Puzzle Game Design
Elegant rules, emergent depth
How puzzle games are made: few elements, abstract presentation, felt progress. Stated by Computer Gaming World in 1988 ("simple in concept and play, but also addictively challenging"), by Edge in 2001 ("Accessibility alone determines whether a puzzle game lives or dies"), and at length by Alexey Pajitnov in 2007.
A puzzle game asks the player to reason rather than react. The design questions — how much randomness, how much time pressure, how few elements, how abstract a presentation — were put most directly by Alexey Pajitnov, who wrote Tetris at the Moscow Computer Centre and has spent, in Edge’s phrase, “the best part of two decades consulting on and designing puzzle games”; this entry rests on his 2007 interview with Edge, and on two reviews that state the principle before and after it.
Fast facts
- The principle, 1988: “very simple in concept and play, but also addictively challenging” — Roy Wagner in Computer Gaming World, on Soko-Ban and Tetris.
- The principle, 2001: “Accessibility alone determines whether a puzzle game lives or dies” — Edge, on Minna De Puyo Puyo.
- Pajitnov’s distinction: a classical puzzle has “the full information, which is set up once”; randomness and real time “wash out” the puzzle but make it a game.
- Pajitnov’s rule: “you don’t need to be really smart to create really hard puzzles — it’s not correlated. You need to be really good to create easy puzzles!”
Simple in concept, 1988
When Spectrum HoloByte brought Soko-Ban and Tetris to the US in 1988, Computer Gaming World’s Roy Wagner reviewed them as a pair and named what they had in common: “somewhat similar to non-computer shape puzzles, but totally new from anything currently on a computer. These games are very simple in concept and play, but also addictively challenging.” Soko-Ban, a Japanese game published by ASCII, “takes its start from” the sliding fifteen-puzzle “but carries it quite a bit farther”: the player is a warehouseman who must “move the crates to their storage location. However, you are only able to push the crates. Walls, doorways, and other crates makes this process challenging.” A single undo is allowed, “but only if you do it before making any other moves.” Of Tetris he wrote that placing pieces becomes easy after a little play, and “Your challenge then becomes the ever increasing speed level” — the verdict was “deceptively simple and insidiously addictive.”
Puzzle or game
Pajitnov told Edge in 2007 that Tetris began as an exercise: the Moscow Computer Centre was “one of the small number of open organisations [in the USSR] which dealt with computers”, foreign hardware arrived to be tested, and “The best way to deal with a new computer is to try to write a small program and see how it works. A game was a very good example. And puzzles are some of the easiest things to program.” The result was “1,600 lines of code — 27 kilobytes, once compiled”.
His definition separates the two things the genre’s name runs together. “A classical puzzle is something with the full information, which is set up once. But those games are random, so that you have variety in the task every time, and you don’t know the configuration. That gives great variety and interest to the game, but at the same time it doesn’t allow you to make the puzzle really deep and complicated. Realtime is one element that ‘washes out’ puzzles, and the other one is this randomness.” By that measure “Tetris is not a pure puzzle game. It has a very strong arcade element.” Computers, he said, “turn puzzles into games”: “According to public opinion, puzzles are dull and take too long to solve, but computers really increase the speed and dynamise them.”
What keeps a player playing
Asked what motivates a Tetris player, Pajitnov described a loop with no arc: “Every moment you feel you could do a little bit better, and lower this garbage by one line. And you do it and you discover that you’re higher than before. Also you have a very nice feeling when you fit pieces together, and it comes in a good rhythm.” A shooter, he said, builds “some other emotional picture” — an easy start, a challenge, a plateau, a boss — but “Tetris doesn’t have this overall picture. It just happens to be repeatable stuff with a certain rhythm.”
Two further rules follow from the interview. Abstraction is a design choice, not a limitation: “Most successful puzzle games are usually completely abstract in their presentation” because “when it’s abstract, nobody gets annoyed” — a themed game “cut[s] out a big part of the audience”. And progress must be felt: his complaint about Bejeweled was that “no matter how good a player you are, your score is always about the same. You don’t have any feeling of your own progress.” The games he named as models were Lode Runner — “Every level was a real puzzle with its own mechanics, its own dynamics, its own kind of solution. At the same time, it was an arcade game to play” — and Pipe Dream, “the other absolutely classic, classic game. It will never die.”
Accessibility, 2001
Edge’s review of Minna De Puyo Puyo on the Game Boy Advance opened with the same principle Wagner had found in 1988, stated as a law: “Accessibility alone determines whether a puzzle game lives or dies”. Tetris “hits the spot by throwing in a mere handful of elements”, while a newer game “stumbles because it muddies the ethic by presenting six individual components for simultaneous juggling”. Puyo Puyo had “walked the fine line between complexity and manageability”: match four of a colour, send the leftovers to the opponent, “Ostensibly, that’s it. But dig a little deeper and soon you’ll be mastering the chain-reaction manoeuvres which lead to advanced Zen-like play.”