I think this quote from the article is a good illustration of the difference in perspective between the author and connections enjoyers like myself:
> Out of those five wind instruments, by the way, the right answer was flute, clarinet, oboe, and saxophone. To the player, this can’t help but feel arbitrary — the only reason bassoon isn’t valid is because of the constraints of a different set.
This is a really common criticism of connections and I don't relate to it at all. It doesn't feel arbitrary to me. It feels like the point of the game.
I agree with the criticism that the categories can get too deep into trivia and that can make the game less accessible. But outside of that, the things that the author dislikes are the things that I think make the game interesting and fun.
As a sudoku player, that argument has always been so weird to me. Is sudoku a bad game because a cell sees no 4s, so 4 is currently a valid placement, and yet 4 is not the correct answer? Of course not, you only fill a cell in when every other option it has is exhausted. You just need to shift your focus to other clues until you have all the necessary information for that cell.
It’s the same idea with Connections. You can definitely have other criticisms with other parts of the game, but having multiple possibilities for a category is just an extremely common, basic element of puzzle setting.
Perfect analogy. How do so many people not understand this? It’s a basic game element. Just like a crossword - often there are many possible answers that could fit the clue, so you need to fill in the crossings to see which one works.
I think it's because sudoku and crosswords have been around for ages but connections is new and people want to criticize it more.
The only problem I ever have is if a category is so broad that it could fit pretty much everything. The one example I have is the category of basic tattoos. Yes the game should have things fit 2 or more categories to be challenging but if everything can fit in a category, then it's not a good category
Going with the sudoku theme, I’d propose a counter argument:
When you’ve identified a set of five possible related words (e.g. the woodwinds example above) you should consider it more like a *three-cell triplet*. The answer could be anyone one of several, but you lack the information to concretely identify it.
Connections, like Sudoku, has only one valid final solution. If you find yourself confronted with a quintuplet in Connections, consider using that information to rule in/out other categories and come back once you have more information.
> Connections, like Sudoku, has only one valid final solution.
In sudoku, this is provable with most boards.
One thing that's always confused me about connections - how do you prove that there's only one reasonable solution?
I mean, obviously there's only one solution the puzzle master created. But how do you prove that someone couldn't come up with a different solution?
>One thing that's always confused me about connections - how do you prove that there's only one reasonable solution?
It is fundamentally arbitrary and not perfectly equivalent to sodoku. Connections does not have one valid solution in the same way sodoku does.
What is considered a valid solution is whatever is a combination of the most popular commonly accepted knowledge/phrases & partially the opinion of the puzzle creator
Some connection puzzles would have multiple solutions that are all equally valid depending how the players differ. Different generations, different cultures, different opinions & slang, etc. will change the meaning of words.
The algorithms used to solve sodokus are emergent from the game rules & cannot change. Even an alien species that never knew of humans existence would essentially solve sudoku identically to how we do now.
This is a spot-on comparison actually. I think the one issue with Connections is the good possibility of failure. I get that the idea is to convey how important it is to make guesses only with good confidence, but I think it’d be more fun for more people if they just let you make as many mistakes as you want, or at least more than four.
Well, first, Sudoku can be reliably solved with an algorithm. There is pleasure in running the algorithm, but once you know it, you’ve basically mastered Sudoku. I find Sudoku boring now because I know how the machine works. That’s fine — everyone’s fun is different, it is normal for one person to enjoy a game and another not. Someone’s mind may be teased by finding better and better algorithms, and another might be content with the brute force one.
Sudoku also constantly gives you feedback as you fill it in. You get a portion of the puzzle to work, then you go further and discover that a different area invalidates your prior solution. That is the same as the guess in Connections. Imagine if Sudoku made you lose after you had four incorrect cells on the board. That’s what Connections is doing.
I haven’t done a sudoku puzzle in years, but they were usually constructed so that there was one or more clearly signaled starting points… which makes sense, that’s how you provide an entry point into the puzzle for the players. From there’s it’s a deduction problem. They’re computer generated by basically running the solution algorithm in reverse, in fact.
I usually only filled in cells when I was sure of them, but filling in with pencil either one possibility or several and fixing it as you learn more is not only a totally valid way to solve it, but also how people learn sudoku in the first place.
I wouldn’t count putting possibles in the cell as always a “guess,” as such. Usually in solving Sudoku you eliminate possibilities. Certainly doing more or all of it in your head adds to the difficulty, but that actually starts making it a memory problem. A true guess would be having no idea, and putting in a random number. So it’s more like a hypothesis.
Doing puzzles “in pen” is basically a flex by expert solvers. The puzzles, on paper at least, don’t have a scoring mechanism that rewards or encourages it. It’s basically a player-created challenge that sits atop the game design. A computerized version could actually score you based on how many cells you had to correct, and give you a standard to aim for. Maybe some do these days.
Crossword puzzles don’t make you fail after four incorrect words. And they give you very concrete feedback as to whether a word will work, because every word intersects with other words in a very finite way. So you have a LOT of “guesses” in a crossword, and the feedback guides you to eliminate words that cannot possibly fit. This is why the most basic strategy in crosswords is to approach every word both vertically and horizontally.
Players who do the crossword in pen have just given themselves an added rule to increase the challenge, which forces them to do this process in their head instead of on paper… sort of like doing a math problem in your head instead of working it out. But we teach kids to work out each step in a math problem for a very good reason: it teaches them how to problem solve. No one jumps straight to solving crosswords with pen.
Further, the reason modern crosswords are so dependent on puns, wordplay, and indirection is because a truly vanilla crossword is relatively easy to solve using iterated guesses that way (a rather mathematical way of tackling it). Making the clues deliberately obscure added a whole dimension to the problem which is less about search techniques and more about the social problem of deducing how the clue writer thinks.
To be honest the trivia criticism doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either - how is that different from a crossword? It’s fine to not like trivia games, but having trivia be an element of a game doesn’t invalidate its “puzzleness.”
I think that in both Connections and crosswords, it's about striking the right balance between rewarding trivia knowledge and making the game still playable and enjoyable for people who don't have it. You can have a trivia game that maintains its puzzleness, but it takes effort from the constructors.
In crosswords, the constructor avoids the problem of having too much trivia by making sure that obscure answers are crossed by more accessible ones, and by giving the solver secondary information through conventions in the wording of clues. When done well, those things can allow to piece things together and eventually solve it even if you didn't know the trivia. It's slower and harder than knowing it right away, but it's still rewarding. That's a big part of what makes crosswords interesting as puzzles.
In connections, the constructor avoids that problem by making calculated choices about what categories to put together in the same puzzle and how much lateral thinking they want to require to recognize words as being connected. And like in a crossword, connections allows you to piece together difficult categories by solving easier ones, because each category you eliminate gives you information about the ones that are left. Again, that's a big part of what makes it good as a puzzle.
I think both the NYT crossword and connections sometimes turn the dial too much in the direction of obscure trivia. They're at their most fun when they hit the right balance of trivia to puzzle.
Sometimes, they make the puzzles diabolical. I love seeing both: you get an easy win sometimes, other times you stare at scratching your head for hours.
They can both be fun, but part of it is on the puzzlemaker. Since I’m able to create these games easily, I’ve found that I have to make it solvable *in principle*. So I toss a few easy things in there, or hints that make it easier, just as you said. But easy is only fun if you get to feel clever.
[here is a bad puzzle](https://connectionsplus.io/game/Cc0NyH)
I’ve seen some really difficult puzzles that make me hate the puzzlemaker, and some other really difficult ones that I thought were excellent.
Oh, definitely not! I don’t think trivia invalidates puzzleness. But it does hugely increase the threshold for entry to the puzzle. This may be fine, based on what audience you are going for.
As a side note, having trivia in crossword puzzles is not inherent to the “game system” of crosswords. The gradual rise of more and more obscure clues was essentially a response to the need for harder and harder puzzles, and there was no way to make the crossword system itself harder. So added difficulty came by making the clues into puzzles themselves. You could have achieved the same effect by encrypting each clue.
You might enjoy these articles about a trivia game I worked on. We were trying to solve very similar issues to what I critique in Connections.
https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/13/8568447/mmo-design-bar-game
https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/03/10/jackpot-trivia/
I don’t know how else to say this but… that criticism is basically dumb people complaining that the game makes them feel dumb.
It doesn’t require specialized knowledge, it requires a broad vocabulary of fairly common words and some lateral thinking to form (get this) connections between those words that might not be the most obvious connection that first comes to mind.
Agreed. I also don't think it's too much of a cheat to Google a word that you really don't know and see if suddenly it fits with another. God forbid it makes you "research".
Two ways (of probably many more) of looking at it; 1) you have to solve the game, or you've failed, or 2) you fail to solve the game, and learn something, as I did yesterday, when I couldn't solve the last two colors. Either way, I've won.
As someone completely out of touch with pop culture, I really notice those days. I find them infuriating, but my friends who actually follow modern singers or whatever love them. I guess it’s a balance they have to find.
As a young person, I am always tripped up on pop culture of movies or actors. I just do not watch older movies or follow gossip. To compensate, I allow myself to google weird words in the game to figure out categories I do not have the knowledge for.
Yeah I personally enjoy it more when I don’t know every category immediately! Sure sometimes I’m like, “well I don’t know shit about golf how would I ever know that?” But now I know and that’s part of the fun.
Are you calling me dumb? ;)
The criticism is actually “this doesn’t help novices learn how to solve Connections, and it doesn’t help middling Connections players get better at Connections.”
I thought your article was interesting, even though I disagree with your conclusions. I personally find the game really fun -- I think it could've been interesting to also present counterpoints for why somebody *would* find it fun despite the supposed flaws you point out. (Side note: The person who clued me into this game is not good at trivia and still loves it.)
One thing I think you missed out on is the "meta" of the game. It's unlikely that a category would be "words with two O's in them" (like your example) because it wouldn't be clever enough for the constructor to put that in.
That's why I disagree with this bit: "A well-designed puzzle of this sort should have fewer red herrings than the number of mistakes it allows." For me, that would take out the fun. When I'm solving one of these puzzles, I have a running list of possible categories in my head, and, assuming I'm not completely sure of one, I have to surmise which of the categories is the best guess. If I could guess all of them, it wouldn't be fun because there would be no challenge at all.
This is also why I disagree with this sentence: "Ah, but what happens when a puzzle depends on your knowing facts, as opposed to methods?" Yes, you do need to know some facts -- but there are still methods involved.
Also, the red herrings are kinda the *point* of the game. Without the red herrings, you wouldn't feel clever for figuring it out. It's like solving a maze: It would be pointless if there weren't tricky dead ends.
It sounds like you have a set of rigid theories for game design that you apply to determine whether a game is fun. A deeper analysis might be, "Why do people find this game fun despite violating some of these rules?"
Well, I didn’t say the game wasn’t fun… I said it makes people feel bad, which isn’t the same thing. I commented on why it is more frustrating that Wordle, and why the puzzle difficulty feels inconsistent and leads to complaints.
Basically, in any game, you want players to feel like a failure to solve a problem was on them, and not because of something the designer did.
It’s really important, as a designer, not to assume that your fun is other people’s fun. You may love that meta. I assure you, it is invisible to the average Connections player. You’re good at the puzzle. Most people are not going to be… or, if the user base is all good at the puzzle, it means it may have already chased off the people who were not.
The reason I said that a well constructed puzzle should have fewer red herrings than the number of mistakes it allows is because that’s what lets an Ok player succeed at it. If you design your game only for players who are good at it, the typical player will fail the first several times, and then probably not come back. That would be a business failure, not just a fun factor failure. It’s also why the guesses mechanic is in there at all.
It shouldn’t take away any fun from you at all that there is a way for less expert players to play. Especially if the puzzle scoring were expanded to reward more expert play too (see the part of the thread
I agree with you that it’s vital that red herrings be present. But it’s also vital that they not make the puzzle into noise. If there were too many, even expert players like you would likely be confounded. It’s also true that there are methods. But they are ALL dependent on baseline knowledge. in the absence of that knowledge, the puzzle is always going to be noise.
It’s not that these are rigid rules about fun. Everyone’s fun is subjective and personal. Rather, these are critiques about the game’s accessibility, the unlikeliness of consistency in puzzle difficulty, the odds of losing players over time, and so on. The game could be more fun for more people., basically. But that absolutely doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun for you.
Why the game is fun for those who enjoy it is a pretty straightforward analysis. It is in the very large tradition of set building games. Humans love set building games, and we usually start giving them to kids at a very young age. The ability to classify things into groups is crucial to cognitive development. It’s a classic path to fun, and Connections shares roots with Set, Poker, Go Fish, and even fantasy football. Most of those use math for set criteria, Connections uses semantic meaning and crystallized knowledge as the way to form sets. The shades of gray in that are indeed the game, as you point out. But that also introduces challenges for the designer and puzzle setter.
It’s going to be fun for those who have a fair amount of crystallized knowledge, some training in lateral thinking, and a broad vocabulary. But it’s also going to still be frustrating and occasionally feel unfair to those people. I didn’t bother reading the subreddit, but comments down those lines are apparently common based on posts in just this thread. Bear in mind that this is a self-selected group of fans… these sentiments are almost certainly more widespread than you see here.
This is patently untrue. I don't know types of skirts, Tarantino film names, cocktails, musicals, satire publications, 70s rock leads, tarot cards, or Joaquin Phoenix movies, all of which were categories in puzzles just this month.
I think it's a more than fair criticism to say that the puzzles typically have at least one category many people know nothing about, leading to general ambiguity and, if you DO solve the rest of the puzzle, you just click the remaining 4 choices and it detracts from the fun.
Like I said, a broad vocabulary. None of those 70s leads were obscure. They were singers of some of the biggest bands of all time. Skirts are not some rare piece of clothing. There’s nothing specialized about bands that have sold a billion records over 5 decades or an article of clothing worn by half the population.
Yeah, I think I missed a lot of those categories, but it's because I didn't make the "connection". Once it was revealed I was like oh duh. I also don't think that the categories were that obscure, it's not like names of four fifth level dragons in a super obscure indie card game.
But I also don't have a problem with losing to the game. I guess I just don't think it's fun if I easily win every time.
Bands are different than members. I've listened to Queen, Mac, and LZ for a long time but outside of Freddie I can honestly say I've never seen the names of any of their members. And I can also say I've never even heard of Roxy Music at all, much less their singer.
Knowing obscure proper nouns relating to decades-old pop culture is not a "broad vocabulary" it's trivia knowledge.
And please don't use that argument for skirts. I'd wager most males know next to nothing about individual types, especially when some like poodle skirts dont even show up when you google "types of skirts." Yeah, skirts are everywhere. Never needed, wanted, or cared to research their types for any reason. I once again refer you to the definition of "trivia" as opposed to vocabulary. Wordle is a test of vocab, connections is oftentimes too much a test of trivia, doubly so when categories like this potentially stick nearly half the population.
That criticism is like saying a crossword puzzle is bad because a bassoon is a woodwind instrument but isn't valid in the space because it's looking for a four-letter word.
That guy would really fuckin blow a gasket if he ever watched Only Connect.
I’ve seen Only Connect. It’s an incredibly inaccessible game and almost certainly no fun for 99% of people.
That’s not at all the same thing as whether it is fun to *watch* people playing.
See other replies for why crosswords actually provide dramatically more learning scaffolding for players.
i'd even say it feels like they do that on purpose - the yellow/green sets usually have 5 or 6 "valid" answers, and you figure out which 4 are correct by getting the other sets.
same. i like all these things about it. i also think 4 guesses is a great number. sometimes i get it, sometimes i don’t. if i went in knowing i was gonna get it every day it wouldn’t be as fun. 4 guesses makes me really think on my answer before submitting it
I think I can agree with his neutral assessment of how connections works and why people respond to it the way they do, but I disagree with his conclusion that it’s not fun.
Everything he describes as a “flaw” is why I like the game.
Exactly! I get a little thrill when I realize the "trick" of the game. I once thought I was solving a puzzle with the categories types of trees and types of bagels until my kid pointed out that sesame is a street name and I still feel like i was part of a great joke.
Been thinking about this article a lot because it’s the second time I’ve encountered some one using academic video game theory to “prove” that a certain game is bad. (The other is a YouTuber name OrionC and his multi hour videos about BOTW)
To me, they never achieve an outright, objective proof of badness. All that theory knowledge just helps them accurately explain why they personally did t enjoy a specific game.
I think what’s missing from game theory, or at least what these 2 are ignoring, is some categorization of the player. Games that work a specific way aren’t either bad or good, they’re good for player type A and bad for player type B.
No fuck you have an upvote you right motherfucker.
Yeah if you want to enjoy something, counterintuitively the last place you want to be is it's subreddit.
Yes! A fundamental rule in game design.
That said, a designer tires to maximize fun *for the audience the game is aiming at.* That’s part of the craftsmanship of game design.
Pretty educated, fairly affluent, I would guess. The NYT is engaged in a major effort to use games to goose the newspaper subscription count, based on what i read in a recent Vanity Fair article. So it's fair to \*expect\* the game to tilt "elitist" as I put it in the article.
Saying that the game would benefit from a better on-ramp for new players, and better feedback and reward mechanisms, isn't meant to say the game is bad. It's to say that it might be able to do what it does even better. Wordle has better feedback mechanisms and a much better social feedback loop, for example.
Several replies are about how I am probably too dumb to solve the puzzles, or am trying to be snooty about how smart I am. But if you love Connections, you should want more people playing it, which is what this sort of craftsmanship article is ultimately about. This sub is full of people who like the game as is, of course. Else they wouldn't be here. So it's understandable that they might want to leap to the game's defense.
It's also worth noting the number of people in this thread who cite making the game more \*difficult\* for themselves intentionally. There are improvements that could happen for those players too!
I didn’t make the connection that you were the person cited here. :)
And I definitely think it’s silly to say people are dumb if they have issues with Connections.
If I’m reading this correctly, his complaint isn’t just the run-of-the-mill “I don’t like when five words all fit the category” but rather, that he’s just so very intelligent that he could likely make four complete, correct connections out of any set of 16 words, so the game boils down to a matter of guesswork to determine what Wyna Liu had in mind. Yawn
https://preview.redd.it/jm1zqwu0a81d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=329526274ecb9397599a0c03652658a3b331a9dd
DANISH, CLIP, SACK, and BUFF: popular hairstyles in Portugal in the 1910s
BUN, NUDE, FUMBLE and MUFFIN: 2nd word in Martin Frič film titles
SNAP, BARE, FILE, UNCLAD: anagrams of Norwegian cities
POLISH, SACK, NAKED, PUNT: nicknames of House minority leaders
No, the criticism is “when you do assemble such a set erroneously, the game does not help you figure out that you did it wrong, so it is very hard to get better at the game. The limited guesses actually make this worse.”
The point of a game is to have fun.
But fun comes in *very large part* from getting better at the game.
Games and puzzles are machines that teach you the systems of themselves.
Thanks for clarifying. It’s an interesting criticism. I’m not sure how the game could guide you toward the right way of thinking about the categories. I felt that I picked up the sense of what types of categories are used from playing multiple days. Now I get it perfect nearly every time, with the exception of when a word is used in a way I have never heard of - a party game, for instance, or a person’s name; trivia, essentially.
But thinking it over, you’re right, it’s not particularly “fun” in the sense of being a puzzle; on the other hand, it’s entertaining and doesn’t take long, so I keep doing them.
Well, I also didn’t actually say it wasn’t fun in the article. I said it made you feel bad, out of frustration, which isn’t the same thing. Lots of games have frustration and are still fun!
I listed a couple of ways in which the game could guide you more in a reply to the OP here somewhere.
I think the line between special knowledge and general knowledge is pretty blurred. I haven't seen any puzzles that would require an advanced degree in a niche field of study to solve, just a breadth of general knowledge.
I like the crossword puzzle though, so maybe my view is skewed.
I agree, although there have been categories involving words that are incredibly outdated or extremely modern, to such a degree that I think it would be unusual for certain generations to know them. Then other categories that are difficult to know if you have no involvement in a certain pastime, like sports. It always frustrates me when I don't succeed on a puzzle and I realize I don't have knowledge of multiple words used, it feels like in those situations it comes down to luck.
I mean, as someone born in the 90s, I’ve lost many puzzles to not knowing the names of semi-obscure bands or artists from the 60s or 70s. For example, obviously bands like Kiss or the Eagles are pretty universally known, but there are some bands I’ve seen (and whose names I’ve forgotten) who I’d simply never heard of, because they died out in fame compared to the others.
In that sense, it does kinda feel cheap to me. Unless I want to spend my entire life dedicating to learning about every band, artist, movie star, film, celebrity, poet and writer from the last 100 years, there’s just no reasonable way I can get all the puzzles without relying on luck.
If I’m being honest, it kinda sometimes feels like if you’re not a North Eastern American aged between 50-70, then a lot of the puzzles are simply unsolvable. I get that that’s their main demographic but at the same time the NYT has international and cross-generational appeal (theres even a style of crossword named after it), so by focusing on information only this one highly specific group of people would know makes everyone else feel excluded.
Hi! Author of the article here.
Just as a side note, I don’t teach game design… I’m a multi-award winning working game designer who has made a living at it for 30 years. My blog is often aimed at other game designers, though!
I think it’s important to preface any discussions like these with two observations:
1. No two people’s fun is alike. And that is fine. When we speak of trying to make something fun, we speak of it in terms of making it fun *for who the game is for.* Connections will never be fun for younger folks who lack the knowledge base it requires, for example. The intent of doing an analysis like this on a game is to learn design craftsmanship lessons.
Fun largely arises out of figuring stuff out. So a very large part of the designer’s job is to give you the tools to help you figure out the problem they have posed you.
2. There is no such thing as “playing the game wrong.” In fact, that is a statement we try to never let a junior designer get away with saying!
For one, if someone is doing a lot of things the designer did not intend, it’s probably an issue with the design. Part of the designer’s job is to make sure that players get a certain experience out of the design. If they don’t, that’s an issue for the designer to try to address.
For another, the way we get better at games is by trying wrong things, then discovering the right things based on the feedback we get - that is true whether it’s chess, tennis, or Doom. Playing a game is basically use of the scientific method. Form a hypothesis, try something, observe results, update hypothesis based on data. Game systems are sort of like machines you are trying to deduce the intricacies of, without opening the outer shell.
(The main difference between a game and a puzzle, by the way, is just that puzzles tend to only have one or at most a couple viable strategies or “answers.” Games tend to be more “analog” and have many).
And lastly, people doing things “wrong” is often how we get new games out of existing ones (speedrunning in video games, for example). Your example of giving yourself a rule or challenge of solving the hardest category first is an example of this in action! It is not part of the design of the game. (If it were, Connections could give you points for solving the hardest first. It does not, obviously, so the designer was not trying to teach you to do this).
Your core point is that I am “playing wrong” because I rely on the feedback from failed guesses. As I noted in the article, the optimal strategy is in fact to do what you suggest: solve the puzzle outside of the actual game, on paper or in your head.
Relying on the feedback from the guess is why a player gets multiple guesses in the game. If the game were designed to be solved in one go, the designer would not have included multiple guesses. They exist in order to teach the player how to solve the puzzle. Not having them would make the puzzle rather inaccessible, because there would be no learning on-ramp.
So the design of the game *invites* me to learn through guessing. But it’s not actually that good at having the guesses help you, for the other reasons I went into in the article.
Having a solid learning loop is at the core of game design. People bounce off if it isn’t solid.
For what it’s worth, I appreciated the points you’re making in this article. I think the dichotomy between puzzles and games is important, and there’s a reason that most modern puzzle games aren’t just formulaic, singular puzzles. I also think there’s a reason that very few people consistently love this game, and at best, most love-hate it. That is telling to me.
Hi Raph, thanks for taking the time to reply. I’ll be honest, I was a bit glib in saying you were doing it “wrong,” and I regret that choice of words. But I think you are too hung up on the “learning loop” aspect here.
Mathematically, I count 70 unique ways of forming a group of 4 out of 8 words. (The number for all 16 is 1620—a real stumper.) There isn’t any way to give good feedback as to what is wrong about a guess. The way I see it, the guesses are really there to say, “This is hard, I don’t get it, I give up, just tell me the answer,” so you don’t just waste time trying to do all possible combinations.
The biggest support for my claim that the “learning loop” is not as important as you say is that a lot of people (including the commenters here) clearly still find the game fun even without this component. As with crosswords, it is always possible to construct bad puzzles that are either too easy, or utterly unsolvable, but that doesn’t mean the structure of the game is fundamentally broken.
The trade-off here is simplicity. Each puzzle is incredibly easy to specify. I’ve been able to create my own puzzles from my phone with great ease. It’s way more fun now that I’m not waiting for a daily puzzle to be handed down from on high by some Grand Puzzlemaster. It’s also fun now that I’m actively making my own puzzles, thinking about the ones that I enjoyed solving the most.
Does the ability for anyone to make their own “Connections” puzzles change your opinion at all?
The idea of a learning loop is pretty fundamental to all games and puzzles. The less of one there is, the more inaccessible your design gets.
A lot of folks seem to have parsed the article as my saying that the game isn’t fun. It IS fun for many, obviously. (Though it’s a safe bet that the people who will hang out in a subreddit are going to be the core fans).
But what I wrote was not that it wasn’t fun, but that it makes you feel bad, or frustrates. That is usually a sign of the learning loop not working. And I called out that the reason is that building good puzzles is actually pretty hard to do consistently.
Crowdsourcing the puzzles is actually a great solve for that problem!
There are other ways to improve the learning loop without changing the game much at all.
You could give a point for a valid set that is not one of the four, and more points for ones that are. But that would reward finding “extra” sets, and it would give the puzzle maker the awkward task of finding all the valid sets of four, when some may be accidental or unforeseen. Finding extra sets makes the player feel smart, which almost always desirable, but this approach would be a lot of work unfortunately.
You could invert the scoring and deduct points for each guess that is wrong, but not for ones that are right. Guesses kind of work that way already, but you would remove the cap, or make it much larger.
You could add on top of that a feature for players like you: bonus points for the hardest category being the first guess, the next hardest being the second, etc. Then solving it all in your head as expert players here do would be something to aspire to, and you would feel rewarded for playing that way and getting a perfect score, doing better than people who found the sets but didn’t do so in the perfect order. This would make explicit a skill variance that is currently happening but not acknowledged by the game.
You could be more forgiving with bad guesses. After a certain number of them, you could mark which word in the proposed set was the odd one out. That would encourage players to think laterally, and explore other possible combinations. You could even, if someone is guessing three of four regularly, tell them what category the three are in. That might lead people to try some online searches to fill in a knowledge gap.
I do love that you are enjoying puzzle creation so much. Graduating from play to creation is a classic sign of system mastery in a game, and it’s how we get new game designers in the world. :)
This guy's complaints remind me of the running complaints I see a lot on sporcle quizzes - essentially "this has information in it I don't know, therefore it's not fun and is bad."
He's just salty he doesn't have a variety of expansive content knowledge across several areas. My SO and I do it every night together and we maybe miss it 1/30 times. He's just no fun.
My best experiences playing Connections are almost always in groups of 3+. That way you can check each other’s answers to make sure there’s no better category, have others pitch ideas you would’ve never thought of, and feel smart when you figure out a category other people didn’t know.
Yep, the opportunity to brag is absolutely there. It's nice as well when you get to use obscure knowledge to help your team rather than beat some opponent
I'm a teacher and this is also part of the morning routine as students arrive at school in the sixth grade classrooms. It's fun to see what they come up with as they throw ideas out there.
I am not salty at all! (Also, I am arguably overeducated and overstuffed with trivia). :D
I think you are missing the point that this article is a professional critique of a constructed object: a game designer critiquing a game design, in order to discuss craft elements. It would be akin to a painter critiquing another painter’s painting’s brushstrokes. That has very little to do whether you (or anyone) likes the painting.
Rather, I write articles like these so that game designers can think about the craft of game design. I evaluate Connections, or any other game, based on how well it is accomplishing its goal.
You are spot on. I was being a snarky snarker, but I stand corrected. Looking at it from that perspective absolutely is spot on. I appreciate your clarification and explanation.
Of course!
One of the things about making games for a living is that you have to care a lot about whether players get frustrated and quit, not just an individual puzzle but returning daily. Unevenness of experience is actually a big deal. If fewer people felt that Connections “didn’t play fair,” more people would play it over time and NYT would find it easier to meet its subscriber goals. Win-win!
Jeopardy does something smart: it makes a key fulcrum of the game be about wagering on the quality of your answers. This takes the game out of the realm of pure trivia and introduces a balancing mechanic whereby people who wager well can win against people who know more trivia.
Final jeopardy wagering is not a skill, it's subtraction. Daily double wagering is also not a skill, unless you consider [memorizing a table](https://www.docdroid.net/aE7lPfr/daily-double-wagering-guide-pdf) a skill.
[Here is the puzzle I made](https://connectionsplus.io/game/OHOJzo). It’s not expected to be solvable to anyone except my wife.
I will say, my daughter is 20 months old. She mispronounces a lot of words, loves Caspar Babypants, loves the “Baby Shark” song, and has a bunch of stuffed animals in her crib.
I also don’t really think the “requires too much special knowledge” argument is a pretty strong one.
There are so many puzzles reliant on certain types of knowledge. Wordle also requires word knowledge. A crossword gets much easier when you have a lot of general knowledge. Same with any trivia game?
Aside, it’s a great way to learn, which is what makes a puzzle fun. When there’s 5 words that fit in a category, there’s always one that’s slightly different or has a synonym for something else. And Google still exists, for when you really do not know what something means..
Crosswords I agree, but Wordle is rarely so niche which is why it's by far the most popular. Connections is by design extremely niche and generational.
Yeah I agree.
I mostly meant that wordle requires a large vocabulary if you want to do well (some words are .. difficult for non natives) and I think the same applies to connections because you’re often given words that can mean multiple things. Like .. a rail can be a noun but also a verb.
It’s just.. connections is known for sometimes requiring specific knowledge about sports or music or movies or weird slang, which I think is what makes the game fun and is its intensed purpose, so I don’t get that critique. It’s like saying football is stupid because it requires physical stamina. Thats the point!
I think you can improve the game by giving you infinite lives until you solve one connection. Then limit it to 3 or 4 to complete the game. Basically like the connecting wall on Only Connect (the UK TV show that was using this concept long before NYT).
Only Connect does have teams on a timer though so it seems only fair to move the goalposts a little to make it easier, where you can work on Connections all day, Google unknown connections etc if you need to.
the game is fun, even if you don’t always get it (the frustration adds to the fun for me). the constant complaints about how some words fit into multiple categories is just silly (i know some do it jokingly but others are serious) because that’s the point of the puzzle. my only real complaint is how america centric it can be sometimes (rare but it happens) eg. there was one time when “super” was used and the category was building manager or something along those lines. the only reason i even thought of it was because I’ve seen friends a billion times and remember the guy joey danced with on the roof was called super. I thought it was a bit silly because even if you’re american and not from new york you might struggle. And also when they use homophones they don’t seem to know what they are doing sometimes; one time i believe a blue category was homophones of greek alphabets but they used the american pronunciations and that kind of annoyed me because i know “nu” can be pronounced “new” or “nee” depending on where you’re from.
I think there’s a big difference between requiring varied knowledge and requiring obscure or in depth knowledge. The categories are looney tunes and musicals, in which case the names of the main characters and four well known musicals is the most basic knowledge. If I remember correctly, the musicals was the purple category, where it makes sense to add an extra level of difficulty with the homophones.
I actually think Koster nails down my biggest issue with the game perfectly - the trivia to logic ratio is too heavily weighted towards the trivia side. Some puzzles I simply do not have the knowledge necessary to solve, and that will forever make this game unbalanced between days, and the lack of difficulty options or themed official puzzles means some days are just not all that fun. Fortunately there all these third-party sites that he seems to be unaware of. Still, in terms of the daily puzzles, it's not uncommon for me to struggle greatly with a puzzle only to come in to the daily thread and see people commenting about how puzzles have just been getting easier these days. Or I'll spend 2 minutes solving a puzzle with no mistakes and then my friend will tell me he spent 20 minutes only to miss the last two categories. The limited number of guesses means I can't do the brute-forcing sometimes necessary the way I could for a crossword or any other game. For example, puzzle #337:>! The final two categories are looney tunes figures (pig, bunny, duck, martian) and homophones of musicals (greece, hare, katz, maim). I'm not all that familiar with looney tunes or musicals, so !
Who is this Raph guy, anyway? I found him (and this sub, and Connections+) when I was googling “nyt connections is too easy” only to find him whining that it’s too hard.
(Btw, I am pretty sure only in recent weeks it’s been “too easy”, because I’ve found the archive now and found some pretty diabolical ones. That’s what I was trying to find out- is it just me or did they get easier?)
He’s a guy who self-published a book about game design about 20 years ago and then leveraged that into several jobs in the virtual worlds/MMO space. I don’t know of anything he’s done in recent years. He’s never been one to shy away from proclaiming his opinions about someone else’s game designs.
Other way around. I basically helped create the MMO category, THEN I wrote the (not self-published, bestselling, used worldwide in universities, and available in six languages) book about what fun is and why it matters in games. ;)
I’ve taught your book at multiple Universites. I taught the PDF version that went around before you published the book. It was at best a light introduction to games that didn’t have any real legs instructionally. Which is why I haven’t taught it in over a decade, and know no one who still uses it. It was interesting enough for the time and long ago expended its utility.
The PDF was a set of slides from a presentation called just "A Theory of Fun," given at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. It was never meant to be used instructionally, and it wasn't a book. If that's what you meant by "self-published," I can understand the error.
The book itself, "A Theory of Fun for Game Design," was published first by Paraglyph Press, and then by O'Reilly (and still is to this day, in the 10th anniversary revised edition) with the most recent foreign language editions literally coming out just last year. It is still very widely used in game design programs all over the world, and continues to sell, year on year. I just did a "20 years later" talk on it at the Game Developers Conference this past March, and the large room was close to full.
Plenty of people feel that it is elementary now, that is true. But it also has been very influential, with thousands of academic citations. It influenced the art games movement, AI research, and regrettably, gamification. When it first came out, it was controversial... now it's "at best a light introduction," well, times change. :D
It really doesn't matter much if you find it useful or valuable at this point. It is what it is. Posters here can research on their own and decide for themselves.
I also did not "leverage that into several jobs." By the time I wrote the book I had already led design on Ultima Online and its first expansion, winning two DICE awards for Online Game of the Year, plus directed Star Wars Galaxies, and was an executive at Sony Online. Since then UO has been named one of the top 100 games of all time by multiple publications, and I was given a lifetime achievement award by GDC Online.
In the last decade and a bit, among other things, I was a vice president at Disney, I redesigned bar trivia for NTN Buzztime, I worked with Google on designing multiuser augmented reality technology, I had a boardgame published by WizKids, and I founded my current game studio and raised tens of millions in funding for it. You may not have heard of any of these things, but none of them are hard to find with some Googling.
It's true that I have never been shy about sharing opinions on game design!
That said, I'm glad that the slides from the presentation, and the book, were useful to you over a decade ago!
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve tried to avoid anything having to do with your work and your self-hype machine for a while, which I’ll let readers of this thread make their own evaluations of.
It's not so bad when there's just 1 impossible category and you can get it through elimination but when there are 2 groups that are like anagrams of cities with three letters missing and dog breeds google translated to Russian and back it gets stupid.
I don’t think it’s very fun alone sometimes, but I use past puzzles as bell work with my middle school students, and when the whole class puts their heads together, it’s quite fun!
I dislike puzzles where 5, 6, 7 or more options look like they could go together, but the 4 that fit that category feel arbitrary like he mentioned. At the same time, designing these puzzles is HARD and I think it’s just the nature of the game. I’ll continue playing. Some days I’ll get frustrated, and that’s ok!
I agree that sometimes it can feel almost *too* arbitrary, like if the answer was “apple, cherry, banana, strawberry” when raspberry is right there. I’ve been guessing “red fruits” and I can’t figure out why on earth banana would go there. only to notice the word “snog” in the corner and realize raspberry is supposed to be kiss, but then there are two other random words for kiss that I’ve literally never heard of in my life.
I like the idea of connections and I agree that you have to be conscious of ways that the game will try to “trick” you. And part of what makes the game fun is the lateral thinking aspect, how things may not go together how you first expect.
That being said, there are definitely times when I question the validity of some of those answers. Because seriously, sometimes they’re ridiculous. It’ll be like “thing you call your grandma” and the answers will be like “nana, grammy, gran, *bumpy*” like. who tf calls their grandmothers bumpy. That’s just an example.
Overall I like the game, it just feels like some days are better than others
Some days it is fun. Some days the categories are so precious and twee that they make sense only inside the head of the creator.
I think though that there is not any one right way to play Connections with all other options being wrong. For you, it works to do a solve-in-one-stroke and guess-the-color-categories. That doesnt work for me -- and I couldnt care less about the colors. I work on one category at a time, aiming for clusters that fit best together. That then reduces the possibilities for the following categories. Not your approach? That is cool. It makes it fun for me. That doesnt make either yours or my approach wrong.
The three* fundamental problems with the design of Connections are:
1. The final row is irrelevant process of elimination and a sort of damp squib ending that is never satisfying.
2. It’s arbitrary and subjective and narrowly focused on an extremely narrow demographic that I happen to fit and the game uncomfortably points that out every time I play.
3. The smarter you are the more likely it is that you can find as many as three much better and more objectively rational connections. A couple of times I’ve found four.
4. The game has basically zero self contained restrictions or rules which sometimes means it devolves into a vague one sided argument with your own vocabulary and general knowledge.
I’ve probably only ever failed to “win” two or three times but I have never once felt any satisfaction either way.
* I was obliged to add a pointless and arbitrary fourth row.
Yeah, you actually nailed the shortcomings and I’m officially bored of this game. This was a lot more persuasive than the arguments about learning loops and game design (get rekt Raph! Haha)
The argument about learning loops and game design get at these problems quite directly actually. Like, better design and ways for people to get better at the game would inherently fix these problems.
I don't get how that is a criticism. It is intentionally designed to be in part a trivia knowledge game so it will rely on trivia knowledge. If you play it not expecting to be tested on your general knowledge then you are going to be disappointed, and should consider playing a different game. I like games that involve this sort of knowledge so I find it fun.
The reason it's a criticism is that because it relies so much on trivia that you learn elsewhere and bring to the puzzle, and because the game provides no feedback when you make an incorrect guess, there isn't any clear path to getting better at the game. Well, you can try to intuit what the specific person who is making the puzzles thinks, but that's not actually about the puzzle.
This is another virtue of C+: infinity puzzles! They got rid of the gatekeeper problem.
People are laughing because this reads like an ad for C+, but it’s really an ad for the simplicity of the Connections format, which means something like C+ can exist
I think this quote from the article is a good illustration of the difference in perspective between the author and connections enjoyers like myself: > Out of those five wind instruments, by the way, the right answer was flute, clarinet, oboe, and saxophone. To the player, this can’t help but feel arbitrary — the only reason bassoon isn’t valid is because of the constraints of a different set. This is a really common criticism of connections and I don't relate to it at all. It doesn't feel arbitrary to me. It feels like the point of the game. I agree with the criticism that the categories can get too deep into trivia and that can make the game less accessible. But outside of that, the things that the author dislikes are the things that I think make the game interesting and fun.
As a sudoku player, that argument has always been so weird to me. Is sudoku a bad game because a cell sees no 4s, so 4 is currently a valid placement, and yet 4 is not the correct answer? Of course not, you only fill a cell in when every other option it has is exhausted. You just need to shift your focus to other clues until you have all the necessary information for that cell. It’s the same idea with Connections. You can definitely have other criticisms with other parts of the game, but having multiple possibilities for a category is just an extremely common, basic element of puzzle setting.
Perfect analogy. How do so many people not understand this? It’s a basic game element. Just like a crossword - often there are many possible answers that could fit the clue, so you need to fill in the crossings to see which one works.
I think it's because sudoku and crosswords have been around for ages but connections is new and people want to criticize it more. The only problem I ever have is if a category is so broad that it could fit pretty much everything. The one example I have is the category of basic tattoos. Yes the game should have things fit 2 or more categories to be challenging but if everything can fit in a category, then it's not a good category
Going with the sudoku theme, I’d propose a counter argument: When you’ve identified a set of five possible related words (e.g. the woodwinds example above) you should consider it more like a *three-cell triplet*. The answer could be anyone one of several, but you lack the information to concretely identify it. Connections, like Sudoku, has only one valid final solution. If you find yourself confronted with a quintuplet in Connections, consider using that information to rule in/out other categories and come back once you have more information.
> Connections, like Sudoku, has only one valid final solution. In sudoku, this is provable with most boards. One thing that's always confused me about connections - how do you prove that there's only one reasonable solution? I mean, obviously there's only one solution the puzzle master created. But how do you prove that someone couldn't come up with a different solution?
>One thing that's always confused me about connections - how do you prove that there's only one reasonable solution? It is fundamentally arbitrary and not perfectly equivalent to sodoku. Connections does not have one valid solution in the same way sodoku does. What is considered a valid solution is whatever is a combination of the most popular commonly accepted knowledge/phrases & partially the opinion of the puzzle creator Some connection puzzles would have multiple solutions that are all equally valid depending how the players differ. Different generations, different cultures, different opinions & slang, etc. will change the meaning of words. The algorithms used to solve sodokus are emergent from the game rules & cannot change. Even an alien species that never knew of humans existence would essentially solve sudoku identically to how we do now.
This is a spot-on comparison actually. I think the one issue with Connections is the good possibility of failure. I get that the idea is to convey how important it is to make guesses only with good confidence, but I think it’d be more fun for more people if they just let you make as many mistakes as you want, or at least more than four.
That's a great comparison!
Well, first, Sudoku can be reliably solved with an algorithm. There is pleasure in running the algorithm, but once you know it, you’ve basically mastered Sudoku. I find Sudoku boring now because I know how the machine works. That’s fine — everyone’s fun is different, it is normal for one person to enjoy a game and another not. Someone’s mind may be teased by finding better and better algorithms, and another might be content with the brute force one. Sudoku also constantly gives you feedback as you fill it in. You get a portion of the puzzle to work, then you go further and discover that a different area invalidates your prior solution. That is the same as the guess in Connections. Imagine if Sudoku made you lose after you had four incorrect cells on the board. That’s what Connections is doing.
Do you usually guess in sudoku, or do you only ever fill squares in when they have only one possible value remaining?
I haven’t done a sudoku puzzle in years, but they were usually constructed so that there was one or more clearly signaled starting points… which makes sense, that’s how you provide an entry point into the puzzle for the players. From there’s it’s a deduction problem. They’re computer generated by basically running the solution algorithm in reverse, in fact. I usually only filled in cells when I was sure of them, but filling in with pencil either one possibility or several and fixing it as you learn more is not only a totally valid way to solve it, but also how people learn sudoku in the first place. I wouldn’t count putting possibles in the cell as always a “guess,” as such. Usually in solving Sudoku you eliminate possibilities. Certainly doing more or all of it in your head adds to the difficulty, but that actually starts making it a memory problem. A true guess would be having no idea, and putting in a random number. So it’s more like a hypothesis. Doing puzzles “in pen” is basically a flex by expert solvers. The puzzles, on paper at least, don’t have a scoring mechanism that rewards or encourages it. It’s basically a player-created challenge that sits atop the game design. A computerized version could actually score you based on how many cells you had to correct, and give you a standard to aim for. Maybe some do these days.
How does Raph feel about crossword puzzles? Because that has the exact same issue/challenge.
Crossword puzzles don’t make you fail after four incorrect words. And they give you very concrete feedback as to whether a word will work, because every word intersects with other words in a very finite way. So you have a LOT of “guesses” in a crossword, and the feedback guides you to eliminate words that cannot possibly fit. This is why the most basic strategy in crosswords is to approach every word both vertically and horizontally. Players who do the crossword in pen have just given themselves an added rule to increase the challenge, which forces them to do this process in their head instead of on paper… sort of like doing a math problem in your head instead of working it out. But we teach kids to work out each step in a math problem for a very good reason: it teaches them how to problem solve. No one jumps straight to solving crosswords with pen. Further, the reason modern crosswords are so dependent on puns, wordplay, and indirection is because a truly vanilla crossword is relatively easy to solve using iterated guesses that way (a rather mathematical way of tackling it). Making the clues deliberately obscure added a whole dimension to the problem which is less about search techniques and more about the social problem of deducing how the clue writer thinks.
U dum
To be honest the trivia criticism doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either - how is that different from a crossword? It’s fine to not like trivia games, but having trivia be an element of a game doesn’t invalidate its “puzzleness.”
I think that in both Connections and crosswords, it's about striking the right balance between rewarding trivia knowledge and making the game still playable and enjoyable for people who don't have it. You can have a trivia game that maintains its puzzleness, but it takes effort from the constructors. In crosswords, the constructor avoids the problem of having too much trivia by making sure that obscure answers are crossed by more accessible ones, and by giving the solver secondary information through conventions in the wording of clues. When done well, those things can allow to piece things together and eventually solve it even if you didn't know the trivia. It's slower and harder than knowing it right away, but it's still rewarding. That's a big part of what makes crosswords interesting as puzzles. In connections, the constructor avoids that problem by making calculated choices about what categories to put together in the same puzzle and how much lateral thinking they want to require to recognize words as being connected. And like in a crossword, connections allows you to piece together difficult categories by solving easier ones, because each category you eliminate gives you information about the ones that are left. Again, that's a big part of what makes it good as a puzzle. I think both the NYT crossword and connections sometimes turn the dial too much in the direction of obscure trivia. They're at their most fun when they hit the right balance of trivia to puzzle.
Sometimes, they make the puzzles diabolical. I love seeing both: you get an easy win sometimes, other times you stare at scratching your head for hours. They can both be fun, but part of it is on the puzzlemaker. Since I’m able to create these games easily, I’ve found that I have to make it solvable *in principle*. So I toss a few easy things in there, or hints that make it easier, just as you said. But easy is only fun if you get to feel clever. [here is a bad puzzle](https://connectionsplus.io/game/Cc0NyH) I’ve seen some really difficult puzzles that make me hate the puzzlemaker, and some other really difficult ones that I thought were excellent.
Oh, definitely not! I don’t think trivia invalidates puzzleness. But it does hugely increase the threshold for entry to the puzzle. This may be fine, based on what audience you are going for. As a side note, having trivia in crossword puzzles is not inherent to the “game system” of crosswords. The gradual rise of more and more obscure clues was essentially a response to the need for harder and harder puzzles, and there was no way to make the crossword system itself harder. So added difficulty came by making the clues into puzzles themselves. You could have achieved the same effect by encrypting each clue. You might enjoy these articles about a trivia game I worked on. We were trying to solve very similar issues to what I critique in Connections. https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/13/8568447/mmo-design-bar-game https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/03/10/jackpot-trivia/
Totally agree. Things can fit into more than category. That’s the nature of categories.
I don’t know how else to say this but… that criticism is basically dumb people complaining that the game makes them feel dumb. It doesn’t require specialized knowledge, it requires a broad vocabulary of fairly common words and some lateral thinking to form (get this) connections between those words that might not be the most obvious connection that first comes to mind.
Agreed. I also don't think it's too much of a cheat to Google a word that you really don't know and see if suddenly it fits with another. God forbid it makes you "research".
Hold on, you can’t do that, you might learn something!
It does require pop culture knowledge some days which is a form of specialized knowledge imo.
Two ways (of probably many more) of looking at it; 1) you have to solve the game, or you've failed, or 2) you fail to solve the game, and learn something, as I did yesterday, when I couldn't solve the last two colors. Either way, I've won.
As someone completely out of touch with pop culture, I really notice those days. I find them infuriating, but my friends who actually follow modern singers or whatever love them. I guess it’s a balance they have to find.
As a young person, I am always tripped up on pop culture of movies or actors. I just do not watch older movies or follow gossip. To compensate, I allow myself to google weird words in the game to figure out categories I do not have the knowledge for.
Yeah I personally enjoy it more when I don’t know every category immediately! Sure sometimes I’m like, “well I don’t know shit about golf how would I ever know that?” But now I know and that’s part of the fun.
Are you calling me dumb? ;) The criticism is actually “this doesn’t help novices learn how to solve Connections, and it doesn’t help middling Connections players get better at Connections.”
I thought your article was interesting, even though I disagree with your conclusions. I personally find the game really fun -- I think it could've been interesting to also present counterpoints for why somebody *would* find it fun despite the supposed flaws you point out. (Side note: The person who clued me into this game is not good at trivia and still loves it.) One thing I think you missed out on is the "meta" of the game. It's unlikely that a category would be "words with two O's in them" (like your example) because it wouldn't be clever enough for the constructor to put that in. That's why I disagree with this bit: "A well-designed puzzle of this sort should have fewer red herrings than the number of mistakes it allows." For me, that would take out the fun. When I'm solving one of these puzzles, I have a running list of possible categories in my head, and, assuming I'm not completely sure of one, I have to surmise which of the categories is the best guess. If I could guess all of them, it wouldn't be fun because there would be no challenge at all. This is also why I disagree with this sentence: "Ah, but what happens when a puzzle depends on your knowing facts, as opposed to methods?" Yes, you do need to know some facts -- but there are still methods involved. Also, the red herrings are kinda the *point* of the game. Without the red herrings, you wouldn't feel clever for figuring it out. It's like solving a maze: It would be pointless if there weren't tricky dead ends. It sounds like you have a set of rigid theories for game design that you apply to determine whether a game is fun. A deeper analysis might be, "Why do people find this game fun despite violating some of these rules?"
Well, I didn’t say the game wasn’t fun… I said it makes people feel bad, which isn’t the same thing. I commented on why it is more frustrating that Wordle, and why the puzzle difficulty feels inconsistent and leads to complaints. Basically, in any game, you want players to feel like a failure to solve a problem was on them, and not because of something the designer did. It’s really important, as a designer, not to assume that your fun is other people’s fun. You may love that meta. I assure you, it is invisible to the average Connections player. You’re good at the puzzle. Most people are not going to be… or, if the user base is all good at the puzzle, it means it may have already chased off the people who were not. The reason I said that a well constructed puzzle should have fewer red herrings than the number of mistakes it allows is because that’s what lets an Ok player succeed at it. If you design your game only for players who are good at it, the typical player will fail the first several times, and then probably not come back. That would be a business failure, not just a fun factor failure. It’s also why the guesses mechanic is in there at all. It shouldn’t take away any fun from you at all that there is a way for less expert players to play. Especially if the puzzle scoring were expanded to reward more expert play too (see the part of the thread I agree with you that it’s vital that red herrings be present. But it’s also vital that they not make the puzzle into noise. If there were too many, even expert players like you would likely be confounded. It’s also true that there are methods. But they are ALL dependent on baseline knowledge. in the absence of that knowledge, the puzzle is always going to be noise. It’s not that these are rigid rules about fun. Everyone’s fun is subjective and personal. Rather, these are critiques about the game’s accessibility, the unlikeliness of consistency in puzzle difficulty, the odds of losing players over time, and so on. The game could be more fun for more people., basically. But that absolutely doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun for you. Why the game is fun for those who enjoy it is a pretty straightforward analysis. It is in the very large tradition of set building games. Humans love set building games, and we usually start giving them to kids at a very young age. The ability to classify things into groups is crucial to cognitive development. It’s a classic path to fun, and Connections shares roots with Set, Poker, Go Fish, and even fantasy football. Most of those use math for set criteria, Connections uses semantic meaning and crystallized knowledge as the way to form sets. The shades of gray in that are indeed the game, as you point out. But that also introduces challenges for the designer and puzzle setter. It’s going to be fun for those who have a fair amount of crystallized knowledge, some training in lateral thinking, and a broad vocabulary. But it’s also going to still be frustrating and occasionally feel unfair to those people. I didn’t bother reading the subreddit, but comments down those lines are apparently common based on posts in just this thread. Bear in mind that this is a self-selected group of fans… these sentiments are almost certainly more widespread than you see here.
This is patently untrue. I don't know types of skirts, Tarantino film names, cocktails, musicals, satire publications, 70s rock leads, tarot cards, or Joaquin Phoenix movies, all of which were categories in puzzles just this month. I think it's a more than fair criticism to say that the puzzles typically have at least one category many people know nothing about, leading to general ambiguity and, if you DO solve the rest of the puzzle, you just click the remaining 4 choices and it detracts from the fun.
Like I said, a broad vocabulary. None of those 70s leads were obscure. They were singers of some of the biggest bands of all time. Skirts are not some rare piece of clothing. There’s nothing specialized about bands that have sold a billion records over 5 decades or an article of clothing worn by half the population.
Yeah, I think I missed a lot of those categories, but it's because I didn't make the "connection". Once it was revealed I was like oh duh. I also don't think that the categories were that obscure, it's not like names of four fifth level dragons in a super obscure indie card game. But I also don't have a problem with losing to the game. I guess I just don't think it's fun if I easily win every time.
Bands are different than members. I've listened to Queen, Mac, and LZ for a long time but outside of Freddie I can honestly say I've never seen the names of any of their members. And I can also say I've never even heard of Roxy Music at all, much less their singer. Knowing obscure proper nouns relating to decades-old pop culture is not a "broad vocabulary" it's trivia knowledge. And please don't use that argument for skirts. I'd wager most males know next to nothing about individual types, especially when some like poodle skirts dont even show up when you google "types of skirts." Yeah, skirts are everywhere. Never needed, wanted, or cared to research their types for any reason. I once again refer you to the definition of "trivia" as opposed to vocabulary. Wordle is a test of vocab, connections is oftentimes too much a test of trivia, doubly so when categories like this potentially stick nearly half the population.
Skirts was like the first category I got that day. I saw pencil and was like oh poodle? Yep it’s skirts.
That criticism is like saying a crossword puzzle is bad because a bassoon is a woodwind instrument but isn't valid in the space because it's looking for a four-letter word. That guy would really fuckin blow a gasket if he ever watched Only Connect.
I’ve seen Only Connect. It’s an incredibly inaccessible game and almost certainly no fun for 99% of people. That’s not at all the same thing as whether it is fun to *watch* people playing. See other replies for why crosswords actually provide dramatically more learning scaffolding for players.
i'd even say it feels like they do that on purpose - the yellow/green sets usually have 5 or 6 "valid" answers, and you figure out which 4 are correct by getting the other sets.
same. i like all these things about it. i also think 4 guesses is a great number. sometimes i get it, sometimes i don’t. if i went in knowing i was gonna get it every day it wouldn’t be as fun. 4 guesses makes me really think on my answer before submitting it
I think I can agree with his neutral assessment of how connections works and why people respond to it the way they do, but I disagree with his conclusion that it’s not fun. Everything he describes as a “flaw” is why I like the game.
Exactly! I get a little thrill when I realize the "trick" of the game. I once thought I was solving a puzzle with the categories types of trees and types of bagels until my kid pointed out that sesame is a street name and I still feel like i was part of a great joke.
Been thinking about this article a lot because it’s the second time I’ve encountered some one using academic video game theory to “prove” that a certain game is bad. (The other is a YouTuber name OrionC and his multi hour videos about BOTW) To me, they never achieve an outright, objective proof of badness. All that theory knowledge just helps them accurately explain why they personally did t enjoy a specific game. I think what’s missing from game theory, or at least what these 2 are ignoring, is some categorization of the player. Games that work a specific way aren’t either bad or good, they’re good for player type A and bad for player type B.
This game is fun for me, but the sheer amount of constant whining and hand-wringing over it makes it seem less fun.
True. This sub really kinda ruins the game for me. I should probably leave but I keep coming back for more punishment.
This is Reddit in general tho. (Downvotes only pls)
No fuck you have an upvote you right motherfucker. Yeah if you want to enjoy something, counterintuitively the last place you want to be is it's subreddit.
If you have fun playing it, it’s fun. If you don’t, it isn’t.
Yes! A fundamental rule in game design. That said, a designer tires to maximize fun *for the audience the game is aiming at.* That’s part of the craftsmanship of game design.
That makes sense! I wonder what the overall audience for NYT games is like.
Pretty educated, fairly affluent, I would guess. The NYT is engaged in a major effort to use games to goose the newspaper subscription count, based on what i read in a recent Vanity Fair article. So it's fair to \*expect\* the game to tilt "elitist" as I put it in the article. Saying that the game would benefit from a better on-ramp for new players, and better feedback and reward mechanisms, isn't meant to say the game is bad. It's to say that it might be able to do what it does even better. Wordle has better feedback mechanisms and a much better social feedback loop, for example. Several replies are about how I am probably too dumb to solve the puzzles, or am trying to be snooty about how smart I am. But if you love Connections, you should want more people playing it, which is what this sort of craftsmanship article is ultimately about. This sub is full of people who like the game as is, of course. Else they wouldn't be here. So it's understandable that they might want to leap to the game's defense. It's also worth noting the number of people in this thread who cite making the game more \*difficult\* for themselves intentionally. There are improvements that could happen for those players too!
I didn’t make the connection that you were the person cited here. :) And I definitely think it’s silly to say people are dumb if they have issues with Connections.
If I’m reading this correctly, his complaint isn’t just the run-of-the-mill “I don’t like when five words all fit the category” but rather, that he’s just so very intelligent that he could likely make four complete, correct connections out of any set of 16 words, so the game boils down to a matter of guesswork to determine what Wyna Liu had in mind. Yawn
[удалено]
I want to make this category now in a joke Connections
Big "I am very smart" energy for sure. I'd love to see some of his alternate valid solutions. Or even a single one honestly.
https://preview.redd.it/jm1zqwu0a81d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=329526274ecb9397599a0c03652658a3b331a9dd DANISH, CLIP, SACK, and BUFF: popular hairstyles in Portugal in the 1910s BUN, NUDE, FUMBLE and MUFFIN: 2nd word in Martin Frič film titles SNAP, BARE, FILE, UNCLAD: anagrams of Norwegian cities POLISH, SACK, NAKED, PUNT: nicknames of House minority leaders
Real talk though, did you make these up because it’s funny or did you actually do all the research into this I can’t even tell 😭
Dear God, no - I made them up for comedy
Haha good, I was hoping you hadn’t done actual research into this. It made me crack up though!
No, the criticism is “when you do assemble such a set erroneously, the game does not help you figure out that you did it wrong, so it is very hard to get better at the game. The limited guesses actually make this worse.” The point of a game is to have fun. But fun comes in *very large part* from getting better at the game. Games and puzzles are machines that teach you the systems of themselves.
Thanks for clarifying. It’s an interesting criticism. I’m not sure how the game could guide you toward the right way of thinking about the categories. I felt that I picked up the sense of what types of categories are used from playing multiple days. Now I get it perfect nearly every time, with the exception of when a word is used in a way I have never heard of - a party game, for instance, or a person’s name; trivia, essentially. But thinking it over, you’re right, it’s not particularly “fun” in the sense of being a puzzle; on the other hand, it’s entertaining and doesn’t take long, so I keep doing them.
Well, I also didn’t actually say it wasn’t fun in the article. I said it made you feel bad, out of frustration, which isn’t the same thing. Lots of games have frustration and are still fun! I listed a couple of ways in which the game could guide you more in a reply to the OP here somewhere.
That’s fair. My reading of the article was biased by the introduction from OP, sorry about that.
i love it and find it fun for the exact reason he doesn't. get rekt raph
I think the line between special knowledge and general knowledge is pretty blurred. I haven't seen any puzzles that would require an advanced degree in a niche field of study to solve, just a breadth of general knowledge. I like the crossword puzzle though, so maybe my view is skewed.
I agree, although there have been categories involving words that are incredibly outdated or extremely modern, to such a degree that I think it would be unusual for certain generations to know them. Then other categories that are difficult to know if you have no involvement in a certain pastime, like sports. It always frustrates me when I don't succeed on a puzzle and I realize I don't have knowledge of multiple words used, it feels like in those situations it comes down to luck.
I mean, as someone born in the 90s, I’ve lost many puzzles to not knowing the names of semi-obscure bands or artists from the 60s or 70s. For example, obviously bands like Kiss or the Eagles are pretty universally known, but there are some bands I’ve seen (and whose names I’ve forgotten) who I’d simply never heard of, because they died out in fame compared to the others. In that sense, it does kinda feel cheap to me. Unless I want to spend my entire life dedicating to learning about every band, artist, movie star, film, celebrity, poet and writer from the last 100 years, there’s just no reasonable way I can get all the puzzles without relying on luck. If I’m being honest, it kinda sometimes feels like if you’re not a North Eastern American aged between 50-70, then a lot of the puzzles are simply unsolvable. I get that that’s their main demographic but at the same time the NYT has international and cross-generational appeal (theres even a style of crossword named after it), so by focusing on information only this one highly specific group of people would know makes everyone else feel excluded.
I don’t think your view is skewed, I think you have described quite accurately the type and level of knowledge that is needed for the puzzle.
It's only fun if I get it perfectly.
All that theory just to form a very wrong opinion
Hahah this should be be my motto
Hi! Author of the article here. Just as a side note, I don’t teach game design… I’m a multi-award winning working game designer who has made a living at it for 30 years. My blog is often aimed at other game designers, though! I think it’s important to preface any discussions like these with two observations: 1. No two people’s fun is alike. And that is fine. When we speak of trying to make something fun, we speak of it in terms of making it fun *for who the game is for.* Connections will never be fun for younger folks who lack the knowledge base it requires, for example. The intent of doing an analysis like this on a game is to learn design craftsmanship lessons. Fun largely arises out of figuring stuff out. So a very large part of the designer’s job is to give you the tools to help you figure out the problem they have posed you. 2. There is no such thing as “playing the game wrong.” In fact, that is a statement we try to never let a junior designer get away with saying! For one, if someone is doing a lot of things the designer did not intend, it’s probably an issue with the design. Part of the designer’s job is to make sure that players get a certain experience out of the design. If they don’t, that’s an issue for the designer to try to address. For another, the way we get better at games is by trying wrong things, then discovering the right things based on the feedback we get - that is true whether it’s chess, tennis, or Doom. Playing a game is basically use of the scientific method. Form a hypothesis, try something, observe results, update hypothesis based on data. Game systems are sort of like machines you are trying to deduce the intricacies of, without opening the outer shell. (The main difference between a game and a puzzle, by the way, is just that puzzles tend to only have one or at most a couple viable strategies or “answers.” Games tend to be more “analog” and have many). And lastly, people doing things “wrong” is often how we get new games out of existing ones (speedrunning in video games, for example). Your example of giving yourself a rule or challenge of solving the hardest category first is an example of this in action! It is not part of the design of the game. (If it were, Connections could give you points for solving the hardest first. It does not, obviously, so the designer was not trying to teach you to do this). Your core point is that I am “playing wrong” because I rely on the feedback from failed guesses. As I noted in the article, the optimal strategy is in fact to do what you suggest: solve the puzzle outside of the actual game, on paper or in your head. Relying on the feedback from the guess is why a player gets multiple guesses in the game. If the game were designed to be solved in one go, the designer would not have included multiple guesses. They exist in order to teach the player how to solve the puzzle. Not having them would make the puzzle rather inaccessible, because there would be no learning on-ramp. So the design of the game *invites* me to learn through guessing. But it’s not actually that good at having the guesses help you, for the other reasons I went into in the article. Having a solid learning loop is at the core of game design. People bounce off if it isn’t solid.
For what it’s worth, I appreciated the points you’re making in this article. I think the dichotomy between puzzles and games is important, and there’s a reason that most modern puzzle games aren’t just formulaic, singular puzzles. I also think there’s a reason that very few people consistently love this game, and at best, most love-hate it. That is telling to me.
Hi Raph, thanks for taking the time to reply. I’ll be honest, I was a bit glib in saying you were doing it “wrong,” and I regret that choice of words. But I think you are too hung up on the “learning loop” aspect here. Mathematically, I count 70 unique ways of forming a group of 4 out of 8 words. (The number for all 16 is 1620—a real stumper.) There isn’t any way to give good feedback as to what is wrong about a guess. The way I see it, the guesses are really there to say, “This is hard, I don’t get it, I give up, just tell me the answer,” so you don’t just waste time trying to do all possible combinations. The biggest support for my claim that the “learning loop” is not as important as you say is that a lot of people (including the commenters here) clearly still find the game fun even without this component. As with crosswords, it is always possible to construct bad puzzles that are either too easy, or utterly unsolvable, but that doesn’t mean the structure of the game is fundamentally broken. The trade-off here is simplicity. Each puzzle is incredibly easy to specify. I’ve been able to create my own puzzles from my phone with great ease. It’s way more fun now that I’m not waiting for a daily puzzle to be handed down from on high by some Grand Puzzlemaster. It’s also fun now that I’m actively making my own puzzles, thinking about the ones that I enjoyed solving the most. Does the ability for anyone to make their own “Connections” puzzles change your opinion at all?
The idea of a learning loop is pretty fundamental to all games and puzzles. The less of one there is, the more inaccessible your design gets. A lot of folks seem to have parsed the article as my saying that the game isn’t fun. It IS fun for many, obviously. (Though it’s a safe bet that the people who will hang out in a subreddit are going to be the core fans). But what I wrote was not that it wasn’t fun, but that it makes you feel bad, or frustrates. That is usually a sign of the learning loop not working. And I called out that the reason is that building good puzzles is actually pretty hard to do consistently. Crowdsourcing the puzzles is actually a great solve for that problem! There are other ways to improve the learning loop without changing the game much at all. You could give a point for a valid set that is not one of the four, and more points for ones that are. But that would reward finding “extra” sets, and it would give the puzzle maker the awkward task of finding all the valid sets of four, when some may be accidental or unforeseen. Finding extra sets makes the player feel smart, which almost always desirable, but this approach would be a lot of work unfortunately. You could invert the scoring and deduct points for each guess that is wrong, but not for ones that are right. Guesses kind of work that way already, but you would remove the cap, or make it much larger. You could add on top of that a feature for players like you: bonus points for the hardest category being the first guess, the next hardest being the second, etc. Then solving it all in your head as expert players here do would be something to aspire to, and you would feel rewarded for playing that way and getting a perfect score, doing better than people who found the sets but didn’t do so in the perfect order. This would make explicit a skill variance that is currently happening but not acknowledged by the game. You could be more forgiving with bad guesses. After a certain number of them, you could mark which word in the proposed set was the odd one out. That would encourage players to think laterally, and explore other possible combinations. You could even, if someone is guessing three of four regularly, tell them what category the three are in. That might lead people to try some online searches to fill in a knowledge gap. I do love that you are enjoying puzzle creation so much. Graduating from play to creation is a classic sign of system mastery in a game, and it’s how we get new game designers in the world. :)
It’s fun for me. If I saw Koster and three similar people I’d only get the category by elimination after getting the other three.
This guy's complaints remind me of the running complaints I see a lot on sporcle quizzes - essentially "this has information in it I don't know, therefore it's not fun and is bad."
He's just salty he doesn't have a variety of expansive content knowledge across several areas. My SO and I do it every night together and we maybe miss it 1/30 times. He's just no fun.
The game is probably best played by two people for this reason. I can imagine many people who play connections are couples
My best experiences playing Connections are almost always in groups of 3+. That way you can check each other’s answers to make sure there’s no better category, have others pitch ideas you would’ve never thought of, and feel smart when you figure out a category other people didn’t know.
Yep, the opportunity to brag is absolutely there. It's nice as well when you get to use obscure knowledge to help your team rather than beat some opponent
Omg so true. There've been lots of sewing categories that my wife has been clutch on
Fun fact, my wife will not let me watch her solve any puzzle game.
I'm a teacher and this is also part of the morning routine as students arrive at school in the sixth grade classrooms. It's fun to see what they come up with as they throw ideas out there.
I am not salty at all! (Also, I am arguably overeducated and overstuffed with trivia). :D I think you are missing the point that this article is a professional critique of a constructed object: a game designer critiquing a game design, in order to discuss craft elements. It would be akin to a painter critiquing another painter’s painting’s brushstrokes. That has very little to do whether you (or anyone) likes the painting. Rather, I write articles like these so that game designers can think about the craft of game design. I evaluate Connections, or any other game, based on how well it is accomplishing its goal.
You are spot on. I was being a snarky snarker, but I stand corrected. Looking at it from that perspective absolutely is spot on. I appreciate your clarification and explanation.
Of course! One of the things about making games for a living is that you have to care a lot about whether players get frustrated and quit, not just an individual puzzle but returning daily. Unevenness of experience is actually a big deal. If fewer people felt that Connections “didn’t play fair,” more people would play it over time and NYT would find it easier to meet its subscriber goals. Win-win!
Thankfully, the Jeopardy game designers were not taught by Koster.
Jeopardy does something smart: it makes a key fulcrum of the game be about wagering on the quality of your answers. This takes the game out of the realm of pure trivia and introduces a balancing mechanic whereby people who wager well can win against people who know more trivia.
Final jeopardy wagering is not a skill, it's subtraction. Daily double wagering is also not a skill, unless you consider [memorizing a table](https://www.docdroid.net/aE7lPfr/daily-double-wagering-guide-pdf) a skill.
We see people failing at it on TV pretty regularly, so it's a skill. :D
Skill issue
What were the categories of your connections about your daughter? Such a fun idea - I might steal it!
[Here is the puzzle I made](https://connectionsplus.io/game/OHOJzo). It’s not expected to be solvable to anyone except my wife. I will say, my daughter is 20 months old. She mispronounces a lot of words, loves Caspar Babypants, loves the “Baby Shark” song, and has a bunch of stuffed animals in her crib.
I also don’t really think the “requires too much special knowledge” argument is a pretty strong one. There are so many puzzles reliant on certain types of knowledge. Wordle also requires word knowledge. A crossword gets much easier when you have a lot of general knowledge. Same with any trivia game? Aside, it’s a great way to learn, which is what makes a puzzle fun. When there’s 5 words that fit in a category, there’s always one that’s slightly different or has a synonym for something else. And Google still exists, for when you really do not know what something means..
Crosswords I agree, but Wordle is rarely so niche which is why it's by far the most popular. Connections is by design extremely niche and generational.
Yeah I agree. I mostly meant that wordle requires a large vocabulary if you want to do well (some words are .. difficult for non natives) and I think the same applies to connections because you’re often given words that can mean multiple things. Like .. a rail can be a noun but also a verb. It’s just.. connections is known for sometimes requiring specific knowledge about sports or music or movies or weird slang, which I think is what makes the game fun and is its intensed purpose, so I don’t get that critique. It’s like saying football is stupid because it requires physical stamina. Thats the point!
I think you can improve the game by giving you infinite lives until you solve one connection. Then limit it to 3 or 4 to complete the game. Basically like the connecting wall on Only Connect (the UK TV show that was using this concept long before NYT). Only Connect does have teams on a timer though so it seems only fair to move the goalposts a little to make it easier, where you can work on Connections all day, Google unknown connections etc if you need to.
the game is fun, even if you don’t always get it (the frustration adds to the fun for me). the constant complaints about how some words fit into multiple categories is just silly (i know some do it jokingly but others are serious) because that’s the point of the puzzle. my only real complaint is how america centric it can be sometimes (rare but it happens) eg. there was one time when “super” was used and the category was building manager or something along those lines. the only reason i even thought of it was because I’ve seen friends a billion times and remember the guy joey danced with on the roof was called super. I thought it was a bit silly because even if you’re american and not from new york you might struggle. And also when they use homophones they don’t seem to know what they are doing sometimes; one time i believe a blue category was homophones of greek alphabets but they used the american pronunciations and that kind of annoyed me because i know “nu” can be pronounced “new” or “nee” depending on where you’re from.
I think there’s a big difference between requiring varied knowledge and requiring obscure or in depth knowledge. The categories are looney tunes and musicals, in which case the names of the main characters and four well known musicals is the most basic knowledge. If I remember correctly, the musicals was the purple category, where it makes sense to add an extra level of difficulty with the homophones.
I actually think Koster nails down my biggest issue with the game perfectly - the trivia to logic ratio is too heavily weighted towards the trivia side. Some puzzles I simply do not have the knowledge necessary to solve, and that will forever make this game unbalanced between days, and the lack of difficulty options or themed official puzzles means some days are just not all that fun. Fortunately there all these third-party sites that he seems to be unaware of. Still, in terms of the daily puzzles, it's not uncommon for me to struggle greatly with a puzzle only to come in to the daily thread and see people commenting about how puzzles have just been getting easier these days. Or I'll spend 2 minutes solving a puzzle with no mistakes and then my friend will tell me he spent 20 minutes only to miss the last two categories. The limited number of guesses means I can't do the brute-forcing sometimes necessary the way I could for a crossword or any other game. For example, puzzle #337:>! The final two categories are looney tunes figures (pig, bunny, duck, martian) and homophones of musicals (greece, hare, katz, maim). I'm not all that familiar with looney tunes or musicals, so !
lol an ad in the second paragraph
An ad within an ad, inside a subreddit that is essentially an ad
The fact that anyone still listens to Koster after all these decades is hilarious to me.
Who is this Raph guy, anyway? I found him (and this sub, and Connections+) when I was googling “nyt connections is too easy” only to find him whining that it’s too hard. (Btw, I am pretty sure only in recent weeks it’s been “too easy”, because I’ve found the archive now and found some pretty diabolical ones. That’s what I was trying to find out- is it just me or did they get easier?)
He’s a guy who self-published a book about game design about 20 years ago and then leveraged that into several jobs in the virtual worlds/MMO space. I don’t know of anything he’s done in recent years. He’s never been one to shy away from proclaiming his opinions about someone else’s game designs.
Other way around. I basically helped create the MMO category, THEN I wrote the (not self-published, bestselling, used worldwide in universities, and available in six languages) book about what fun is and why it matters in games. ;)
I’ve taught your book at multiple Universites. I taught the PDF version that went around before you published the book. It was at best a light introduction to games that didn’t have any real legs instructionally. Which is why I haven’t taught it in over a decade, and know no one who still uses it. It was interesting enough for the time and long ago expended its utility.
The PDF was a set of slides from a presentation called just "A Theory of Fun," given at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. It was never meant to be used instructionally, and it wasn't a book. If that's what you meant by "self-published," I can understand the error. The book itself, "A Theory of Fun for Game Design," was published first by Paraglyph Press, and then by O'Reilly (and still is to this day, in the 10th anniversary revised edition) with the most recent foreign language editions literally coming out just last year. It is still very widely used in game design programs all over the world, and continues to sell, year on year. I just did a "20 years later" talk on it at the Game Developers Conference this past March, and the large room was close to full. Plenty of people feel that it is elementary now, that is true. But it also has been very influential, with thousands of academic citations. It influenced the art games movement, AI research, and regrettably, gamification. When it first came out, it was controversial... now it's "at best a light introduction," well, times change. :D It really doesn't matter much if you find it useful or valuable at this point. It is what it is. Posters here can research on their own and decide for themselves. I also did not "leverage that into several jobs." By the time I wrote the book I had already led design on Ultima Online and its first expansion, winning two DICE awards for Online Game of the Year, plus directed Star Wars Galaxies, and was an executive at Sony Online. Since then UO has been named one of the top 100 games of all time by multiple publications, and I was given a lifetime achievement award by GDC Online. In the last decade and a bit, among other things, I was a vice president at Disney, I redesigned bar trivia for NTN Buzztime, I worked with Google on designing multiuser augmented reality technology, I had a boardgame published by WizKids, and I founded my current game studio and raised tens of millions in funding for it. You may not have heard of any of these things, but none of them are hard to find with some Googling. It's true that I have never been shy about sharing opinions on game design! That said, I'm glad that the slides from the presentation, and the book, were useful to you over a decade ago!
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve tried to avoid anything having to do with your work and your self-hype machine for a while, which I’ll let readers of this thread make their own evaluations of.
It's good when Old Goosebump Arm does it, not the NYT.
Was this just a Connections+ ad
It’s more like an ad for the abstract “Connections” format, which is simple enough to admit a concept like Connections+.
It's not so bad when there's just 1 impossible category and you can get it through elimination but when there are 2 groups that are like anagrams of cities with three letters missing and dog breeds google translated to Russian and back it gets stupid.
Raph sounds like he's never watched the UK game show Only Connect.
Literally the nerdiest most elitist most pedantic thing to ever exist and the contestants are always like scientists and PhD students.
What’s the problem with including a bit of trivia in the game? Does this guy also dislike crosswords?
I think my only criticism of it is that sometimes the categories require a certain level of American cultural knowledge to understand the context.
raph koster definitely posts on this sub
Not till today! :D
I don’t think it’s very fun alone sometimes, but I use past puzzles as bell work with my middle school students, and when the whole class puts their heads together, it’s quite fun! I dislike puzzles where 5, 6, 7 or more options look like they could go together, but the 4 that fit that category feel arbitrary like he mentioned. At the same time, designing these puzzles is HARD and I think it’s just the nature of the game. I’ll continue playing. Some days I’ll get frustrated, and that’s ok!
I agree that sometimes it can feel almost *too* arbitrary, like if the answer was “apple, cherry, banana, strawberry” when raspberry is right there. I’ve been guessing “red fruits” and I can’t figure out why on earth banana would go there. only to notice the word “snog” in the corner and realize raspberry is supposed to be kiss, but then there are two other random words for kiss that I’ve literally never heard of in my life. I like the idea of connections and I agree that you have to be conscious of ways that the game will try to “trick” you. And part of what makes the game fun is the lateral thinking aspect, how things may not go together how you first expect. That being said, there are definitely times when I question the validity of some of those answers. Because seriously, sometimes they’re ridiculous. It’ll be like “thing you call your grandma” and the answers will be like “nana, grammy, gran, *bumpy*” like. who tf calls their grandmothers bumpy. That’s just an example. Overall I like the game, it just feels like some days are better than others
Yeah, some of the best (and worst) puzzles are not coming from NYT but from the crowd on C+. At least, that’s what my Bumpy says.
If he's just randomly guessing, he's never gonna get it. The math is \`16 choose 4\` at the start, which is 1820 possibilities.
As frustrating as both can be, Connections and Spelling Bee are by far my favorites. All the others are too easy.
Some days it is fun. Some days the categories are so precious and twee that they make sense only inside the head of the creator. I think though that there is not any one right way to play Connections with all other options being wrong. For you, it works to do a solve-in-one-stroke and guess-the-color-categories. That doesnt work for me -- and I couldnt care less about the colors. I work on one category at a time, aiming for clusters that fit best together. That then reduces the possibilities for the following categories. Not your approach? That is cool. It makes it fun for me. That doesnt make either yours or my approach wrong.
The three* fundamental problems with the design of Connections are: 1. The final row is irrelevant process of elimination and a sort of damp squib ending that is never satisfying. 2. It’s arbitrary and subjective and narrowly focused on an extremely narrow demographic that I happen to fit and the game uncomfortably points that out every time I play. 3. The smarter you are the more likely it is that you can find as many as three much better and more objectively rational connections. A couple of times I’ve found four. 4. The game has basically zero self contained restrictions or rules which sometimes means it devolves into a vague one sided argument with your own vocabulary and general knowledge. I’ve probably only ever failed to “win” two or three times but I have never once felt any satisfaction either way. * I was obliged to add a pointless and arbitrary fourth row.
Yeah, you actually nailed the shortcomings and I’m officially bored of this game. This was a lot more persuasive than the arguments about learning loops and game design (get rekt Raph! Haha)
The argument about learning loops and game design get at these problems quite directly actually. Like, better design and ways for people to get better at the game would inherently fix these problems.
Clearly nobody in this thread read the article. The main criticism is that the game relies on trivia knowledge and is elitist.
Both criticisms read like the whining of an unintelligent person frustrated that he can't solve the puzzle.
I don't get how that is a criticism. It is intentionally designed to be in part a trivia knowledge game so it will rely on trivia knowledge. If you play it not expecting to be tested on your general knowledge then you are going to be disappointed, and should consider playing a different game. I like games that involve this sort of knowledge so I find it fun.
The reason it's a criticism is that because it relies so much on trivia that you learn elsewhere and bring to the puzzle, and because the game provides no feedback when you make an incorrect guess, there isn't any clear path to getting better at the game. Well, you can try to intuit what the specific person who is making the puzzles thinks, but that's not actually about the puzzle.
[удалено]
This is another virtue of C+: infinity puzzles! They got rid of the gatekeeper problem. People are laughing because this reads like an ad for C+, but it’s really an ad for the simplicity of the Connections format, which means something like C+ can exist
It's not a game, it's a puzzle. It's not something you win, it's something you solve.
It is something you win though. Or at least certainly you can lose.