Scott Kim "What is a puzzle?" In T.Fullerton (2008)

Scott Kim "What is a puzzle?" In T.Fullerton (2008) Game Design Workshop: A placentric Approach to Creating innovative Games pg 35-39.

Scott Kim is a Puzzle designer  at a games design company called Shufflebrain since 1990. He has influenced some of the most popular puzzles of all time, including Bejeweled, Colapse and Tetris.

Scott also contributes monthly to a magazine called Discover. In which he produces 3 puzzles of increasing difficulty for the magazines readers. The subject of the magazine is of maths and science, so he claims to base the puzzles around these subject areas and not something irrelevant such as fashion.

So what is a puzzle?

A toy or contrivance that can be solved by ingenuity or patient effort? A simple task with a bad user interface?

Stan Isaacs mentions the best definition suggests Kim.

1. A puzzle is fun,
2. and it has a right answer.

Puzzles are also a form of play, these are then classed as a form of games and toys. One of Scott Kims puzzles included within the article was a visual letter puzzle. It included a image of a letter of the English alphabet folded only once. The only clues we are given is that the letter is NOT the letter L. However it does not state that the letter is upper or lower case, it could be many different solutions. How many can you find? There is one answer at the end of this blog post...

So is it fun?

One of the most important parts of designing a puzzle is knowing if its fun or not. Here there is 3 different types of fun mentioned, these are;

• Novel - Invites you to be playful by turning familiar objects and giving them a twist.
• Not too easy, not too hard - These sorts of puzzles are very selective, a puzzle that is too hard can discourage people from participating in the game if easy discouraged, whereas if the puzzles is actually too easy, then the player could become bored quickly and lose interest.
• Tricky - These puzzles are about shifting the perception of the players with an image.

This however leads to us mentioning that different people have different preferences when it comes to puzzles and games as well as different motivations.

Subjective nature: For some individuals, a simple everyday task can be a load of fun to someone else, and finding the mid range to keep the puzzle aimed at as many people as possible is a hard task.

The big difference between games and puzzles is that games don't appear to have right answers, but revolve around the player making decisions, however puzzles have certain answers.

To summarise, what was learnt from this article that there is a clear difference from games and puzzles, and that there is differences in what puzzles other people like.


One answer to the puzzle:
(F)