Puzzling ⭐

I've been trying to expand my videogame playing to different titles and different types of games, and while videogames have come a long way since I was a kid, I'm struck by how some basic gameplay mechanics remain unchanged to this day. Honestly, it's ruining the experience for me.

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell once observed that the key to a good game was that it should be easy to learn but hard to master. Of course, Bushnell coined this term, ahem, during the golden age of coin-operated arcade games in the 1970s. And he oversaw the creation of some of the first videogames, like Pong and Asteroids, that were by definition basic and thus easy to learn.

Things got more complicated, and quickly. My Intellivision home videogame console had what is arguably the first real-time strategy game, called Utopia. Later that decade, I spent hours upon hours frustrating myself trying to get further into Shadow of the Beast, a comically difficult game with no saves. And thanks to the fluid movement of early 3D shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, we could suddenly run through virtual worlds, fending off enemies, finding secrets, and, eventually, competing with other people.

Pong and DOOM are both videogames, but given the technical improvements that occurred during the intervening 20 years, one might assume that's the extent of the similarities. But both games share another trait: They are both easy to learn and hard to master. DOOM offers difficulty levels, which is interesting, but it also brought multiplayer gaming to the mainstream, amping up the challenge and, based on the gaming experiences of the 30+ years since then the engagement.

Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM are memorable for all the obvious reasons. Both were technical marvels, with Wolf3D firmly establishing the PC as a first-class gaming platform and DOOM, just one year later, adding new levels of realism and levels—worlds—that were bigger and more open in every dimension and not confined to corridors and small rooms with right angles and flat floors. But they also share some basic play mechanics. There were three episodes in each, initially, each consisting of several levels through which you would traverse in linear fashion. Each level ended with a door or elevator, or whatever. And each episode and game ended with a boss fight of some kind.

Both games also featured secret doors which, on a PC, you would try to find by running up against a wall and tapping the Space bar. Players would spend hours or even days running through levels they had previously emptied of enemies, tapping Space repeatedly as they bumped into whatever walls, hoping to find some secret door that would lead to a hidden area with goodies of whatever kind or even transport them to a secret level. A friend from the DOOM days used to imitate what it would look like to be the DOOM guy, as the player character was called, in real life, stiffly walking straight into a wall and then bouncing off, stepping...