I think a thing that games do (and yeah this includes puzzle-boxes) is to make ‘interacting with the world’ a lot more streamlined and manageable than usual.
Like, in real like inventing a sword takes a hundred thousand years of trial and error. In Minecraft it takes about a day. In real life puzzles often stymie you for years and there’s no clear sense it’s even possible. In Baba Is You they come in bite sized manageable chunks, optimized to give you a drip of eureka spikes. And I do think this has important shared structure with ‘you can be a strong barbarian who can kill things easily’.
I think a thing that games do (and yeah this includes puzzle-boxes) is to make ‘interacting with the world’ a lot more streamlined and manageable than usual.
Like, in real like inventing a sword takes a hundred thousand years of trial and error. In Minecraft it takes about a day. In real life puzzles often stymie you for years and there’s no clear sense it’s even possible. In Baba Is You they come in bite sized manageable chunks, optimized to give you a drip of eureka spikes. And I do think this has important shared structure with ‘you can be a strong barbarian who can kill things easily’.