Puzzle vs game?

A random tangent I am going to rudely throw into the fray:

Speedrunners have basically made a pocket industry of achieving idealized/optimized “solutions” to what I think most of us would consider games (e.g., Super Mario World, Super Metroid, etc.) based, generally, around time as the end-goal. But in so doing, they’re oftentimes finding the most efficient means of completing the games’ objectives, and while there’s certainly sometimes a strong element of manual dexterity and many games could use further optimization, they are, on some level, puzzle-ifying non-puzzle-games.

Then again, the above discussion about Chess Problems vs. Chess Matches touches on a similar idea in a less complicated way, so maybe I’m just stating that you can apply some extra rules to a non-puzzle game to turn it into an effective puzzle.

Building off of Armando’s comment I have been wondering if designs like highly-scripted linear corridor shooters fall closer to the puzzle end of the spectrum than people realize. Sure, we are all pressing WASD keys in different combinations but ultimately using a very narrow decision-space to achieve the same end-states.

The same applies to min-maxing strategy game players. When I’m reading their thoughts on a game, it’s like they’re talking of a completely different game.

I love watching speedrunners do their thing, the time and work it takes to figure out how to get through and around the game and then execute is pretty amazing to me. Been watching this stuff since the Quake Done Quick days. But I’ve never even considered trying to do it myself. Even setting aside all the time it would take to be able to do so, I just have no interest in actually playing games that way, I’m much more of a stop and smell the roses kind of player.

Yeah. I consider high level RTS and fighter competitive play to oftentimes have puzzle-elements sprinkled into what seems like a fully chaotic, pure-game environment.

e.g., “Ah yes, he is choosing a 14-hatch, speedling expand with eyes on the gold and gas for roaches on Metropolis. The proper counterplay here based on my current position [no expand, no gas, reactor already building on my barracks, 3 away from supply cap, 47 energy built up on my Command Center] is obviously 7-rax Reapers until the game ends, one way or the other.”

But then you mix in the dexterity elements (extremely perfect control can win out situations of immense strategic disadvantage. For instance, sufficient quantities of splash-damaging Siege Tanks were often seen as a hard counter to masses of one-shot, one-kill Zerglings in TvZ. However, you had interesting things like AI controlled play revealing that zerglings could be split so perfectly as to trigger the targeting AI of the siege tanks to make their shots do very sub optimal spreads of splash damage, allowing far more Zerglings to survive than previously thought feasible. And indeed, slowly over time, humans began to master those talents themselves. This is oversimplifying the evolution of strategies a lot and contains some inaccuracies, so sorry to my fellow competitive SC2 nerds).

And of course there’s also the competitive element: as people would master strategies and counter-strategies in the old Brood War days, sometimes the counter-strategies would become so fixated and focused that players would uncover novel, oftentimes otherwise considered sub-optimal responses that would turn the matches on their head, introducing a whole new “optimal” meta-game, and so on and so forth, such that a game that received no balances patches after a certain point was still seeing wild shifts in optimal strategy a decade after release.

But after beating up my own argument so badly, on some level, extreme top-tier high level competitive play in some genres–where “sufficient dexterity” can be assumed and the meta-game is not relevant to an individual match–the multiplayer matchup takes on a strong appearance of being a puzzle-game, to the point where commentators can often “call” a match minutes before its conclusion, based purely on the build orders or scouting patterns used.

More or less ditto for some matchups in fighting games. “Assuming perfect, Armada-level control of that Fox, the only way for my Jigglypuff to succeed is to initiate Strategy such-and-such with equally perfect control until I chip him down from an effectively perfectly defended position, since I can assume he will not try deemed-suboptimal approaches/offensive strategies that have long been discarded by the competitive community, instead relying on optimal strategies that my counter-strategy effectively neuters.”

I was thinking more of 4x. The game becomes the meta-game of disregarding as many suboptimal choices as possible, focusing on getting the 3rd city or that tech by turn X, otherwise just restart.

EDIT: Expanding: the early game turns into a puzzle of figuring out how to reach some optimal state before meaningful interactions start, sometimes even deciding the game at that point. Does that turn the game into a puzzle game? I’m going with no, especially since few people play like that, but it’s an interesting thought.

“Oh, my random map started me without a unique resource within 8 tiles, immediate restart”

AKA 12 year old me for 20 minutes straight back in the day :)