I have put up a new article, “Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games.”
Swap Adjacent Gems is an attempt at writing the history of matching tile games through the last 20 years.
This is a quite detailed article that discusses a large number of small games. It touches on a few things I consider underexplored:
- How does a game genre develop historically?
- What is special about casual games and the casual games channel?
- How do developers perceive the issue of originality in casual games?
- How does a player make sense of a new game?
Swap Adjacent Gems is slated to appear in the Artifact Journal, October 2007.
Acknowledgment: Thanks to everybody who helped me by commenting on my earlier post about matching tile history.
Interesting article; I must save it.
I note the exclusion of “Puzzle Quest” and “Puzzle Pirates” with some interest; the former is perhaps understandable given that the game has been out for only a short while, but the latter is a somewhat curious omission.
These two are of particular interest to me because they take the core mechanic of tile-matching and encase it within a metagame framework that might be more closely associated with single-player (Puzzle Quest) or multiplayer (Puzzle Pirates) role-playing games.
In Puzzle Quest, this has significant implications for the game experience and rules, because it turns the game into a two-player (or one-player versus a computer opponent) competitive game where both players take turns to make moves on the same board: is there any precedent for this?
Valid points.
Puzzle Quest came out after I finished the article, but on the other hand the battle mechanic is already present in Puzzle Fighter or various two-player versions of Tetris for that matter.
The focus of the article is on game mechanics, so the wrapping of the game mechanics in a larger world as in Puzzle Pirates is somewhat beyond its scope. That could be an other article, which should also discuss setting, backstory, and so on.
I wonder, Jesper, if you do read Marshall Mcluhan. Do you use his theories with your game studies?
I think Tetris and Puzzle Fighter are substantially different beasts from Puzzle Quest, because those games play out on two separate boards with relatively low interaction – i.e. one player’s success directly parlays into the other’s failure (by sending junk objects, etc).
Puzzle Quest is mechanically quite different, since it’s turn-based and both players are manipulating the same board and set of tokens (so they can attempt to block or forestall each other’s moves, or potentially set up a good move for their opponent by accident!).
And you’re quite right that the individual puzzles in Puzzle Pirates aren’t mechanically different from their counterparts such as Puzzle Fighter (etc): mea culpa.
There is a thread about this article over on the indiegamer forum, just FYI.
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=132178
I also posted a link and list a few other games notably excluded from your article on my site. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to take a stab at my own version of your “match three family tree”. I wonder, when you created the tree, did you list out the game mechanics you felt each game was “inheriting”? I think a comprehensive list of puzzle game mechanics would be an incredibly interesting read and valuable resource. I’d love to hear your thoughts on such a list.
grid, thanks, I saw the discussion on indie gamer.
Feel free to make your own tree of course. Be warned: no tree will make everybody happy!
The arrows informally mean that a game inherits _most of _ the game mechanics from the game above it, with the innovations listed with “+” to the side.
As mentioned in the article, I focused on four different aspects of puzzle mechanics: timed vs. non-timed, ways of manipulating tiles, matching criteria, and matches required.
I did develop a program that allowed you to switch between many of these variations as part of the prototyping for a casual game that is coming out this week. Will post.
Wasn’t Tetris, in turn, inspired as a video-game departure from “Connect Four,” which had been played at least since its release in 1974?
I see what you mean about connect four, but I have never heard this cited as a source of inspiration. Do you have a source for it?
See for example: http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm
I can’t find a citation on the web, but recall that I got this infomation from the BBC documentary on the creation of Tetris, “From Russia with Love”:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3479989.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/tetris.shtml
it has cropped up in the US on LinkTV.com
Pajitnov has also cited pentominos as another inspiration
A nice article, but you missed an entire series, spanning a decade and about ten platforms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Driller
It (any of the games from the series) also has some very interesting gameplay and allows (demands!) you to develop some crazy skills in order to complete it. But it’s all about matching tiles, no doubt about that.
Gronk, I don’t consider Mr. Driller a matching tile game. I see why you would argue that it is, but my focus is on games where you do not control a character, but rather manipulate _the tiles_.
I can understand your reasoning and accept it, but grudgingly, since it’s not fair. Just because it offers one of the most creative twists doesn’t mean it’s right to evict it from its rightful genre. Don’t you also control the frog in Zuma? And they’re not even tiles!
Otherwise, it’s a very nice article. I wish you’d also do histories of other genres.
P.S. I’d also like to point out http://aluminumangel.org/attack/ which is not just a competent clone – it offers a significant twist gameplaywise.