Hmm, I feel more typing coming on. Probably not what I should be doing over my lunch break at work; I’ll try to blog about it more tonight. Thanks for the nudge!

How is that any different than Grim Fandango (or my nostalgic favorite) Space Quest? Because the puzzles you solve in space quest had context in the world that your character inhabited. Sure it was dumb that you had to pet the weasel to build up a static charge to ignite some gunpowder which startled a bird and thus gave you a feather that you could write an note with… (made up example), but as silly as it is, your character is using in-game elements to solve in-game problems.

In Layton you could simply replace all of the puzzles with Sudokus and the game would be exactly the same. The puzzles had no relevance to the story whatsoever and could easily be swapped out with other random puzzles.

So Layton is awesome, but it’s not a narrative game.

I think aggregation is a great way to smooth out the difficulty in adventure games, but implementation can be tricky. In a game like Layton where there’s no need to pretend the puzzles are organic to the world it’s easy to say “solve x number of puzzles and you can progress.” But when you have an adventure game in the vein of the LucasArts titles, there’s a priority placed on blending the puzzles into the fiction of the game such that each puzzle appears to alter the game world in a significant way (even if it’s just opening a door to move to a new area or gaining a new item) and makes some semblance of sense within the greater context of the game. In the end, aggregation gates tend to feel incredibly contrived in games like this, “Oh this troll needs three gems to let me into the next area, and there are five areas I can go to gain gems.” It’s tolerable in small amounts, but if this becomes a major mechanic it quickly gets tiresome.

Hmm, “interaction” is a good term. What your dichotomy suggests is that puzzles vs shooting/etc. is a false dichotomy, since the two are on different levels and potentially (heck, actually) present in every game. I’ll have to think about it; it makes sense, but I’ll have to play around with reorganizing my thoughts a bit: I still think Michael’s question of whether people want to play puzzle-based games makes sense, but I need to figure out how to phrase that question in your framework.

I wrote some about how I thought boss battles incorporated both action elements and puzzle-elements on my blog. I think you’re right that putting to much emphasis on the “direct gameplay” side can ruin a game for some people. (I had parts of Metroid Prime 2 that I just couldn’t get through, either.) My proposal is to substitute the pity “interaction” for “direct gameplay,” and then use the term “gameplay” tout court to describe the higher-order type of thinking where you’re solving puzzles and learning rules. Whaddya say?

It seems that Valve has done a very good job of steering between the Scylla and Charibdys, and it apparently comes from very extensive playtesting.

For some reason I didn’t find it annoying to have a little shooting mixed into my puzzle games, where by “shooting” I mean “typing ‘kill troll’ again and again.”