Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 78)

Trigger Happy
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more primitive, kinetic way—in much the same way, in
fact, as playing sports. Yet the closest thing to sport in
videogames is not necessarily a sports game. Reflexes,
speedy pattern recognition, spatial imagination—these
are what videogames demand. This is perhaps their
fundamental virtue. If so, the king of videogame genres
is arguably the most abstract, the least representational,
the most nakedly challenging: the puzzle game.
At the most basic level, a videogame puzzle
presents the player with a required action that cannot be
performed directly. You must therefore find the
intermediate steps and execute them in the right order.
Puzzle elements abound in all sorts of game genres. As
we mentioned earlier, Tomb Raider is in one sense a
puzzle game, in that it requires manipulation of blocks
in 3D space to unlock certain passages or secrets.
Object-manipulation or switch-tripping puzzles abound
in classic platformers like the early Mario games. Even
a shoot-’em-up like Defender in one sense poses very
high-speed puzzles measured in fractions of a second.
But a great puzzle game in its own right requires a
combination of perfect simplicity (both in terms of
rules and gameplay) and lasting challenge. Classics of
this particular genre are therefore thin on the ground.