Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles?

Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles. "Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."

One comment:

Compare "Portal" with, say, "Zork" or "The Bard's Tale". The puzzles involved were quite simple and mostly involved wandering around in the dark desperately drawing maps until you found the clue hidden in one corner of a dungeon just so you could answer the riddle one level up and in the far corner, but the level of player involvement is significantly higher.

You don't see players making detailed hand-drawn maps [brotherhood.de] of every level of Portal, complete with precise notes, just so they can solve the puzzles. Gamers today just don't have the patience for it. Even online RPGs, the last stronghold of the fanatical mappers and note-takers [eqatlas.com], have all given up and provided automatic mapping tools which even a brain-dead cat sleeping on the keyboard could use [worldofwarcraft.com].

As the article and its accompanying comments mention, the market for involved puzzle games didn't shrink, it just didn't grow with the rest of the industry. While there may still be a market for a few thousand people who like Monkey Island, there are also now millions of people who think that Halo is about as complicated as a game can get before their heads explode. Welcome to today's market.

Original article at brainygamer.com/the_brain[...]8/07/puzzles-are-for.html with tons of comments at games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/28/2031254