Puzzles

It should come as no surprise that I am a huge fan of video games. Being able to insert myself into a world and interact with it like that is something that I love being able to do, and is part of why I got into writing in the first place. So a lot of things that I think about when it comes to writing come in some form from a video game that I have played, or watched someone else play. However, there are a lot of things in video games that don't translate well to other forms of media, and especially books. One of those things is puzzles.

Being trapped inside a room, and needing to find the hidden away clues to complete a task that will free you is a very interesting and sometimes stressful event that occurs frequently in video games. And it's not enough to simply find the clues - you must figure out how those clues go together, or how they interact with other things in the room, and slowly putting together the pieces until you have a way forward that makes it entertaining. In fact, in flash games online, such a concept is a widely popular genre of game all to itself, called "escape" games. While I've never been very good at them, I love playing them, just to see what kind of twisted logic you have to use to figure out wha to do and in what order.

Something like that doesn't translate too well to non-interactive, written form. You can somewhat do it with choose your own adventure novels, but even then, you are limited to the choices being made being fairly linear, where as a true puzzle can and should be attacked from multiple angles before the correct path is discovered. And you can have a character stuck in a puzzle - with The Da Vinci Code being a fairly popular example of that occurring - where the reader is just as lost as the main character is up until the pivotal moment. But that still means that the puzzle will be solved in a singular manner, the way the main character would.

This makes it especially difficult to have extra pieces of the puzzle, which is an equally frustrating and ingenious element of escape games. Pieces of the puzzle that are intended to make you think in one way about what to do, when the truth is something else entirely. And sometimes those pieces are used for another puzzle that follows immediately afterwards, so if you didn't find it the first time, you would have to move back and search a room you thought you had already completed in order to move forward with the new situation at hand. But you can't turn back the pages to find something you didn't find the first time.

I'm not sure that I would even be smart enough to attempt to put together something like this. It requires a very esoteric way of thinking, much like creating a choose your own adventure novel would. But I think it would be cool if someone found a way to pull this off. And maybe that would only be possible in a non-physical book, which may limit the potential audience. But that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.