I’m laughing even as I knew you’d say:
“Apple? An inferior orange”
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I’m inclined to say that most open world games are puzzle games with elements of dungeon
I remember having an argument with a friend in high school who insisted that Duke Nukem 3D was an RPG, thinking back I suspect his reasoning was that the first person perspective meant that you were ‘playing the role of the character’
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As an old, I will say that at the time at least around here there was the term “action adventure games” that was used most frequently for Zelda.
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I’m going to dance in your framework even as I work so had I think, “I need a new framework”.
If puzzle uses an expansive definition suited for pen and paper, such as, “solving without murdering,” we’re encompassing Talking into it. From there, we’re encompassing Story & World Delivery, although they often lack the oppositional problem to solve that Puzzle implies.
No, better, you’re framework is about describing things to solve, and as such most of the time in open world is negative space; Not Game and thus we’ve vanished it from our scheme. And we don’t need to worry about it anymore!
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Are you sure it wasn’t because there is a weapon in the game called an RPG
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T. and I have collaborated on like a quarter of a manifesto that fully explains what we mean but open world games are essentially collections of linear ‘interest points’ that are, yes, reducible to a thing to solve. There’s more in common between the Witness and an Asscreed game than there is between Asscreed and Ultima Underworld.
Wars are situational and dynamic, which I think is the promise of open world games but the majority don’t deliver on such an experience; cf Crusader Kings 2 as essentially a war game.
Dungeons are about the microscopic choice and its consequences.
Anyway this is to say that all shmups are puzzle games
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Possibly, but I am pretty sure he was arguing that it was a 'roleplaying game ’
I am baffled as to what this makes easier to think about, but I’m intrigued.
How is Assassin’s Creed is closer to The Witness than Ultima Underworld? If I ask this using the lenses I commonly use, I think:
- Player experience (from the Aesthetics of the MDA framework): In Assassin’s, the player is engaged in setting up interlinked goal chains and ticking them off, experiencing a long-term progression and impact on the world, advancing the narrative, while using combat to create pacing and test skill. The game is pitched as something to ‘lose yourself’ in, and immersive pitches are often viewed as self-abnegation, the desire to ‘kill time’. In The Witness, the player is piecing together rulesets in a very direct fashion, challenging their observational skills. They take breaks to explore the island but this is more exploring bounds of the challenging than exploration. Story is delivered as another puzzle. In Ultima Underworld, the player engages in combat tests and builds their long-term path through the world, revealing its edges in very discrete ways.
- Design work (the Mechanics of MDA): In Assassin’s, design work is organized between quests, building small bits of narrative and challenge, systems, building the repeatable actions the game hangs upon, such as combat and movement, and world, constructing an environment in which activities may take place. Unique to open world games, environment is disconnected from quest design as the game is envisaged to support play in all spaces. In The Witness, design is tightly focused on puzzle construction, with environment design tightly woven in to prevent it feeling divorced from the puzzle play. In Ultima Underworld, map and encounter design are tightly linked, while systems are constructed separately to inform the map and encounter design.
- Player needs (the psychological model currently in vogue at big studios, like the PENS framework): Assassin’s Creed players experience high autonomy in open-world games, with wide freedom of movement and semi-wide freedom of activity, while competence is moderately satisfied through combat and progression systems. As a single-player game, relatedness is served through NPCs (weak) and through out-of-game discussion with other people (in this framework, Bethesda games score high for single-player because everyone has unique encounters to share with each other). The Witness strongly satisfies player competency needs, and moderately hits autonomy, by supporting and giving context to the player trying other challenges. Relatedness is poor due to the single-player nature, lack of NPCs, and difficulty engaging in discussion without spoiling the game. Ultima Underworld pushes hard on competency through its combat, progression, and exploration, moderate on autonomy through its character building and exploration, and low-moderate on relatedness through NPC interaction.
So my tools don’t make that obvious so yeah, I’m game.
So that makes board games war games? Maybe old-school flight sims with dynamic campaigns (or maybe that’s just the frame around the ‘puzzle game’ core)?
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hey cool Bushiden got funded
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to uh, paraphrase lengthy email conversations I had (and bear in mind that my views and flippant claim that all games are reducible to three meta-genres has more to do with games criticism/analysis than games development) and to defend a position I spouted off without thinking it through first;
AssCreed resembles a puzzle game more than a dungeon BECAUSE it does not actually feature freedom of activity. It features ‘things to do’ but you do not have a breadth of choice when doing those things. The sense in which I use choice is in that Sid Meier-esque sense of ‘interesting decision’. Decisions are interesting when they are permanent and effective. Now you can pursue different activities in an AssCreed game in whatever order you like but this boils down to an optimization puzzle to efficiently pass through the combat-and-progression-system gateways. Similarly, you can choose which activities you pursue in The Witness but the order doesn’t actually matter in the end, it is just a choice about what you felt comfortable doing at the time. They’re not ‘interesting’ decisions, they’re simply decisions.
A fundamental aspect of choice is the idea that a path is not chosen. Games that let you do everything have a fundamentally weaker sense of freedom than games that gate what you can do based on the decisions you made, that you have to abide by. Ultima Underworld lets you forge alliances, it lets you kill NPCs that have entire questlines that you would then miss out on. You are often forced to pick a side, and these choices aren’t obviated by the rest of the game. Solving one puzzle location in The Witness doesn’t destroy another puzzle location. Collecting all the flags in Assassin’s Creed doesn’t come at the expense of killing any targets.
PS: this isn’t a value judgment about games, this is a pedantic formal framework that I look at games from! Riven, one of my favorite games, is obviously a puzzle game. SMB wouldn’t be a better video game if you had to make interesting decisions.
PPS: board games, depending on the game can be in any of the categories. Most cooperative board games are puzzles. Even amazing co-op board games like Space Alert are still puzzles, they just have added constraints that make them especially good puzzles. The war game Sekigahara is certainly an actual war game. Something like Gloomhaven is a dungeon, naturally, as are the unique Legacy mechanics of Pandemic: Legacy.
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I think I understand your goals in establishing a framework, and certainly don’t take you making subjective judgment. I want to tease out where to put things, because the illustrates your framework for me and shows what it can and can’t do, and what we learn, because that’s the why, right?
So is Ultima Underworld a war game, then? No, of course you mean dungeon. So it’s unsaid: dungeon involves meaningful permanent choice (Dungeon defined in your schema then is divorced from several meanings I had brought into this; it’s not a label evoking that for me).
(I can also wait until you’re fully Manifested)
might as well tag @T in if he wants to expand or clarify any of this, I probably shouldn’t be spreading these ideas until they’re fully set down in the manifesto but oh well!
Puzzle, Dungeon, and War are on a spectrum of choice complexity vs scale of abstraction; Puzzle games have the smallest domain of abstraction (they model what they represent most completely and disregard anything outside that domain) whereas the furthest end of war games have the largest scale of abstraction (they abstractly systematize as much as possible but everything so systematized is simplified so that the real meat of the war genre can be experienced, the complex non-predictive interaction of many systems)
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If you’re going to get all slidey scaley please attempt to make a graph. I am curious where established games would go e.g. Tetris Mario Zelda (!) Street Fighter etc.
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Tetris, Mario, and Zelda are iconically puzzle games, I uh will have to think about Street Fighter and maybe figuring out how to describe it within this formal framework will be an important challenge to refine it
Hell yes this is some old SB shit carry on y’all.
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yeah but in the game you actually play as zelda’s monster
someone beat you to it
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All games are either Action or Comedy.
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This is interesting because my own personal paradigm comes from the inverse angle. You are analyzing gametype by a top-down scheme of permissible choice by design; I analyze by a bottom-up approach of the species of interaction that it’s possible for the player to have with the game.
My pillars are:
Action - any timed challenge of physical skill
Adventure - the asynchronous solving of puzzles
Strategy - the asynchronous manipulation of numerical systems
Many popular genres will obviously be blends of these species of interaction in certain proportions, but I think breaking them down this way helps you see new connections between traditional genres that explains why certain games feel similar that are usually held apart. For example, what are usually called “puzzle” games have a fairly dramatic split down my Action and Adventure lines. And I don’t think it’s silly to say that Tetris has more in common with SMB than Picross, in terms of how it feels to play.
If you were to overlay my Action/Adventure/Strategy triad over your Puzzle/War/Dungeon triad, you would get a pretty interesting taxonomical system!
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