Delightful puzzles
A mantra that I have heard from a lot of puzzle designers recently is that you have to make the player feel like a hero. I, personally, love feeling like a hero. Nothing sets up a good weekend like defusing a ticking (puzzle) explosive just in the nick of time. Overcoming a challenging series of puzzles is exhilarating, especially if the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Failing, on the other hand, can make you feel like a dunce, which is usually taken to be a negative experience. The hero mantra keeps designers focused on producing puzzles that make people feel good, which is important. Puzzling is a recreation, after all.
But this morning I had a different experience. I was doing a cryptic crossword and had nutted out enough of the answer to know that the three letters I was missing had something to do with the word Tripoli. The clue had also mentioned the word “say:, which is usually a marker for a homophone. I said “Tripoli” out loud maybe twenty times, bending various vowels and emphasising different parts of the word, before I realised it was actually a reference to the letters EEE (‘triple E’). When I eventually got it I didn’t feel like a hero. In fact, I felt a little bit stupid for having taken so long to grasp something that now seems so obvious. But the answer made me chuckle, and ultimately I felt amused rather than miserable that I had struggled so needlessly with it.
When I think back to my very favourite tabletop puzzle adventures, many of them have the same elements I found in the cryptic – an answer that is simple but doesn’t come immediately to mind. It’s a playful sensation, maybe even a little cheeky - a bit like the visceral reaction you get looking at an optical illusion.
The best word I can think of to describe this sensation is delight. It is similar to an A-ha moment, but comes comes to you without Sherlock-style deduction or reasoning. There is no doubt that your brain processes the material - you’re not magic after all. But the processing must be done in one of the many portions of the brain that churn through data without our being conscious of it. Only the fully-formed answer bubbles up to the surface. Because you’re not aware of the machinations, the answer is as surprising to you as if it had appeared out of the sky. It feels like a gift. And because it feels like a gift, you have no right to feel heroic about it. But you can still admire it.
Making delightful puzzles is difficult. As puzzlers become more and more familiar with the standard tricks it is harder to find combinations that aren’t immediately obvious. A puzzle can bring delight to a puzzler just once - after that the puzzle becomes a seconds-long solve that barely rates a mention. For this reason, it is almost impossible to build a long form puzzle adventure entirely out of delightful puzzles. But peppering heroic journeys with occasional moments of delight can enhance the puzzling experience and bring a sense on childlike joy. It’s OK if puzzlers feel a little stupid once in a while, so long as the puzzle is clever enough to warrant it.