[JULY] The Puzzle Instinct by Marcel Danesi

[Liz England]

This month's reading is The Puzzle Instinct by Marcel Danesi.

"Humans are the only animals who create and solve puzzles—for the sheer pleasure of it—and there is no obvious genetic reason why we would do this. Marcel Danesi explores the psychology of puzzles and puzzling, with scores of classic examples. His pioneering book is both entertaining and enlightening." —Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, The New York Times

I like getting a summary of the book, but the only description the publisher uses is this above testimonial.

The book's available from Indiana University Press and the usual places (Amazon, etc.) in both hardcover and ebook formats. Hopefully the ebook is available is all regions. 

[Reign Naw]

I've just discovered that Google (in Canada at least) has the ebook available for 9.99.

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Marcel_Danesi_The_Puzzle_Instinct?id=B8UJgmZhdjMC

Most hardcopies/ebooks seem to be between 25-30.

[Lisa Brown]

Finished this up. In general I found it an extremely interesting and informative read, although not entirely a helpful one (as in, I didn't come away feeling like I was better equipped to design puzzles). As a history text, though, it was fascinating. I love how it did deep dives across a number of different subjects and their puzzles (math, literature, religion, history, computer science, linguistics, art, psychology, philosophy...). While it gave a lot of history and insight into all different kinds of puzzle thinking, I didn't really grasp any explanation about why we have this supposed puzzle instinct, but I didn't mind too much in the end.

One criticism I did have was that the author seemed to occasionally throw down big, sweeping, uncited claims. stuff like "few other hobbies attract as many devotees as puzzles," or that "toy mazes are among the most popular types of games given to children today." These bits threw me off because he typically cited sources for most everything else he talked about. Perhaps they are true and it's just the skeptic in me causing trouble, but they made me feel like he was trying a bit too hard to convince the reader of the value of puzzles.

A favorite observation was how a lot of old puzzles (especially language puzzles) required "external knowledge" to solve, which is something we don't do a ton in modern game design outside of trivia-related games. It actually reminded me of a moment in my youth when I was playing the first Silent Hill. There was some puzzle involving zodiac symbols, and I got myself all tangled up and off track trying to read too deeply into the symbolism. I was like "well these two are air signs so they probably are related..." and so on. I was stumped on the puzzle for an entire night. I can't remember if I came up with the realization myself or if it was my brother who pointed out to me that a mass market game probably wouldn't count on players having in-depth knowledge about the zodiac, and so the answer was probably within the puzzle itself (sure enough, it had to do with the number of limbs each symbol had). Even though I was still far from becoming a game designer at the time, I remember this realization sort of shrinking game experiences thereafter, and I started approaching puzzles in games with this assumption that everything I needed would be contained within the game. I haven't really drawn any conclusions from this while I was reading about old contextual puzzles, but it did make me ponder.

Some other points I wrote down throughout my read:

- I wish I could be hired as someone's official puzzlist

- I hadn't before heard of the specific definition of conundrum as a type of word puzzle

- I liked the bit about the origin of the word "chortle" and the idea of human ideas rooted in the structure of language

- Cryptarithm puzzles are the stuff of nightmares to me

- He made an offhand comment about Mancala as a prototype for Dungeons and Dragons, and I still haven't figured out what he meant

- Chess puzzles remind me of the scripting puzzles in SnapMap

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