer the kind of riddle that really befits the medium — I immediately think of all the awe-inspiring environmento-mechanical challenges of the early Tomb Raider games, as well as some of those before the last reboot, where an elaborate and wonderful space itself becomes a living puzzle — evidently requires far more creative effort. Similarly, in the

Advance Wars series, every level is essentially a giant puzzle, as is each enemy encampment in MGSV, and each assassination mission in

Hitman. Great videogames, you could say, are puzzles all the time.

Does the word “puzzle” itself trivialise the sophistication of some of videogames’ best cognitive challenges? And if so does it encourage developers subconsciously to carry on giving us the same boring letter-cipher, sliding-tile or combination-lock minigames, so that the function of the “puzzle” is simply to mark an impediment to further play, an arbitrary obstacle to be overcome, perhaps a moment to rest your shooting finger without having to watch a bad CGI movie, rather than a pleasurably satisfying conundrum in itself? Certainly in chess, it is assumed that “puzzle” sounds rather childish, and so people speak of specially composed chess “problems” instead, featuring strange positions that require beautiful and counterintuitive ideas to solve. Perhaps if we retired the word “puzzle” from the lexicon of videogames, we’d get better puzzles too.

Does the word “puzzle” itself trivialise the sophistication of some of videogames’ best cognitive challenges?