Puzzle Solving... or Problem Solving?

Most puzzle games are about discovering the one, designer-intended answer to a conundrum. Let's look at a different take on the puzzle genre, which takes inspiration from real-world problem solving.

Sources

Play Zach's games

Gamasutra: "New educational video game used in schools"

Gamasutra: "Postmortem: Zachtronics Industries' SpaceChem"

Rock Paper Shotgun: Zach Barth talks about Minecraft

Games shown in this episode (in order of appearance):

Infinifactory (Zachtronics, 2015)
The Talos Principle (Croteam, 2014)
Snakebird (Noumenon Games, 2015)
Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007)
Limbo (Playdead, 2010)
The Swapper (Facepalm Games, 2013)
Mini Metro (Dinosaur Polo Club, 2015)
Kerbal Space Program (Squad, 2015)
Spacechem (Zachtronics, 2011)
Minecraft (Mojang, 2011)
Infiniminer (Zachtronics, 2009)
The Codex of Alchemical Engineering (Zachtronics, 2008)
Bureau of Steam Engineering (Zachtronics, 2008)
KOHCTPYKTOP: Engineer of the People (Zachtronics, 2009)
TIS-100 (Zachtronics, 2015)
Human Resource Machine (Tomorrow Corporation, 2015)
Quadrilateral Cowboy (Blendo Games, 2016)
World of Goo (2D Boy, 2008)
Bridge Constructor (Headup Games, 2012)
The Witness (Thekla, Inc, 2016)

Music used in this episode:

Human Ingenuity (Infinifactory)
Working (Spacechem)
Resource Site 528.81 (Infinifactory)
In Motion (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)
Opening (Spacechem)
Proving Grounds (Infinifactory)

Clip credits:

"Minecraft Compact Calculator" - FVDisco

"Minecraft - The ICE GPU 2.0" - FVDisco

"Minecraft 8 Track Music Sequencer" - FVDisco

"Infiniminer Demolition Fun" - betasword

[Clowndoe]

You've convinced me: I want "puzzle game" and "problem solver" as two separate genres now. Now to spread it.

[TesseractE]

My favorite Programming puzzle solving moment that was inadvertently hilarious:

Writing code to scan through windows processes to kill a specific one, but failing to tell the program WHICH one to kill, so it just started killing ALL processes one by one. It was the first Blue Screen that I totally deserved and directly cracked me up. XD

[androidwillpwn]

"Programming is basically the best puzzle game in the world"
glad I'm not the only one who thinks of it that way.

[DouglasGregoryTO]

Something that strikes me in playing Zachtronics games is that their scoring histograms actually give a decent emergent measure of the room for imagination in any given level.

One sharp peak? There's an obvious solution most people find.

Strong bimodal split? Optimizing for one metric or another will lead you to very divergent solutions.

Broad bell curve? There are a ton of ways to approach this level, and no objective consensus on which is best - lots of room to be creative and forge your own path.

[TipsyDucks]

Brilliant video. I've always loved puzzle games, but never even realised 'problem solving' games existed. Time to gorge on some new games. Thanks for the introduction!

[Suppenfischeintopf]

"Programming is basically the best puzzle game in the world" - I want a shirt with this

[noseman]

I really, really love SpaceChem, but it saddens me that I will never beat it. It is just too hard for me. I am not smart enough, and I am too proud to look up other people's solutions before solving it myself.

A very humbling experience, to sit for hours on end trying to figure out a puzzle, only to realize your solution is inherently flawed. And I'm still at the penultimate chapter! Who knows what the final chapter throws at you.

But I still return every now and then, if not to progress, then to improve my current solutions.

[igorthelight]

4:37 its not "KOKTIPOYTOP" as you said its Russian word "Конструктор", which means "Constructor" )))

[ShrubRustle]

Antichamber feels a lot like the problem solving to me, even though i'm pretty sure most of the puzzles have just a couple solutions. Whenever I'd solve a puzzle/problem in Antichamber, i felt almost like i'd cheated the system, like i'd somehow done something the devs hadn't intended even though, obviously, they had. The way the block placing worked into all the puzzle stuff was really inventive, and lead itself to puzzles with very inventive solutions. I mean damn, I literally got out graph paper to work out my solution to one puzzle.

[exquisitecorpse]

Thanks for the videos. I've been tinkering with game design and - as a method of teaching myself - am trying to build a super-simplistic puzzler. Initially, I was approaching the objects in absolute and concrete terms: Item 'mop' destroys item 'puddle', and that's it - the puddle checks to see that you're holding the right item and then dissolves. Much better is to code materials to apply to objects - so that 'water' always reacts to electricity or absorbency the same way (whether it's in a glass, on the floor, or in a swimming pool). That way, players will search for a material that makes logical sense rather than a specific trigger object that solves a specific puzzle.

[Okapi]

This ties really well into your Zelda videos! A lot of "puzzles" in the first Zelda games would fall into the "problem solving" bin (particularly those in Zelda 1; later early Zelda games really only fit in that bin when you talk about bosses). More recent Zelda games fall more in the "puzzle solving" bin. Breath of the Wild looks like it will fall in the "problem solving" bin.

[MegaBondagemon]

It might be too 'Japanese' for your tastes but I'd recommend looking up Deception IV: Blood Ties.

In that game, you lay out traps in a specific order and try to knock the enemy from one trap to another.
Think Rube Goldberg machine, only more sadistic.

Like what you mentioned, there isn't only one single solution.
Every time I revisit the game, I find more efficient trap combos that accommodates the enemy's defenses and immunities, while getting better scores or killing them faster.

[TimdeVisser]

A good recent example of this is Oxygen Not Included, a base management game where you have to keep your duplicants alive by managing food, waste, water, heat, germs, power and morale, designing efficient systems to automate as much as possible. The goal is always the same, but the randomly generated map and the intrinsic difficulty of recycling and stretching your resources as long as possible never gets old.

[Nixitur]

I'm not sure about Quadrilateral Cowboy. From what I've seen so far, it's very much a puzzle solver. You can't really write complex commands. You can't even do branching like "Do this, if that is fulfilled, do this other thing" or say "Do this, wait 10 seconds, then do that." All you can do is go "door1.open" and then, door 1 opens.

[ELStalky]

I love Zach's games. It's interesting, i am a software engineer myself and i would never write such low code to solve actual problems, but i find it quite enjoyable as a puzzle game. (For clarification: Low level code refers to the level of abstraction; his games are at the hardware unit level, where you only have the most basic of instructions at your disposal. In most cases that is not something one would want to worry about, so high level code is independent of the hardware and is then compiled to lower level code.)

[ZoruaHunter]

May I use this video for my presentation, please? I really want my classmates to start watching your videos, I think they would be very helpful for us.

[fletcherst-germain]

I've seen this video a couple times before, but never managed to realize how fantastic the comparison of programming and puzzles are. I've thought of it before, but never put it into words.

[iHeartIndieGames]

I can't stress how good this video is... I'm watching this again after a few months... I personally sought out the video as reference. As a teacher, this fits very well with the concepts of teaching.

[PatchyE]

There is this game I loved so much when I was in college called Armadillo Run. It's a physical simulation game where you build a machine to send a ball (the armadillo) to the destination, kinda like the Incredible Machine, but instead of the fixed objects, there are 7 kinds of materials to choose from to build your contraption (like rope, cloth, rubber band, metal sheet, etc.). So instead of being given a cogwheel or a lever, you build your own with some material. You have to take into account the weight distribution of your structure because each material has a maximum tension it can endure. There is a tension view where you can check in real time the force distribution in your structure. You can also put a timer on a part so it will be destroyed when its designated time hits 0. There are so many possibilities in the game, and it is super satisfying when you come up with a clever solution, or just come across an accidental solution. It is also fun to build a roller coaster and watch it run in first person (of the armadillo). I recommended it to my classmates (I'm physics major). It is worth checking out if you are into this kind of games.

[SnakeEaer]

Mark, The game "KOHCTPYKTOP" is actually called "CONSTRUCTOR" translated from Russian. Love ur vids!