Puzzleless

A term for games which break from the traditional pattern of using puzzles in order to control the player's movement through the game world and story.

Some such games provide the players with a more fine-grained level of interaction, focusing tightly on a particular situation and allowing them to affect unfolding events in more subtle ways. In particular, some games concentrate on conversation between the player and NPCs, in which the player's goal is simply to converse, as in Emily Short's "Galatea".

Other puzzleless games lower the level of interactivity altogether, shifting the balance of power toward the designer, making the experience more like a traditional narrative(in which the reader need not perform any non-obvious interactions in order to experience the whole story) and curtailing the player's ability to engage in incidental or tangential interaction.

-- OKB 2002/08/21

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Discussion

The player doesn't have to do anything beyond entering obvious commands to experience the work in its entirety. --JdBerry - 10 Sep 2002

LeeAnnKorecky - 21 Nov 2002 Added "or her" to all the references to the player as a "him." Deleted parentheses.

Removed some awkward "him or her" language (finding other ways to avoid gender bias). Added bit about narrative; incorporated JdBerry's comment in main body. DGJ - 16 Jan 2003