Video Games Are Like Logic Puzzles

It blows me away that video games are treated like the second-biggest waste of time ever conceived by man (right above studying Time Cube theory).

The only brain activity required to watch your typical television show is the repressing of your entire left hemisphere's attempts to escape the torture of hackneyed plot formulas by exiting out the back of your skull. This is the socially accepted way to spend your time. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional brain-strangling session myself, but even the dumbest video games require some neurons to fire.

A video game (any kind of game, really) is like a logic puzzle. How's that? Let's start with a simple logic puzzle and break it down.

A farmer needs to cross a river on his small raft. He has with him a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain. His raft can hold one object besides himself. In the presence of the farmer nothing gets eaten, but if left without the farmer, the fox will eat the chicken, and the chicken will eat the grain. How can the farmer get all three possessions across the river safely?

Not to be confused with the Mario Pit Crossing Puzzle.

Every puzzle has an objective, or goal. In this case, it's getting the farmer's lovable misfit crew across the river (sack of grain is the comic relief).

We also need rules that we apply to reach the goal. The rules here are that the farmer has a lousy raft and that we must ensure that all of the animals starve.

Finally, we have to maintain resources in some manner. (This is less apparent in some puzzles than others.) We could consider the animals as resources, but let's not. I'd like to bring your attention to how many times we cross the river. The River Crossing Puzzle is often presented with the caveat that we must cross the river as few times as possible. Besides, you're not impressing anyone if you solve the puzzle in a couple hundred turns.

Our logic puzzle has a goal, rules, and resources to account for. So does every video game you've ever played. The most obvious examples are video games based on puzzles.

The only winning move is not to play.

Let's consider a more interesting example, like the legendary Super Mario Bros. game. That's right. Legendary.

The goal of Super Mario Bros. is obvious enough; keep moving right to reach the end of each level. Also an acceptable answer: rescue a MacGuffin dressed in pink that will never, ever learn.

But how does a game like Super Mario Bros. deal with rules? Short of using glitches or cheats, you are forced to follow the rules. It's a given. All the stuff that isn't questioned because it's common sense (like gravity, stomping on turtles, and chasing growth-inducing running mushrooms) make up the rules of your typical Mario game.

OK, so where does resource management come into play? It's not like you can save up your golden coins and spend them on anything other than an extra life. I can answer that one too. (Ah yes, the privileges of answering your own questions.)

Platforming games are, by and large, played in real-time. Aside from being governed by the rules of the Mushroom Kingdom, you must manage your time, reflexes, and position. No matter how awesome you are, you can only hit those buttons so fast. And because of your limitations as a human playing a game in real-time, you have to manage those reflexes. Have you ever given yourself just a little extra space to make that running jump? How about waiting for a crushing ceiling to repeat its up-and-down pattern just to ensure you can sneak under it cleanly? That's managing your reflexes right there.

Your response time and real-time actions are even more apparent as resources when we consider the alternative. What if Super Mario Bros. was a turn-based game instead of a real-time game?

Super Mario RPG: An entirely original idea.

With the real-time system, time and your reflexes determined how far you could move. Now, in the turn-based system, movement would be fixed over some amount of turns. Shuffling actions around on a turn-based system should be easy to recognize as resource management. But really, the only difference between this system and the real-time system is how quickly you are making the decisions. The focus will have shifted from reflexes to planning, but the actions themselves are the same (and some resources, like position, would remain unchanged).

In short, all games, even real-time games, have some sort of quantifiable resource to be handled, just like logic puzzles.

Hopefully you can see how a video game is like a logic puzzle. Both force interpreting and applying goals, rules, and resources. When you approach a new game, there is a flurry of mental acrobatics you go through to learn, understand, and play the game. This is decidedly more involved than drooling all over yourself. So what's the problem with video games again?

Admittedly, some games do not provide very interesting rules or goals, which lead to not very interesting challenges. But no one is making the argument that all games are worth your time.

The other problem is when you play a game exhaustively. With a logic puzzle like the classic River Crossing Puzzle, it's interesting when you solve it the first time, but you're not getting much else out of it once you've solved it. The same goes for a video game. When you can play the game without thinking about it... then you're not really thinking about it. Deep.

Play some interesting games. Play some that are really challenging.

I said challenging, not sadistic.

And when a game isn't challenging anymore, learn a new game. I can think of worse things to do.