Puzzles are very popular in games because of the simple fact that learning is fun. A puzzle presents you with a problem and you have to learn how to overcome this problem in order to succeed, which causes your mind to reward you with feelings of pleasure. This response is an innate feature of the human mind, evolved throughout the ages to make us as smart as we are today. In fact, all games revolve around some form of learning and the fun in playing them is usually derived from overcoming challenges in the game, taking advantage of our evolutionary instinct to learn in order to better survive in the world.

This even extends to other forms of play and can easily be seen in children: hide and seek is practice for hunting, war games are practice for protecting your tribe from outside threats, looking after dolls is practice for looking after a real child – all of these games that children play correspond with something that our ancestors will have had to do a lot in their adult lives. It makes sense: by practicing these skills as a child they will be better at them as adults and so much more likely to survive in a prehistoric world – evolution at work. Games don’t necessarily have to have a direct analog in the real world, but their enjoyment is due to the thought processes behind learning and mastering skills.

This is why fine tuning of difficulty is important for games. If a game is too easy the players will master it too quickly and grow bored with the game. If a game is too hard the players will get frustrated and eventually give up. Hitting the sweet spot in the middle where a game is difficult but doable goes a long way to improve the longevity of a game. One way of adjusting the difficulty in a game is to introduce customisations that the player can make that affects the way they play the game – effectively making it easier if they customise well. This acts as a sort of metagame within the game, giving the player more to learn.

I played a game the other day called Learn to Fly by maxgames.com. The main gameplay is quite simple: you have to adjust the angle of your penguin as it flies off a ledge in order to achieve the maximum distance. However, at the end of each day you earn money which can be used to buy a variety of upgrades which let your penguin achieve a greater distance. This introduces a new challenge into the regular gameplay: Which upgrades provide the most benefit? Should you save up to buy a glider or spend what you have right now on air resistance? It adds an additional puzzle element to the main game and adds that little bit of extra depth.

These sorts of “puzzles” within non-puzzle games are actually very common once you realise they’re there. Any game with some RPG-esque character customisation automatically challenges the player to customise themselves in an optimal way. One big example is World of Warcraft, which has a variety of ways for characters to customise themselves: equipment, talents, temporary buffs, etc. All of these features interact with each other to determine what statistics a character has (e.g. how much damage they do or how much health they have) and in a highly competitive game like WoW, optimising your character as much as possible is a big deal. Many players have written their own spreadsheets to calculate what statistics they need to focus on, what abilities to use, what talents to take in order to maximise damage. The “puzzle” of making your character the best he or she can be in WoW is taken very seriously by many players and makes up a huge part of the game’s depth and therefore its appeal.

Going back to what I said earlier about difficulty, it’s important that when implementing customisations like these within your game that it isn’t necessary to customise your character to the optimal level to complete the game. It should be possible to complete the game with any customisations the player wants (obviously you can require some customisations – you don’t necessarily want players to ignore it completely), but they should make it easier in order to reward the player for customising their character well.

Some more examples of these sorts of customisations off the top of my head: Choosing between an uzi or a shotgun (one is better at long range, the other is better at short range – you have to decide which one is more important), allocating stats to damage or health in an RPG (doing lots of damage is desirable, but you need enough health to stay alive), choosing which character to play if each one has a unique power (can depend on the level you’ll be playing on; one character might be better suited for it).

For my devil game that I’ve mentioned previously on this blog I’ve been thinking about a system where you get a number of points for successfully completing a level, with these points being spent to acquire new powers or upgrade existing ones to make the rest of the game easier. I’m hoping that this will add depth to the game and make it more fun! The aim will be to balance the powers so that they are all roughly equivalent, so the player can choose whichever ones they want to customise themselves with and still be able to do well in the game.