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Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why I can't enjoy "puzzle games" like The Witness, Antichamber, or even Sudoku, et al. Why would I want to solve puzzles with known answers that thousands of people have already solved? The puzzles may look cool or have interesting mechanics, but the answers are already set in stone. Nothing novel or emergent can happen. I already solve problems all day long for work. I don't want to solve arbitrary ones in my free time. Just my personal mindset. I do enjoy most other types of games.

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> Why would I want to solve puzzles with known answers that thousands of people have already solved?

For the same reasons you might engage in any entertainment activity.

Real-life still-unsolved puzzles are hard ; whereas puzzle games keep the difficulty under some control (except for the infamous boat puzzle in The Witness).

Real-life problems are hard because, often, proper domain modeling/formalization is part of the problem. Puzzle games generally don't have this 'domain modeling' part, they provide you with an extremely consistent set of rules, and you have to build a solution inside it. Sometimes this set of rules is partly implicit, and discovering it is part of the fun (e.g The Witness, Antichamber) ; but you never have to worry about the real-world and it's complexity.

When I played Baba is You, solving a puzzle didn't feel like fixing a problem. It felt more like the instant you finally get a joke, or come up with a good punchline yourself. The mechanics of the puzzle game combine in surprising and entertaining ways, and the puzzle designer sets up the situation to force you to experience the same thing they felt when they found that combination.

Not every puzzle game has mechanics that combine in such surprising and entertaining ways so consistently, but I think this feeling is what most of them are going for.

This is the reason I almost can't enjoy any single player, story-driven game or puzzle game. These days I only play multiplayer, online games because even if we're all playing the same game, every experience and interaction is something new. People are unpredictable and they keep things interesting.

The one type of single player game I do play are either city building games or 4X games. The freedom for creativity and randomness, respectively, makes every game new.

Do you watch movies, TV shows or read books? Playing a single player story game is the same as those other art forms for me.

I actually don't watch many movies or much television for that reason. I still find books enjoyable, though. I think there's something different about needing to visualize everything yourself that still allows for creativity.

I find the same with TV/movies vs books and I don't really watch many TV shows or movies for that reason, but I find games different because they're interactive: because I have an impact on the story (at least in the story games I tend to play), so the outcome is so much more personal and impactfull than a movie can be.

I do think you're on to something in that having to visualise everything yourself when reading books does get me more invested, probably because I can better project onto the characters than if they're just given to me on a screen.

I recently played an interactive visual novel (think choose your own adventure only digital) and.. wow, it was not as I expected. By the time shit went down, I was already so invested in the characters that by the time shit hit the fan, I actually legitimately cared about what happened in a way that no movie or show ever has and only a few books and games have.

How do you feel about the highly interactive "all of your choices will impact the story" games, where few people will experience exactly the same thing you did? For example, Detroit: Become Human or Until Dawn, where any or all of the main characters can die without the story ending (quite early on in some cases too; but they can also survive), or the Life Is Strange games?

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