I can't thank Scott enough for coming in and conducting the puzzle workshop with us. I had a blast! It was not only fun to quickly prototype puzzles, but also to work with a different group of students than I usually do.

It seemed natural that I am better at certain types of puzzles, but I never really considered what that meant to me as a game designer. I really enjoyed putting our puzzlez in the context of a game story; again, it was fun to do these quick iterations. The time we had was so limited, there was no time to argue about details! Will and I just kept taking our first idea and running with it, and it was great to see that this technique can actually WORK.

I think one of the most insightful comments Scott made about puzzles in story games was that they act like songs in musicals - treated poorly they seem unnatural and harm your suspension of disbelief, but treated well they mesh with the flow of the narrative and enhance the experience.

The workshop was really interesting and enjoyable - as Kellee indicated it was quite introspective.
We did an exercise where, in partners, we chose 2 of 4 puzzles to give to the other person to solve. I chose puzzles that I thought my partner would enjoy solving (rather than ones that I knew I would have more fun solving) - but I suspect I wouldn't be good at designing puzzles that I didn't enjoy solving. I guess to be a good puzzle designer you either like all kinds of puzzles, or you're good at getting in someone else's head. That said, I think I would enjoy designing puzzles for children, but I wonder how you go about simplifying a problem without "dumbing it down".

Also, I had never really thought about where the inspiration for puzzles comes from, and it was a neat exercise to look at news headlines as a source of inspiration. I had only done that in classes focusing on more traditional, narrative forms of media.

I enjoyed the lecture and workshop...a lot of the elements covered are relevant to just about any kind of interactivity, and it was good to see puzzles are in many ways just like other interactive (or linear media) elements.

As mentioned above, the musical/puzzle analogy was dead on...I've accepted potentially ludricous contrivances a well crafted game, while finding myself insulted and jarred out of the narrative in another, and in retrospect the puzzles themselves were not very different between the two games. It's a matter of what you can buy into, and what you were expected (and expecting to be surprised by).

I also enjoyed Scott's thoughts on how to craft puzzle systems and puzzle elements (i.e. levels)...to be honest, most if not all of us in the program are going to be in that territory sooner or later, one way or another.

The brainstorming session during the workshop eas enlightening...I imagine Scott took some interesting notes. The idea of making a game by making a puzzle big enough to be a world was a common theme among us (for instance, imagine a planet sized Rubik's cube, with landforms and inhabitants on its surfaces...that's a game franchise right there!), and while most of the "ripped from the headlines" puzzles were pretty cool, the subject matter itself made the puzzle/games pretty dark.

I see a lot of interactive design as "puzzle design", in that its system design. Like Scott mentioned, it's a challenging system with a goal. Not all interactivity would end up being a "puzzle", but the design process would be similar. And interactive piece can quickly be changed to a puzzle, and a puzzle into a toy. This falls back again into the role of context and narrative.

I think the puzzle design requires proficiency of mathematic adaption. The way Kim assigns story to geometric structure is inspirational. It calls to my mind how my math prof deducted a natural event of daily life into an exquisite math model. Obviously, Kim is also good at doing the reverse way.(Thank you, Kim, I've having a lot of fun meanwhile.)

Generally speaking, maybe we can simply start off from any layer to design a gameplay if the relations between each layer are clear enough to adjust each part to others for the gaming intergrality. But, for the puzzle game design, I feel it's more productive to begin with maths(including graphic). Except for the pure graphic fun, the more and the better maths model meaningful human movements e.g. "Ms Green("pawn") has her excrescent tax money back(intension) only when she's checked and approved(counterpart/opponent) by the revenue(place, grid)", the more interesting puzzle stories of the game we can design.

It was great to meet a person like Scott Kim who is specialized for a specific game janre, for his case, puzzle. I'm so excited because I could think about my own game called "ISOSTAR" which is kind of action + construction + puzzle game. When I showed my game to him, he solved the very first combinaton of the game right away which Most of other classmates couldn't. It was quite amazing but not that surprising for a person like him. Mr. Scott Kim articulated various kinds of puzzle games and analysed it from the key elements of the game mechanics. Puzzle game is by itself a hudge game janre and he seemed to have experienced in developing almost every variety of the perticular janre. Actually puzzle element can be seen in every janre of games, so the applicability of puzzle element for other famous janre was quite large. Also his workshop was quite useful time for me to think about designing a new puzzle game or addapting one into a new one using core mechanics of it. Ideas from other students were also quite impressive. Everybody thought of really unique version of puzzle game of their own. I want to have more chance to exercise "game design" in the future quided by a really experienced developer like Scott Kim.

As a personal fan of puzzle games, I really enjoyed presentation of Scott Kim. I missed the workshops he gave, but it sounds like everyone who went to them enjoyed them immensely.

What struck me the most is the thought process that goes into the design; specific functions that and how they relate to the inspiration and purpose of the larger work.

Scott Kim scares me. With that said, he makes some of the most beautiful puzzles I've ever seen. Somehow, I've known this since elementary school, when I was first exposed to that wonderful piece of computer software called Heaven and Earth. Back then, of course, I had no idea how to justify my love of the games within. Now that I'm a little more than a decade older and I've got a little more education stuffed into my brain well...of course; I still can't put it into words...not because I can't, but because I just simply don't want to, other than these touchy-feely things I just sort of feel from what he puts out: a sense of symmetry in the game; an ability to visualize the concept on multiple levels; the immediate realization that it not just solvable, but able to be understood...

Maybe...hrm...I guess the reason I "feel" these things so is because they have this sense of physicality about them...I think either because of the real physical properties these games borrow from or their ability to reside in the virtual realities of our own minds as physical spaces.

no one can argue with the numbers that the casual game industry runs these days, but my opinion is that the simplest puzzle games don't offer a very rich media experience. The ones that do it for me are the ones that add an extra element, be it some sort of simulated physics or music generation (Lumines)... extending the puzzle genre in these kind of ways really creates more of a breathing gameworld and it helps me convince myself i'm not simply killing time. And yet I still play a lot of Q-Bert on my cell phone and thats a relatively pure puzzler.

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