Video Games

For video games referenced in puzzles, see List of sports and recreation puzzle topics § Video Games.

For the MIT Mystery Hunt with video games as a theme, see MIT Mystery Hunt 2011.

Video Games are a type of interactive puzzle where the solver plays a game, and the answer is either given upon successful completion the task, or additional puzzle material is incorporated in the game and the solver needs to extract the answer during or after playing the game. Video game puzzles can usually be solved alone (though multiple players can help with parallelizing data collection); for puzzles that require multiple teammates to collaborate in a shared game, see TEAMWORK TIME.

Background

Video game puzzles are often used to help increase variety of puzzles in online hunts, which are often are mainly "paper puzzles". While they are often memorable puzzles to solvers in a hunt, care should also be taken in order to ensure that the puzzles are accessible.

In the MIT Mystery Hunt, due to the physical location, some puzzles involved having teams play a video game live. For example, in 2001, the puzzle Here Thar Be Dragons required teams to send over a member to play the Atari 2600 game Adventure, and in 2006 the endgame involved inputting a move sequence in Nethack.

With the advent of web applets, video game puzzles can be played directly in the browser. Early examples include Going Out Clubbing from 2007 (a golf game) and Bad Beat Jackpot from 2008 (a poker game). The Round 4 meta from 2001 also included an interactive Ouija board as an input mechanism.

Notable Examples

• Angry Portals (GPH 2017) (web) - This puzzle is a mashup between the games Angry Birds and Portal.
• Beep Arcade (Teammate 2021) (web) - A Celeste demake written in PICO-8.
• Bullet Curtain (GPH 2022) (web) - This puzzle appears as a bullet hell game.

See Also

• Puzzles that use Video Games