Really a Useful Note: Stock Puzzle

I believe it is possible for the moderators to change the linked page. I'd be in agreement with the switch.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Agree with the switch. This is a problem with Stock Puzzle, not with this particular subtrope. Either all the stock puzzles on the index deserve pages or none of them do.

edited 8th Jan '17 6:08:12 PM by pokedude10

Easy. They all do. Unless there's an individual problem.

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Huh; done.

[I don't like that feature; I'm concerned it may be abused by "well-meaning" tropers.]

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I agree that all the stock puzzles deserve pages (especially considering the fact that many of those pages contain quite a lot of information). Where you (Another Duck) and I disagree is whether they should be trope pages or Useful Notes.

I think people are overtaxing Useful Notes a little. If something is used as a storytelling device, it does not belong there. Explaining stuff for writers and the like is more like what Useful Notes is for.

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Taking a look through the list, I believe Enter Solution Here and Block Puzzle are the only ones which doesn't fit Useful Notes.

• Enter Solution Here is essentially a riddle whose answer depends on if the game (usually a videogame-only trope) allows for sequence-breaking or not. This cannot work in other mediums.
• Block Puzzle requires the videogame graphics as interactive elements and itself is essentially an interactive version of Grid Puzzle. This would be very difficult to utilize in other mediums.

Both of the above seem to clearly be tropes, more specifically they're subtropes to Stock Video Game Puzzle.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

"Storytelling devices" (as far as tropes are concerned) also include game mechanics, since they're about how the player interacts with the game. Different puzzles require different ways of thinking. Some are visual, some are logical, some are physical, some are mathematical. It's not strictly about telling a story; it's about conveying information to the audience, and allowing the audience to take part of the work by using familiar patterns so that everything isn't alien and have to be learned from scratch. Sometimes, that information is just for enjoyment (like jokes), as works are primarily meant to entertain the audience (teaching is probably the second most important goal).

Tropes are about patterns. On this wiki they're somewhat more narrowly defined, mostly to keep out rampant misuse and coincidences, but if they still include the above, they're tropes.

The difference between subtropes and The Same, but More Specific is a little floating, with the middle being a Lumper vs. Splitter issue, but when a pattern has a sub-pattern with some specific details (plural) to it that are easily defined and separated, it's a subtrope. That's why I would group those "count 1-3" puzzles (like the SMT example) into the same category as Game of Nim, because the way to solve them is very similar, but not Towers of Hanoi, because there's a different thought process to approaching them, and one's a two-player game while the other's a one-player puzzle.

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Game of Nim is not a storytelling device itself though; it is a game of logic and abstraction. It is a competitive puzzle where players take turns in approaching the solution. Game Theory is about studying and teaching this approach. But it is not a trope.

The trope is "a simple logic puzzle is used to prevent progress until the player can solve it" or "a game within a game". (Stock Puzzle or Mini-Game)

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Sure, Game Theory is not a trope. Game of Nim is.

If you use that approach of simplifying you can simplify anything and claim it's not a trope.

Kill Sat is just a construct flying in the air to cause destruction and/or death, but it's not a trope. The trope is Orbital Bombardment.

Deus ex Machina is just a way of solving the plot without building up to it, but it is not a trope. The trope is Ass Pull.

Action Girl is just an Action Hero who happens to be female, so it's not a trope.

Chekhov's Gun is just an object that's been introduced before and later gets used for some plot-related reason, but it's not a trope. It's just a practical application of The Law of Conservation of Detail.

That's roughly how I see your argument.

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• Sputnik flying overhead of America is not just a construct flying in the air to cause destruction and/or death, it's a trope. Orbital Bombardment is just an index and shouldn't have examples.
• Oberon showing up to laugh at the mortals and Titania is not just a way of solving the plot without building up to it, it is a trope. Ass Pull is a reference to Bottom.
• Mary Jane is not just a redheaded Action Girl; she's used in many Marvel stories, making her a subtrope.
• Winchester is not just a "gun" over the mantle piece; it's a rifle and that is fully distinct, in the narrative sense as well as the physical sense, from a handgun in any part of the story.

That's roughly how your argument has been presented. Notice that each "trope name" is part of a specific work. Game of Nim, Towers of Hanoi, et all are designed games that in many cases predate the written word. That they have very little narrative tropes or gameplay tropes of their own would mean they are not deserving of a TabletopGames/ page. But when the narrative purpose is fulfilled by Tic Tac Toe, that doesn't make TTT a trope. It makes TTT referenced in a trope.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

(Double-posting, if no response comes in before I finish writing this.)

I don't like the tone of my post (#37), it reads a bit harsher than I intended. I appreciate your previous post (#36) because I was worried this was a Lumper Vs Splitter debate from your perspective. I'm not actually arguing to lump them all; I'm arguing that there is a qualitative difference.

As mentioned in post #33, two pages seem legitimate subtropes because they cannot be done independently of a work. Game of Nim is something you and I can play in a pub. Darts we can play in a pub. Block Puzzle we cannot play in a pub. We can challenge each other with varients on Grid Puzzles, but we can't use Enter Solution Here.

Puzzles and Games are creative works, and exchanging one game for a comparable game does not change the storytelling purpose in a larger work. Board Game Night doesn't change if the game is Risk or Diplomacy and the same goes for threshold guardians in videogames that use Hanoi or Nim.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If they're creative works, they should be in a work namespace, not in Useful Notes. Simple as that.

They're used in games for a specific challenge, much like an RTS provides one challenge, while a TBS provides another challenge, related but distinctly different. If you replace it with something else, you have a different challenge. If you replace Game of Nim with Tic Tac Toe, you have a different game. They do not fulfill the same purpose.

Game of Nim is really just one name for a type of puzzle that's much older, which is a type of strategic counting puzzle. Just calling it a Math Puzzle is a bit too generic, since any math problem falls under that, but likewise, limiting it to just one rule set is too specific. Nim games, or whatever you want to call them, can have any number of rows, they can be restricted by how quantitative your move can be, and they can be played to lose or win (i.e. the player doing the last possible move can be the winner or loser).

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• Sputnik is different from Korabl-Sputnik
• Oberon is different from Zeus
• Mary Jane is different from Gwen Stacey
• Colt Winchester is different from Smith & Wesson

Last Year at Marienbad uses Game of Nim; why can it not use Teeko instead? What about the story changes by swapping out the game?

For that matter, what common purpose does Nim demonstrate in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan and Dara Ó Briain's School Of Hard Sums? As far as I can tell, "puzzle appears in the work" is the common element. It appears as a Zero-sum game in the second work, but as a Positive-sum game in the first.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Ok, now that we're looking in the right place, I want to take a step back and try to get a bigger picture.

First of all, Stock Puzzle is currently just an index. I contend it should actually be a trope. A writer will grab a stock puzzle because it's something the viewers are likely to recognize.

And if stock puzzle is a trope, then what does that say about its various sub-pages? I may have given away my thinking there. Yes, most of them are probably sub-pages! :)

Yet I say most. Does that mean I don't think they're all the same? That's right. Some of them may have enough internal game-mechanic tropes to justify a work page. Likewise, some of them may have enough historical or cultural significance to justify an actual useful notes page. I suggest we decide on a case-by-case basis, but start with the assumption that they're all just subpages.

Note that this would mean we could now document things like chess puzzles, such as the classic Eight queens puzzle. Those shouldn't go on the Chess, since they're not, strictly speaking, a game of chess. But they're based on chess, using the rules of chess, and we could put examples directly on the Stock Puzzle page until we get enough examples to justify a sub-page.

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What part of the story would change if you make Starcraft a turn-based strategy game, or an army fighter? What part of the story changes depending on whether you use an Ambidextrous Sprite or a unique one for each side? What part of the story changes depending on whether you use a Fixed Camera or a dynamic one? What part of the story changes depending on what type of save system you use? What part of the story changes depending on whether you make a First-Person Shooter or a Third-Person Shooter?

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To address this specifically, since Septimus was also saying Useful Notes establishes a Real Life thing, and explains how fiction tends to utilize it. Real Life people don't get tropes, but we add tropes for sports sometimes.^note See Association Football for a page with sport tropes Useful Notes and Referenced by... are where we tend to put "this ~thing appears in this work".

Chess appears in works, so we should have a Useful Notes page. Chess is very complex (as opposed to Nim) and should get a full work page in the Tabletop Games namespace. As a complicated game that demonstrates the intelligence of the players you can substitute Shogi, Go, Xiangqi, Mancala, or Hafl for the more traditional European form of Chess without any change in storytelling.

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Edit: I'll answer your questions if you're sincere in wanting my opinion. Right now it looks like a rhetorical device to avoid answering my questions.

edited 9th Jan '17 11:06:30 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Right, Chess should have a work page and a useful notes page. But I don't think stock chess puzzles, which aren't actually chess, belong on either page. I think they belong here. The fact that they're derived from chess doesn't mean they are chess.

And yes, some of these may deserve work pages. But work pages are to list tropes. What we have here are pages which list works. A work page would have to be a from-scratch effort; we can't just move these to a work namespace. So, the only possible solution for the pages here are: useful notes or subpage. And subpage allows us to avoid lengthy debates about the "purpose of useful notes". In fact, it's a quick, clean solution that solves pretty much all of our immediate problems, as far as I can see.

Any arguments against subpage-by-default? (Which won't preclude making work pages and/or useful notes for some of these?)

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Ok, to sidestep the whole Useful note vs. trope debate, I wanted to mention that right now this page only serves as an index, not a trope (it doesn't have examples). Correct me if I"m wrong, but indices don't have to be supertropes.

Also, as some general thoughts, why is this separate from Stock Video Game Puzzle? Isn't that page just restricting the general concept of puzzles to a single medium? Is that page a trope, index, or useful note? What about it's subpages, like Enter Solution Here. Why does that receive it's own page (SVGP even says these pages are also tropes), but Water Level Puzzle does not?

How does Only Smart People May Pass figure into this? Is it the larger scope trope?

I'm not trying to be snarky or derail the conversation, but trying to point out issues of consistency. For reference, Stock puzzle has only 51 wicks and 1,100 inbounds, while SVGP has 65 wicks and a staggering 21,800 inbounds. If stock puzzle is technically the supertrope/superindex/superwhatever for SVGP, it doesn't show.

edited 9th Jan '17 2:32:58 PM by pokedude10

Um, yes, my proposal to change this from an index to a trope with subpages would involve...change. If it weren't currently an index, then we wouldn't be changing it from being an index. And if we didn't change it to be a trope, then it would continue not being a trope.

As for why it has fewer inbounds than Stock Video Game Puzzle? That's probably because indexes don't usually have many inbounds. What that page actually is might be the topic for its own thread, but it currently looks fairly "useful notes"-ish to me—mostly because of the complete absence of examples. Anyway, SVGP has lots of information about the various puzzles its discussing, so it's going to attract more interest than a simple list like our current version of Stock Puzzle.

Only Smart People May Pass is related, but not directly. It's a cousin-trope at best.

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The point with those questions is that "story" is not a requirement for tropes, unless you define game mechanics as "story". A different method of playing a game gives a different playing experience, which means there's a relevant difference. Likewise, the game itself is always played in basically the same way, with or without minor differences in rules. Basically, whether the story changes or not is irrelevant if the gameplay changes, because this is about actually playing a game. And for the examples that aren't about playing the game, they're including the game into the story, so it would presumably (context is somewhat sparse in the few examples of that) be a different story with a different game. Sort of like how Yu-Gi-Oh! would be different if it wasn't a children's card game, but say, a video game or table top game.

The difference between Stock Video Game Puzzle and Stock Puzzle seems kind of small, in that the only one I can see is that it's whether it's specific to video games or not. A few of them exists as board games, or in other game situations that aren't video games.

Either way, changing Stock Puzzle into a trope page with subtropes seems like the logical solution.

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Huh, sorry about that. I don't know how I missed your proposal. I think I was caught up in Samaritan's and Duck's discussion/argument.

I guess I agree with your proposal to make this a trope with subpages. Frankly, I think we're overthinking it (including myself). The overarching concept of "trope" is broad enough to cover puzzles seen in media, and Useful Notes is being overtaxed as Septimus mentioned. If something is used in a story, and it's not People Sit In Chairs, it's a trope.

Stock Video Game Puzzle mostly contain puzzles that would only work in a video game. Not to say Stock Puzzle cannot be in a video game as a small part of gameplay, but those two are distinct.

So if Stock Puzzle is a "trope", then how is it used as a trope? I guess we haven't been clear about it (or I'm missing something).

And speaking of Stock Puzzle being a trope, what's stopping Stock Videogame Puzzle from being a trope too?

edited 9th Jan '17 6:05:39 PM by Getta

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^I would guess sense of scale. Stock Video Game Puzzle is practically omnipresent. Does your action game require finding a key item to open a door? Need to flip a switch or two? Enter a passcode? Stock Video Game Puzzle.

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