Jesse Schell - The Art of Game Design

Puzzles are in all forms of games. At any point in a game when a player has to stop and think they are in the middle of solving a puzzle in the game whether it is abruptly facing you like a game where you have to move certain mechanisms to open a door or the puzzle can be subtle for instance choosing what upgrade to grab.

The Puzzle of Puzzles:
Puzzles are a part of games but are they a game?
"Chris Crawford once made the bold statement that puzzles are not even really interactive, since they don't actively respond to the player."
This is like the first explorers who first saw Penguins and would have probably not known how to define them i.e. they look like birds but cannot fly?

Scott Kim - ""A puzzle is fun, and has a right answer" The irony of that is that once you find the right answer, the puzzle ceases to be fun."

The main reason people do not class a puzzle as a game is because it is not replayable.
Which makes us think they aren't games as most games have enough dynamics to give a player the sense of replay ability.

"When a game has a dominant strategy, it doesn't cease to be a game, it just isn't a good game."

Dominant strategy - when a single strategy will defeat a game every time.

"A puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy"
They are just games which aren't fun to reply.
"Puzzles are just miniature games whose goal is to find the dominant strategy"

Aren't Puzzles Dead?:
Most people believe puzzles are old fashioned but puzzles are still in the games we play today, not as abruptly but they are still there, remember the rule, a puzzle is anything that makes the player stop and think.
In the early years of the game industry puzzles designed to test your mental ability were the craze whereas know a days the new craze is to test how quickly you can move your hands on a keypad or controller. But puzzles are still a part of both.

Good Puzzles:
Ten principles of puzzle design that can be used in any game genre:
1.Make the goal easily understood
2.Make it easy to get started
3.Give a sense of progression
4.Give a sense of solvability
5.Increase difficulty gradually
6.Parallelism lets the player rest (making the player stop and think, best way to avoid anger and leaving the game is give multiple puzzles at once so that if one appears to challenging they can move on to another and still achieve and get a sense of achievement) "A change is as good as a rest"
7.Pyramid structure extends interest (series of small puzzles which contribute to the completion of a larger puzzle)
8.hints extend interest
9.Give the answer (the aha factor of figuring out what the answer is and getting to that state)
10. Perceptual shifts are a double edged sword (like riddles you either get them or you don't, should be used sparingly in video games)

-Dan