Pauline Ragny

We're heading back to the gold saucer!

https://www.twitch.tv/paulineragny

When you solve a puzzle that gave you a lot of trouble, you are entitled to shout "I'M A GENIUS" outloud. Do it. It's great.

When folks encounter a video game challenge that requires a high degree of mechanical skills, like a boss fight in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, I find that they are generally more willing to try and try again or even maybe admit they are not skilled enough to do it. When it comes to puzzles though... I've observed that many players do not like the idea they couldn't solve them. They will call them bullshit. "How was I supposed to figure this out?" Puzzles test your logic reasoning skill. In our society we have a tendency to associate that particular skill with the completely fake concept of intelligence. So when you can't solve something, it's like being told to your face that you're not very smart. Just go on the comments of a solution video for any of the trickier Baba is You puzzles. You'll find plenty of people complaining it was unintuitive or the game made them feel stupid.

But here's the thing. I firmly believe puzzle solving has nothing to do with "intelligence". It's a skill, and like any other skills, it can be learned and honed with a lot of practice. No one expects a player new to fighting games to be able to win a tournament without first learning and practicing the fundamentals. Why should it be any different for logic puzzles?

Here are a few things that personally helped my puzzle solving skills:

But recognizing it's a skill that needs to be worked on, and not a matter of rote "intelligence" seriously helped me get back into more puzzle games, after falling off of them in early adolescence, when the fun of figuring things out became clouded by the fear of being perceived as stupid for not getting them right immediately. And the reward for solving puzzles is universally worth the frustration! It feels GREAT to figure things out! It's a worthy trade to make.

The upset caused by not understanding a puzzle is only compounded by brute forcing it (the Skinner box method) because then not only have you not solved it and felt bad, but you've reached an arbitrary solution and feel worse because you don't really understand why that was the solution and how you were to figure it out. You gotta take those steps and work on it! That's where the dopamine comes from.

This is all good advice, much of it stuff I've been trying myself, and the rest stuff I will try moving forward. Puzzles are great! Puzzle games are wonderful! More people should be empowered to enjoy what their brains can do, and I think it's a real shame so many are discouraged to the point of hating the genre and any hint of real puzzlesmithing in other types of games.

When folks encounter a video game challenge that requires a high degree of mechanical skills, like a boss fight in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, I find that they are generally more willing to try and try again or even maybe admit they are not skilled enough to do it. When it comes to puzzles though... I've observed that many players do not like the idea they couldn't solve them. They will call them bullshit. "How was I supposed to figure this out?" Puzzles test your logic reasoning skill. In our society we have a tendency to associate that particular skill with the completely fake concept of intelligence. So when you can't solve something, it's like being told to your face that you're not very smart. Just go on the comments of a solution video for any of the trickier Baba is You puzzles. You'll find plenty of people complaining it was unintuitive or the game made them feel stupid.

But here's the thing. I firmly believe puzzle solving has nothing to do with "intelligence". It's a skill, and like any other skills, it can be learned and honed with a lot of practice. No one expects a player new to fighting games to be able to win a tournament without first learning and practicing the fundamentals. Why should it be any different for logic puzzles?

Here are a few things that personally helped my puzzle solving skills: