Well, I-you know, there-that little group of us, you know, right - I actually hired Ron at LucasArts, and-and was there when he bought on Dave Grossman and Tim Schaffer and, you know, it was a very tight-knit group, particularly talking about that stuff. David Fox was one of the earliest experimenters in that, too. And what would happen is that we would talk about what made up a puzzle, we would analyze it, you know, we published a lot of stuff in those early days, you know, uh, interviews and-and articles, because it was all wonderful and fresh and new, you know, and nobody really had the technology to even tackle that before, and we often were fueled by things, you know, we would see what our competitors had done, and want to improve on that, and just want to top what we had done ourselves. Puzzles in particular, they’re a very strange beast that, uh, in coming up with learning about game design and trying to apply rules and figure out structures, one of the reasons I realized why adventure games kind of ran into a brick wall is that they are almost alone among all game genres, in that they don’t have any easy way to become gradually more complex and difficult as you go on. If you make a puzzle more complex, it doesn’t necessarily make it more fun, it just sometimes means that people get stuck and can’t progress anywhere, and conversely, if you give hints, it doesn’t necessarily, it certainly makes the puzzle easier, but it’s no fun to be stuck and then have the game tell you, oh - have you tried x? So like, well, yeah, but now, so what? Now I know the answer to the puzzle. And it was a real art in creating that aha moment of leading the player to it, and the real magic of it all is when you have very carefully made it part of the game system, so that as the player struggles more and more, the game gets gradually and gradually more obvious as to what the answer is, but you want the player to feel that they’ve been the brilliant one who figured it out, and not realize that, you know, behind the curtain, you’ve been making it easier and easier for them. And that’s one of the-the toughest tricks, but uh, you know, one of the reasons why it’s been so tough, but also why it’s a very satisfying form to work in, and those of us who did that, I think, never lose our love for that kind of style of game design. Certainly also makes for some of the most entertaining brainstorming sessions I’ve ever had that - in fact, the Day of the Tentacle very early brainstorming was one of the points in my career I remember as laughing the hardest I ever have as part of my every day to day, uh, job.
