There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.

Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.

This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.

There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.

This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.

Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.

Thats amazing lol.

Depends on how the combo works. Is there an element of skill involved? If it’s like a rhythm game I would just call it a puzzle/rhythm game. Otherwise it’s just a puzzle game with extra steps.

That was in my OP though, that most games can be thought of as puzzle games with extra steps.

EDIT: I would agree that Tetris is not a puzzle game.

This is quite interesting to me.

My main point of this post is to highlight how the genres and categories we have for games breaks down upon examination and I guess changes over time.

I would say that most people either have or would call Tetris basically the most popular puzzle game.

When it came out it was basically the titular, archetypal ‘puzzle’ game.

You think that pushing a button that generates a purely random outcome is a game?

To me, those are neither games nor puzzles.

There is nothing one can do, in terms of thought or execution, to influence the outcome.

Other than I suppose choosing to play or not play.

To me, a game must include some capacity of the player to influence whether they succeed or fail, within the game itself.

I will grant you that, I agree.

If there is no thought required to determine the difference between a correct and incorrect choice, if its purely just ‘do this’ and the only difficulty is in execution, then yes I would agree this is not a puzzle.

A very simple puzzle which our brains and bodies usually perform automatically, yet there are quite a number of situations and conditions that make breathing significantly more difficult, or where precise breathing or certain ways of breathing are skills that require mastery.

Swimming, diving, circular breathing for wind instruments, controlling your breathing while shooting, trying to calm yourself down from a panic attack, etc etc.

By your definition, Tetris is not a puzzle game.

Its generated and execution difficulty is a major factor.

Puzzle games can be solved or “won” by identifying the solution. Not-puzzle games require execution.

If you have 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, is it no longer a puzzle game?

If moving certain colored pieces requires a button combo or sequence, instead of a simple action, is this no longer a puzzle game?

EDIT:

Also, by this logic, Tetris is not a puzzle game.

…but knowing the optimal thing to do will still not give you victory which imo disqualifies them as outright puzzle games.

Knowing the optimal thing to do can be seen as but a higher order puzzle.

MMOs are probably the most notorious genre at this point for being extremely overproduced puzzle games.

Sure, there are different builds and strats… but its all very formulaic and boring once you find something that works.

Not to mention a huge, huge amount of them are basically just pay to win, to varying degrees, these days.

Although you could argue they do not actually have a goal… hrm.

Like obviously there are quests and goals and story arcs but technically, there probably are some mmos where you could just make your personal goal something wildly unconventional.

I haven’t played many mmos in a while, but that kind of spirit seems to just only be further and further dying out, I just hope theres still some mmo it exists somewhere.

Is Portal a… First Person Shooter with Puzzle Gameplay? A First Person Puzzle Game?

Is Elden Ring an extremely difficult Action RPG, or is it really just an easy Action RPG hiding behind an opaque and complex system of weapons and armor and enemy types and stats that becomes simple once a viable solution to the puzzle of stats and weapons becomes apparent after either reading a guide or just brute forcing through tens or hundreds of hours of bad solutions?

(For that matter, what even is an RPG?

Role Playing Game?

If that just means that you play a character, ie role, and it is an immersive and or compelling story and world, ok, thats a loooot of games.

Does it mean you can customize your character’s appearance or weapons or stat-build? Ok tons of non RPGs allow for that, and tons of classic RPGs do not allow you to alter your character’s appearance.

If it means you have the ability to put yourself into the game, make choices and do things differently in a way that meaningfully changes how the world of the game responds, then a whole lot of ‘RPGs’ are hardly RPGs at all, as many develop your character(s) as part of their story line to the point that many decisions presented seem entirely out of the established character’s likely responses, or give the player few if any impactful choices, having a mostly or entirely linear storyline.

By that metric most immersive sims are more RPG than many ‘RPGs’, anything with a branching storyline or highly reactive world is as well.)

I have read random weird news articles about modern people who have it as a last name, I swear.

What game involves super human perfect timing that does not include some other kind of puzzle to be solved?

Fighting games? Micro Heavy RTS or MOBAs? Bullet Hell Shooters?

All of these have strategy and can thus be reduced to puzzles.

I suppose if a game was purely just, click button as fast as you can after something happens, then ok, you got me, but add even one more element, and technically this is an extremely simple puzzle, albeit brutally unforgiving in terms of getting your human body to solve the puzzle.

Is there something different you have in mind?

EDIT: Alkheemist answered this later, with rhythm games (that have no elements of strategy ie, GuitarHero is not a puzzle but NecroDancer still is). I agree those are not puzzles. Skipped my mind as I have not played one in a very long time.

I would say you also have got me on a pure RNG slot game. Theres no gameplay, theres no puzzle, theres no strategy.

At least, within the game itself. If youre going to somehow exploit or hack or something, arguably thats now a real world puzzle of how to do it and not go to jail, but excepting that… yeah, there are lots of online ‘games’ with literally no puzzle element, just do thing and then random output happens, with a bunch of flashy graphics that have 0 bearing on what the outcome will be, whether its a digitized horse race or slots or whatever.

I would argue those are not really games though.

The player cannot make any choice that is more or less likely to achieve the goal, thus its the illusion of a game. No meaningful choices.

possibly because it could be easily confused with ‘fix this shit’?

Who knows, theres no real rhyme or reason to how lingo evolves, somethings get popular, other don’t others go through popularity waves and other totally change meaning.

For example, the origin of the phrase ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ is, in its original context, meant to denote something that is obviously impossible.

You cant pull your feet up so hard you’ll float or fly. Its like the modern nonsense propulsion/infinite energy memes from 4chan or plugging a power strip into itself to power it

But, nowadays, it means basically ‘do something difficult and unpleasant’, wíth the implication that ‘i did it, so can you, if you cant or dont, there must be something wrong with you’.

Almost the opposite of its original meaning.

Yeah, it comes from debuffs, which was applied to early FPS games when a gun was debuffed, which made the bullets hit less like bullets and more like nerf darts.

This gun used to take a guy out in 2 body shots and now its 5, like I’m shooting with a nerf gun!

Then the term spread around to non FPS games.

They do, but this is a case of a basic safety standard so obvious that it has never needed to be mandated.

Basically, they invented a never before seen safety flaw that did not previously exist.

This isn’t the only time this one has endangered people. Its quite likely the rather wealthy and well connected lady who drowned a few months back was not helped by the ‘battery dead/systems shorted = doors and windows dont open’ problem.

…Costco, ie the Kirkland Brand, started in Kirkland WA, a suburb of Seattle.

You are from another country though, so I can’t have expected you would know, it just pains me as I am from Seattle and am constantly astounded by Americans who think they know things about the region and very obviously do not.

Like, if there was any real PNW people, they’d read what I’ve written above and argue about how Kirkland is its own city, or, its really a suburb of Bellevue, etc.

To use another PNW saying:

Well, whatever, nevermind.

You must not be from around Seattle.

Kirkland is basically a suburb of Seattle.

If anything Bezos/Amazon, which started around Seattle and now basically owns an entire section of the city, is Kirkland Brand.

Blue Origin has most of their facilities in the Seattle area as well.

Newgrounds (still exists!)

Homestarrunner (still exists!)

Neopets (also somehow still exists!)

Websites for advertising movies was a thrilling new phenomenon.

Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people’s personal sites (before the term blog even came around), discussing a niche topic.

At the same time, a whole lot of sites were still disseminated by word of mouth, person to person, or maybe via email. Running a TV ad for a website was basically a gigantic gamble for early sites… only those with huge amounts of money could even attempt it and it often just outright caused the whole enterprise to fail if you had moderate or little funding.

We did not have touch screen mobile devices with full keyboards, we had SMS T9 texting, which (like pagers before them) led to shorthand (lol is probably the best example) and a good deal of early internet lingo.

There was no ability to basically constantly post some kind if personal update to your personal site or eventually MySpace as is now the norm with modern tech and social media, so people that post usually put a good deal more thought into it.

Forums. The old net used to be far, far more based on communities in forums. Far less emphasis on basically mundane, every day posts about your life and opinions, and more centered around actual discussion of topics or issues.

Oh right of course: GameFaqs.

Back when you could only use the internet if no one else was using a phone in the house, waay before 8 hour in depth video guides explained to you how to do everything in a game…

We had to print out guides with chapter headings written in ASCII art, and it was quite common to be seen as giving up or cheating if you needed a guide to complete a mission or unlock some secret.

Oh and if you think lag is a problem nowadays in online games, try playing an FPS where most people have a ping around or over 200, constantly rubber banding all over the place, yourself included.

Or getting desynced in Starcraft for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, basically every game.

You’ve got a horrible infection and a fever?

I’ll be right over to slit your veins and let all the bad blood out.

(In fairness I think bloodletting was mostly out of practice by the time actual telephones existed, but lol joke)

Maybe a more time period accurate one would be:

Your foot hurts? You think its from a badly fit shoe. Ok. Ok. Come over tomorrow and we will stick your foot into the wildly overpowered and unshielded x ray scope and we’ll see what can be done.

‘Gaylord’

Town Jester? Threw the best parties?