Abstract
This article examines “paper puzzle games”—crosswords, Sudoku, Kakuro, word searches, and so forth—in order to historicize and contextualize “casual games,” complicate our notions of “casual” play, and open up paper puzzle games to game studies consideration for the first time. The article begins by identifying the dearth of literature on paper puzzle games and offers an initial examination of these games through the lens of casual games, play, and players. It focuses on six traits in casual game design: appealing themes, ease of access, ease of learning, minimal required expertise, fast rewards, and temporal flexibility. It demonstrates that—from a perspective of mechanics, demographics, and contexts of play—paper puzzle games are excellent examples of casual games and therefore important to fully study. It also shows the complexity of paper puzzles as a topic in their own right, opening them up for future examination.
Casual games, we are told, represent a “breakthrough moment in the history of video games” (Juul, 2010, p. 2). The rise of these “tremendously popular” games (Russoniello, O’Brien, & Parks, 2009, p. 53) has led to the emergence a “casual games phenomenon” (Kultima & Stenros, 2010, p. 66), which is now “among the most discussed current” (Kuittinen, Kultima, Niemelä, & Paavilainen, 2007, p. 110) trends in digital games and digital game scholarship. Casual games have supposedly “opened up the audience and reach of games” (Trefry, 2010, p. xvii) to a greater extent than ever before, while “the industry and popular press” have focused on their “ability to reach new player demographics” (Consalvo, 2009, p. 50): casual games apparently attract “females, non-gamers thirty/forty-somethings, and ‘lapsed’ gamers” (Waugh, 2006; cf. Tausend, 2006, p. 3), thereby representing a growth in the average age of digital gameplayers (Kuittinen et al., 2007, p. 110; Tausend, 2006, p. 13; Wohn, 2011, p. 204) and a shift into new demographics (Kultima, 2009, p. 59).
In addressing ourselves to casual game scholarship, however, we also immediately note that “casual games,” even as only a two-word term, are understood as being specifically digital in nature. For example, casual games have been defined as being the “casual sector of the [video] games industry” (Gualeni, Janssen, & Calvi, 2012, p. 150); Tausend (2006) defines casual games in terms of the “computer game market” (pp. 3 and 7); Chiapello (2013, p. 1) calls them “one of the major trends in the video game landscape”; Russoniello, O’Brien, and Parks (2009, p. 53) acknowledge the size and growth of the casual games market but refers purely to digital or electronic games; Kuittinen, Kultima, Niemelä, and Paavilainen (2007, p. 105) situate the growth of casual games within a specifically digital game context; Wohn (2011, p. 198) calls casual games “a rapidly growing segment of the video game market”; Reinecke (2009, p. 461), specifically defines casual games as being downloadable computer games or “online games that are launched from a Web site” and played in a web browser; and Kultima (2009, p. 58) positions these games specifically in the context of “digital play.”
As such, the game designs and the players who constitute the concept of “casual” seem natively digital, and thus casual games are ultimately understood to be a “specific time in video game history” (Juul, 2010, p. 152, emphasis mine). Acknowledgments are sometimes made of other kinds of game with commonalities or historical relationships, such as board and card games, but these and their interactions with casual games are not developed beyond a passing mention. However, none of the literature on casual games addresses one kind of game, which—I wish to argue in this exploratory paper—is an exemplary site of casual game design, casual play, and casual players. The games in question are not traditionally digital, and nor do they involve playing on any kind of “board” (unless one adheres to a very generous definition of a board). They do not involve the use of cards of any sort, and they require nothing more than a piece of paper and something to write with (although one could, with a good memory, play without the latter component). I am speaking, of course, of paper puzzle games: of crosswords, Sudoku, Kakuro, KenKen, word searches, and their diverse ilk that are ubiquitous throughout newspapers and magazines the world over. These are games played by millions, perhaps tens of millions, and yet are entirely absent not just from the literature on casual games, but from the game studies canon as a whole. Although I do not disagree that the newfound expansion of casual video games is quite a new phenomenon, I propose two issues with this dominant analysis to date. Firstly, that it has unduly conflated “casual video games” with casual games, which is to say games as a whole that share a set of design characteristics, and that this is an incomplete (at best) and flawed (at worst) proposition that elides a significant volume of other games valuably conceptualized as being casual. Secondly, that although board and card games have been commented on by casual game scholars, paper puzzle games have never been subjected to sustained examination by game scholars, and their study can complicate our notions of what a casual game (video or otherwise) actually is. For both of these reasons, I believe the examination of paper puzzle games is of significant value to game scholarship and will push the study of casual games, casual gaming and casual players in valuable new directions.
The goal of this article is therefore to offer the first focused game studies exploration of “paper puzzle games,” and in doing so explore two interrelated questions: to what extent do current understandings of casual games help us to shed light on this genre and to what extent does this genre of game complicate and confuse our present notions of casual games? To do so the article first looks to define relevant terms—specifically regarding “puzzles” and “games”—before then turning to a brief but comprehensive review of the (sparse) existing literature on paper puzzle games. It then identifies the six most common or universal themes in casual game literature that define the “genre”: That they are universally appealing in content and theme, quick to access, easy to learn, require little expertise, offer fast rewards to the player, and are designed with temporal flexibility in mind. I explore each of these, addressing the extent to which they adequately describe paper puzzles and their players or the extent to which paper puzzle games complicate what is and is not a casual game. The article concludes that paper puzzle games are casual games par excellence and as such also challenge several unquestioned assumptions and positions about casual games as a whole. This article is thus designed to problematize our notions of casual games, bring paper puzzle games into this discussion as an important historical antecedent to their present development, and open up paper puzzle games to broader game studies consideration.
Are Puzzles Games?
In order to examine crosswords, Sudoku, and the like, we must first address a question of terminology: are puzzles games, or are they some other kind of ludic thing which clearly demonstrates a familial relationship, but not a direct commonality or comparability with games? This has been a topic of some discussion, primarily from within game studies as one might expect but also from outside. Numerous nongame scholars, often anthropologists or mathematicians, have tackled definitions of games, puzzles, and other comparable concepts. For example, Moore (2012) notes that literature on game theory and probability theory suggests understanding games of strategy, games of chance, and puzzles as three distinct categories (p. 211). Although not a proposal from game studies scholars, such distinctions run deep in implicit terms, with most of us instinctively recognizing what we might call a game, and what we might call a puzzle, although without necessarily being able to make explicit the distinction. In game studies and game design specifically, however, there are conflicting theories. On the one hand, Koster (2013, p. 78) uses the term “puzzle game” and in a broader sense makes the argument that all “games are puzzles to solve” (Ibid., p. 34) and is certainly not alone in using the puzzle game terminology in this way (e.g., Arnott, 2012; Bizzochi, 2007; De Schutter, 2011; Golomb, 1977; Linehan, Bellord, Kirman, Morford, & Roche, 2014; Mortara et al., 2014). On the other hand, Crawford (1982) contrasts puzzles with games, emphasizing the ability for the ludic activity to change: A puzzle, he suggests, does not change and just presents the player with a single thing that must be “solved” (we would rarely use the term solved to refer to other kinds of games outside of a mathematical and game theoretical context), whereas games change and respond based on the player’s actions, a system that might be unpredictable, game mechanics rather than puzzle rules, and so on. Building on this understanding, Costikyan (2002, p. 10) does note that “almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving” but ultimately agrees that it is a distinction both valuable and, broadly, correct: “a puzzle is static. A game is interactive” (Ibid., p. 11). At present time, therefore, we might suggest that those who have looked closely at this terminological question argue in favor of a distinction, while in both popular and academic parlance beyond these theoretical debates, the notion of a “puzzle game” is taken to be entirely reasonable. In the context of this article, such a discussion of terminology is not only of theoretical interest but will affect how we treat the ludic things examined in this article, how we understand their affordances and relationships with their players, and whether we can even understand them as casual games at all.
In taking stock of the above observations, I agree that the distinction that Crawford draws is a valuable one, and as a whole, the question of interactivity forms both a practically apparent and a conceptually useful dividing line. However, another concern is not addressed in the literature noted above: that of legitimacy. As this article observes throughout, what I have been calling paper puzzle games are certainly played by well into the hundreds of millions of people worldwide, a number that would challenge any video game or even entire video game genre in terms of pure numbers, yet I believe this is the first game studies article to directly address these kinds of ludic experience. Paper puzzle games certainly do not need anything else to further relegate their study within the discipline, and failing to conceptualize them as games runs the risk of pushing them out of game studies as a topic of study, despite it being the only field that seems equipped to offer any kind of incisive study of the phenomenon. As such, the terminology of paper puzzle game which I use here seems appropriate to describe these kinds of playable experiences. We might understand puzzles as a subset of games, or not, which would affect the suitability of the “game” modifier; however, in many ways more importantly, omitting the game terminology runs the risk of relegating these activities in terms of perceived importance or relevance. Given that these are already certainly the most overlooked but immensely popular ludic experiences we might consider, this would seem like a significant mistake. This is therefore the terminology I will use for the remainder of this article, and the one which I believe defines this group of phenomena the most accurately—perhaps in a typological and categorical sense, but certainly in a political one. There is no discipline of “puzzle studies,” and thus, it must inevitably fall to game studies to consider these ludic forms, their history, their popularity, their nature, and their present and continued importance across the world.
Paper Puzzle Games: The Existing Literature
With the paper puzzle game terminology established, what has been written of them before now? The most important observation to make here is that paper puzzle games are entirely absent from game studies literature to date, which might strike us a significant oversight given their scope and popularity. Even when we expand our search to broader social science, political science, and humanities disciplines, scholars have contributed no more than perhaps a dozen papers offering analyses of these games, their players, or their designs, most doing so only briefly. For example, Little (1986) presents a historical analysis of crossword puzzles and their antecedents, dating from ancient Greek and ancient Roman eras. Equally, in attempting to understand the lasting appeal of such games into the modern day, other scholars have laid out requirements for constructing a compelling paper puzzle game—a well-built puzzle should have only one solution (Wilson, 2006, p. 5), for example—while others have explored experiencing these games, describing how the “puzzle solver encounters obstacles and clues, experience associations and figurations, remembers and guesses, tries and errs, and thereby recognizes possibilities and necessities” (Cohen & Waite-Stupiansky, 2011, p. 131). Moving from experience to cognition, others have gone into detail about the specific processes required in paper puzzle gameplay: Sudoku puzzles, for example, are “puzzles of pure deduction” based on the ability to “make valid deductive inferences” (Louis, Goodwin, & Johnson-Laird, 2008, p. 343). They can be trivial or extremely difficult to solve depending on the size of the puzzle and the elements the player is given (Subramani & Ponnuswamy, 2009, p. 280), akin to the kinds of “difficulty settings” common to video games. However, paper puzzle games are designed to be at a level of difficulty where players find them compelling, but solvable; as Louis, Goodwin, and Johnson-Laird (2008) note for Sudoku, “their popularity shows that people can solve them” (p. 343). Vast numbers of individuals with no kind of formal training in logic have rapidly mastered them (Ibid., p. 360), with the simplicity of their rules allowing for easily and rapidly learning the basic procedures (Wilson, 2006, p. 5), progressing with practice from simpler strategies (cells determined by single-step deductions) into “higher level methods” (Fletcher, Johnson, & Morrison, 2007, p. 330) as time progresses and experience grows.
From this literature, we can make two claims. Firstly, paper puzzle games have primary been “taken as read,” not seen as being important enough to study in and of themselves; and even enquiries which have prioritized the consideration of paper puzzles have addressed formal history or cognition, not culture or a focus on them as forms of play specifically (whether or not we believe them, in the Crawford sense, to be games). Secondly, I would argue that it is consequently time for game studies to engage more seriously with these forms of play. Paper puzzle games are played by millions and for many likely constitute the only form of “gameplaying” they do in everyday life and yet have been overlooked to an even greater extent than other analogue games such as board games (which boast a small but growing scholarship). As such, this article is intended not just to assess paper puzzle games from the perspective of the existing literature and research on casual games—although that is its primary goal, and the conceptual perspective I will demonstrate they fit most cleanly into—but also to bring their attention to game studies as a whole. We now therefore turn to examining the extent to which paper puzzle games can be understood as casual games and what that in turn means for our understanding of casual games more broadly.
Paper Puzzle Games as Casual Games
The casual games literature is diverse, but six common typological elements of casual games on which scholars broadly agree can be identified. These are that casual games should be thematically appealing to a wide audience, quick to access with few technical requirements, easy to learn, predicated on little if any prior game-playing expertise or skill, rewarding to the player regularly and quickly, and designed around temporal flexibility. I will now explore these, examining paper puzzle games in the context of each theme, and the extent to which the concept of casual games helps explain the play of paper puzzle games, and whether paper puzzle games pose challenges to our existing notions of casual games.
Thematically Appealing
The first value emphasized for casual games is that they should be thematically appealing and therefore deliberately avoid tackling any of the serious issues that many video games increasingly address. Kultima (2009, p. 60) argues for the value of “mundane themes and universal appeal” in casual game design, emphasizing the importance shying away from potentially controversial themes to guarantee broad social acceptability and, in doing so, ensuring that such games are considered acceptable to play in diverse social contexts (Ibid., p. 61). This is echoed by other scholars who argue that “fiction, themes or settings in casual games must be cheerful, and sexuality or violence should be excluded” (Chiapello, 2013, p. 4) through the production of “broadly accessible premises and narration” (Gualeni et al., 2012, p. 149). These games consequently come with a “focus […] on entertainment and relaxation” (Di Loreto & Gouaïch, 2010, p. 2). Ultimately, casual games are designed to offer “intense blasts of fun” (Trefry, 2010, p. xv) to the player, without any engagement with more serious themes or elements that any possible player might find objectionable.
Addressing paper puzzle games in this thematic or content-driven manner is challenging. As Bogost (2015) notes, it is difficult to subject puzzle games to this kind of thematic or narrative analysis; they tend not to “carry meaning” in the same way as films, books, or television (p. 104). Nevertheless, we can begin to make some inroads in this direction. In a crossword, for example, the “content” of the clues and solutions can be generally assumed to be not too risqué but will nevertheless sweep over a range of topics which might include those not automatically suitable for children or those wanting to avoid any kind of potentially controversial content. More abstract games, such as Sudoku and many other Japanese paper puzzle games, lack any appreciable thematic content, beyond perhaps a sense of mathematical beauty of the final solution. We can therefore state that although paper puzzle games eschew potentially disagreeable content, they do not replace it with particularly “appealing” (or even “family friendly”) content; they are either thematically neutral with minimal content that runs any risk of offending or lacking in any true thematic content at all. In doing so, yet maintaining such a wide player-base, they generate questions about the necessity of such content, and whether it is the presence of universally enjoyable themes—or simply the absence of more contentious content—that is essential to casual gameplay. Nevertheless, they share with casual games an avoidance of any potentially controversial or adult content and situate themselves either without thematic elements altogether or with thematic elements assumed to be pleasant or acceptable to all players.
Quick to Access
As well as thematically appealing, scholars agree that casual games should be “quick to play and accessible” (Trefry, 2010, p. xv), offer easy to access for players wishing to play (Kuittinen et al., 2007, p. 110), and support “spontaneous” (Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 53) play with minimal setup time. As Kultima and Stenros (2010, p. 71) note, “the success of casual and social games shows that there is a large audience for games that require little effort to set up”; as such, the “casual revolution” is centered on the “facilitation of playing and assistance of play” in large part through “less complicated game controls” (Di Loreto & Gouaïch, 2010, p. 2). Kultima (2009, p. 61) also explores this aspect, emphasizing the ready access to the physical game product as being important in casual games. For example, she notes that many casual games come “preinstalled in a device used for another purpose.” From this perspective, we can reasonably conclude that this is a second element of casual game design that paper puzzle games share. Paper puzzle games come preinstalled in newspapers and other magazines where the primary purpose is not the transmission of the puzzle, but rather the transmission of news, reviews, commentary, and so forth. This makes paper puzzle games extremely easy to access. They also require no true setup time, for the puzzle is immediately presented upon turning to the appropriate page; they are accessible, requiring nothing beyond a pen or a pencil to tackle; and they can be played spontaneously without changing one’s position, or the technologies one is engaging with, which might have specialized interfaces or demands on the player. Finally, the game “controls” are extremely simple and require no navigation of buttons, but merely the use of a writing implement. In all of these ways, therefore, paper puzzle games are profoundly casual, and perhaps even more so than casual games, requiring even less technology than a casual video game, coming with simpler controls, and consequently yielding even quicker access.
Easy to Learn
There is also a consensus that casual games should be early to learn, an element distinct from the above speed of game access and the immediacy of play. Casual games “generally involve less complicated game controls and overall complexity in terms of gameplay or investment required to get through the game” (Wallis, 2006) and should be “simple and ideally self-explanatory” (Tausend, 2006, p. 5) with a “short learning curve” (Gualeni et al., 2012, p. 149). To achieve this, a “simplification and minimization of the design elements” (Kultima, 2009, p. 62) and the focus on “simple rules” (Baniqued et al., 2013, p. 2) results in games that need a “minimal amount of instruction and/or skill” (Cusack, Martens, & Mutreja, 2006, p. 2) to competently play. In these discussions, the word “easy” or derivations thereof are extremely common. Scholars and critics argue that casual games should be “easy and quick to pick up and drop” (Kuittinen et al., 2007, p. 106), “easy to play” (Di Loreto & Gouaïch, 2010, p. 2; Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 53), “easy to learn to play” (Juul, 2010, p. 5), and offer easy and “instrumental” tasks for the player (Kultima, 2009, p. 60). Casual games therefore offer to the player “simple game mechanics with simple interrelations” (Gualeni et al., 2012, p. 149) that result in a “low complexity of input” (Tausend, 2006, p. 13), all designed to be playable by the widest possible number of players. Bringing this element to our consideration of paper puzzle games, we find forms of play which sometimes have only a single rule—“find the word that fits the clue,” for example—or games with a small number of intersecting rules, most obviously in games like Sudoku. As well as small in number, these rules tend to be very similar and clear, referencing obvious visual or verbal cues or structures. Equally, all paper puzzle game elements are essential, rather than extraneous, to the core gameplay of the puzzle; there is nothing which complicates the game unnecessarily, and design elements are pared down to the point that only the most vital remain. Even the most complex paper puzzle games adhere to these requirements for ease of play, being far simpler than most casual video games, and certainly easier to learn than more complex video games.
No Expertise Required
As well as being easy to learn, casual games are understood as requiring little expertise to begin play. Whereas the “easy to learn” requirement stipulates that it should be trivial to pick up what the game needs the player to do, this related—but distinct—requirement stipulates that no prior knowledge of gaming culture, especially that relating to “hardcore” gaming, should be required in order to begin understanding the mode of play. Although casual games do sometimes “experiment with innovative mechanics,” their goal is to entertain a “broad audience” (Trefry, 2010, p. xv)—this means forms of expertise dependent on previously game-playing experience are not a viable option. Casual games are consequently well suited to players who might lack game literacy and game skills (Kultima, 2009, p. 59), requiring as they do “no previous special video game skills [or] expertise” (Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 53) and “no special skills to play” (Cusack et al., 2006, p. 3). This also applies to the question of input and not knowing what kinds of inputs are expected and required and also a lack of “comfort” or “ease of use” with the interface systems noncasual games might use. In the last several decades, video games have become increasingly demanding of prior expertise, with the number of buttons on controllers growing and the complexity of many game systems and worlds increasing, but casual games aim to step around this need for the increasingly complex haptic interfaces more “hardcore” games present their players with (cf. Juul, 2010, p. 2). In response, some games have what Juul (Ibid., p. 119) calls “mimetic interface games,” which is to say games where the physical action one performs in some way mirrors the virtual in-game action. These are a popular subset of casual games (cf., Bogost, 2015, p. 90), such as on the Nintendo Wii console, where swinging the controller might translate to the swinging of a virtual tennis racket. As for paper puzzle games, the prior expertise required is even less. Most obviously, almost all paper puzzle games simply mirror the quotidian human act of writing, an act which requires only literacy—a state reasonably assumed in almost all markets where paper puzzles routinely circulate. On a slightly higher level, some games require very basic mathematical knowledge, such as simple calculations and operations, while others are contingent on vocabulary, although the extent to which “vocabulary” can be framed as “expertise” is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, paper puzzle games clearly require minimal outside expertise, and the forms of expertise present in one paper puzzle game (such as crosswords, being linguistic) are not required by another (such as Sudoku, being logical, or others, being mathematical).
Fast Rewards
The fifth core element of casual game design is the speed of rewards given to the player. As Tausend (2006, p. 14) notes, “most casual games are designed to make them rewarding even while playing short sessions” (e.g., 5 min); this is echoed by Juul who states casual games should be able to offer a “meaningful play experience within a short time frame” (Juul, 2010, p. 8); and Chess (2017, p. 66) who calls these sessions “bursts of activity.” Chiapello (2013) similarly states that “short gameplay loops” are core to casual game design (p. 12), yielding “incremental discoveries and rewards” (Gualeni et al., 2012, p. 150) across “short levels” (Anable, 2013) that demand little temporal commitment. This means one is regularly being offered a sense of achievement and completion, a sense of having moved forward, and that one knows very little play is required in order to pursue those same feelings. In the longer term, a player of such games should be able to obtain “game completion in reasonably short periods of time” (Baniqued et al., 2013, p. 2), although what precisely classifies as “game completion” in casual games remains elusive; many such games are designed to be played indefinitely or can offer an endless selection of new challenges within the same basic game-mechanical framework.
These fast rewards are, once more, traits also found in paper puzzle games. A paper puzzle game will offer an immediate reward when one word is completed in a crossword or a single number or sequence of numbers in a nonverbal puzzle. Equally, unless tackling an unusually challenging paper puzzle, they can normally be completed, or completed to the greatest extent a player can (e.g., they might not know some solutions for a crossword), far faster than probably any casual video game can be “finished.” This means that paper puzzle games take the fast-reward rationale of casual games and take this almost to its limit, offering games with extremely rapid rewards in small time frames, both in terms of a gameplay loop and play’s eventual completion. With the ongoing reduction in leisure time in the Global North combined with the increase in possibilities for both digital and analogue play (Johnson & Luo, 2017), these games can thereby remain surprisingly competitive within a highly crowded marketplace.
However, the nature of these fast rewards marks an important difference between existing understandings of casual games and the question of paper puzzle games. Specifically, Juul (2010, p. 50) argues that casual game design “commonly features excessive positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” To describe this “type of visceral interface” (Ibid., p. 45), Gabler, Gray, Kucic, and Shodhan (2005) use the term “juiciness”: a “juicy” element of a game will make sounds, or bounce, or flash brightly and feels “alive and responds to everything you do,” and in doing so, “coaches” the player in understanding what they should and should not do by constantly, and regularly, offering explicit feedback. This is one element of casual game design we do not find repeated (or, more accurately, anticipated) in paper puzzle games. Although there is a certain undeniable satisfaction in seeing empty space(s) fill up with solutions one has generated through calculation, knowledge, or deductive logic, paper puzzles games are, by their analogue nature, profoundly nonjuicy. In turn, they are highly explicit in their roles as intellectual challenges and offer little in the way of visceral positive feedback. It is the completion of the game’s challenges, rather than being told “You have completed the game’s challenges,” which offers the primary signifier of reward. As such, paper puzzle game offers their rewards fast and in rapidly playable pieces, but those rewards are far from juicy and it is on the player to make the most of them. Paper puzzle games therefore pose questions about the importance of juiciness to the appeal of the short gameplay loops of casual games, and whether a challenge, couched appropriately in a particular set of player expectations, is sufficient reward; it certainly seems to be for the hundreds of millions enjoying paper puzzle games on a regular basis.
Temporal Flexibility
The final, and in some ways the most important element of casual games, is temporal flexibility, which follows on but remains distinct from the fast rewards described in the previous section. Time in games is not just a question of game mechanics or the progression of virtual time as gameplay proceeds; it can be structured in games in ways that “necessarily impl[y] specific models of time and time management in the real world” (Chess, 2017, p. 63). This can mean either by representing similar forms of labor to those in the nondigital nongame world or by making players structure their leisure time in manners comparable to their working time. Consequently, the temporal flexibility of casual games comes with three related components.
In the first case, Anable (2013) argues that what makes a game casual is that it “functions in the ambiguous time and space between the myriad tasks we do on digital devices; between work and domestic obligations; between solitary play and social gaming; and between attention and distraction.” Situating her discussion in the context of labor dynamics and the refusal of work, she argues casual games should be designed to be “forgiving to interruptions by phone calls, meetings, or a boss peering over our shoulder,” for these are the events around which we structure the play of casual games. Kultima (2009, p. 59) calls this the rise of “games as a secondary activity,” which requires games to be playable in a range of spatial and temporal contexts; “flexible designs” enable video games to “fit into the lives of players” (Juul, 2010, p. 2), such as mobile games do (Kuittinen et al., 2007, p. 106). In this vein, Chess (2017) notes that adverts for the DS Lite handheld games console suggested rhetorically that “video game play should be done not as an act of leisure for the sake of leisure, but rather to fill snippets of time” (p. 59, emphasis mine), and thereby as an activity defined by its lack of temporal “weight” and its integration around our working days. In this regard, paper puzzle games are easily maintained and transported into diverse contexts in the newspapers or magazine, or through a ripped-out page, much like the transportation of a handheld gaming device; and one’s attention can readily be turned elsewhere, for an analogue game has no moving parts that might respond or take action when the player is not paying attention. Both elements make them ideally suited to being “secondary activities,” and considering the play of these games in newspapers and magazines makes this similarity even clearer. One tackles the puzzles on trains, in breaks, when bored at work, and so forth; paper puzzle games are therefore profoundly casual in this regard, being innately structured—through their association with newspapers—with these kinds of “breaks” and these moments between, before, or after the more “serious” business of work.
In the second case, authors studying casual games seem to agree on “the importance of providing short play sessions” (Chiapello, 2013, p. 3) as a central element of the casual game offering. This is instead of the “long-term commitment” (Gualeni et al., 2012, p. 149) that “hardcore” games require. As Kuittinen et al. (2007, p. 110) note, “it has become increasingly easy to pop in and out of games” committing only to the play of casual games in “short increments” (Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 53) or “in a small amount of time” (Cusack et al., 2006, p. 2), whereby the game is played only in “short bursts of five to ten minutes and then set aside” (Anable, 2013). Without the necessity of a regular time commitment (Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 53), one can play whenever one wants and for however long one wants; as noted in the previous session, rewards come quickly from tight gameplay loops, but while these enable short play sessions but do not necessitate them (Chiapello, 2013, p. 12), one can continue to play and continue to receive regular iterating rewards for any period desired. Naturally, paper puzzle games correlate well with this second element of temporal flexibility: with no digital system that determines the flow of play or the moment at which an instance of play completes, the player can pause after any numbers of words solved or numbers deduced or even partway through a word if so desired.
In the third case, as Chiapello (2013, p. 4) puts it, the “player should be able to easily interrupt the game without any serious consequences and return to the session later.” Juul has much to say on this topic. He (2010, p. 36) calls this “interruptibility” as defined by a “flexibility in the time investment they ask from players”—one can play such a game for hours on end, or potentially for only a few minutes, or even less time. He notes that this comes with both functional and psychological components; in the first case, many such games have automatic saving systems which backup a player’s progress, enabling them to readily return at a later date. In paper puzzle games, writing serves as the saving system, and writing down ideas or possibilities in corners (Sudoku) or on the side of the puzzle (crosswords) also serves to “save” the player’s thinking for later use. Psychologically, meanwhile, one is informed beforehand that the game can be played in short sessions. Paper puzzles make clear what must be done through the visual structure of the puzzle itself: what needs to be filled in, what needs to be deduced, and what the relationships are between these elements. One can also approximate the complete length of a session through the size of the puzzle and also other immediate information that is offered the player. Sudoku puzzles are commonly rated with terms such as “easy,” “medium,” or “hard” and one can also form further judgments about their difficulty from the numbers of digits given to the player at the start of the puzzle: A Sudoku with more numbers given is (generally) easier than a Sudoku with few numbers given. In crosswords, players can distinguish between type—a “cryptic” crossword is probably far more taxing than a “quick” crossword for almost all players—while the size of the crossword also affects the time it will take to solve, with a larger grid requiring more answers (and potentially longer or more complex words) than a smaller grid. Juul’s second psychological component is whether or not “it feels appropriate to leave the game,” a notion conveyed through “break-facilitating” moments where the player has no specific tasks remaining. Paper puzzle games certainly reach this requirement, with a flat ontology of gaming moments: No word elicits greater celebration than another in a crossword, no number is inherently the “most important” in a Sudoku. Some words are longer than others, while some numbers might be solved after a long period, making these psychologically of greater consequence, but not in the formal fabric of the game’s design. As such, paper puzzle games adhere to all three elements of interruptibility, as well as the other elements of temporal flexibility outlined above. This means that all six of the main elements of casual games scholars have previously identified apply—to a certain extent, completely, or even more so than casual games themselves do—to paper puzzle games.
Paper Puzzle Games and Game Studies
Given this apparently obvious potential role within one of the most active domains of games research (the study of casual games) in the present day, why have scholars thus far resisted the study of paper puzzle games? Although this is a large question in its own right, several possibilities spring to mind. Perhaps it is their very ubiquity, and the fact this ubiquity was established before game studies came into being, that have rendered them somewhat invisible; like an unquestioned background element of an otherwise fascinating and rapidly changing scene (exemplified by digital games), they have been taken for granted rather than being seen as potential objects of critical enquiry. Equally, it might the case that games scholars play a lot of video games—indeed, the majority entered the field owing to a strong personal interest and enjoyment in the medium—but relatively few paper puzzle games. These are not generally games that children, teenagers, and young adults play, yet these are the periods of life when the potential interests for a scholarly career are being formed. Additionally, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the dynamics of funding in the contemporary academy have also played a role in this: Digital games seem exciting, cutting edge, beguiling, and even baffling, while paper puzzle games appear unchanging, ancient, and staid. Some new moral panic, question of political economy or controversy over player behavior or monetization models arises around video games every year, while it is difficult to say the same of their paper cousins. Major innovations in video games—augmented reality, virtual reality, Esports, live streaming, to name but a few—routinely assail us, while paper puzzle games remain almost completely constant. As such, it is difficult indeed to fund research on paper puzzle games (and it is even possible the short postdoctoral position through which this study was conducted was, perhaps, the first and only of its kind). Finally, and irrespective of these other points, one question still remains: could it be that there is simply nothing to study in these games? Or is their lack of study truly a cultural matter as I have suggested here, and we have simply not yet figured out what a serious research agenda into paper puzzle games look like? I am firmly convinced it is this latter explanation. Countless scholars have found valuable ways to research games that are more simplistic and less demanding of one’s thought and effort than most paper puzzle games (which is to say, “casual games”, as evidenced by this very special issue and hundreds of other publications), and so surely a research agenda on paper puzzle games—that play with language, mathematics, space, logic, and more—should not be especially hard to come by? There are several I will now suggest to give a sense of the directions paper puzzle game research might pursue.
Firstly, in paper puzzle games of language, we might examine the lexicons of crosswords and related games, the concepts they mobilize, and their intersections with notions of history, geography, and culture. In this regard, playing a British crossword and an American crossword—to take two examples from nations that share effectively the same language and apparently deep cultural connections—immediately reveals a wealth of difference. Each mobilizes different forms of knowledge, with British crosswords (generally) still preferring more literary, geographical, historical, or philological solutions to questions, while American crosswords (generally) give far greater space to contemporary individuals, private companies, music, and television. It is not difficult to see, albeit crudely, reflections of the popular images of these two countries in the crossword clues they set: studying these games might therefore shed new light on wider geographical–cultural contexts, their relationships to the written word, and develop a greater understanding of those who play, or are thought to play, these games. Secondly, we might look to understand paper puzzles as being fundamentally cultural products that are produced, consumed, and exported and imported, in particular and varied geographical–cultural contexts. Why are these games successful in some countries rather than others, how (if at all) are they changed to be marketed in certain markets, and what the dynamics by which these kinds of games are thereby “localized”? This could form a valuable point of comparison for a small but growing scholarship on video game localization and offer a greater understanding of games as products deeply shaped by the conditions of their original creation. Thirdly, we might examine them and their players to understand what precisely it is that makes them appear ordinary and mundane, and what does this show us about how we consume different kinds of media more generally? Despite its tremendous success, Sudoku in particular is regularly mocked in contemporary popular culture as being mundane, asinine, time that could be spent doing something more productive, and a pointless distraction. This idea has even translated into literature: for example, in popular fantasy series Discworld, a parody of Sudoku is presented with the name “Jikan no Muda,” which translates (approximately) from Japanese as “waste of time.” Understanding why they seem to merit such scorn, while being so ubiquitous, might shed further light on the cultural embedding of games, the enduring notion of games as a whole as “wastes of time” and how these are situated within a wider cultural context of the drive toward a neoliberal model of productively used time. Fourthly, in the era of the Kindle, it is interesting to examine these games as being specifically paper-based in nature, yet challenged by the promise of comparable puzzles on the digital devices through which so much of our lives are already performed. Paper puzzle games could therefore be a way to consider how new cultural values emerge both in defense of, and opposed to, analogue paper products, and attendant generational questions that go alongside products and their modes and mediums of consumption. There are certainly many other routes to pursue beyond these, but each of these could be valuable research that would expand both the breadth and depth of our understanding of contemporary games, their play, and the roles that paper puzzle games play within the wider global ludic ecosystem.
Conclusions: Finding Modern Play in an Ancient Medium
In this article, I have carried out what I believe to be the first game studies examination of paper puzzle games (such as crosswords, Sudoku, Kakuro, Futoshiki, word searches, etc.), specifically examining their relationship to the phenomenon of casual games. To do so, I have considered six central values of casual game design in order to carry out a two-way exploration of these games: That they should be thematically appealing, quick to access, easy to learn, predicated on minimal expertise, quickly rewarding, and temporally flexible. As noted above, we have found that these traits describe paper puzzle games extremely well, and these forms of play therefore represent a kind of casual game before casual games; for decades, these kinds of play have exhibited every characteristic we now associate with casual video games. Bringing together, the observations made in the above sections, I now offer three concluding points: that these demonstrate casual games as a design rationale has existed for quite some time in a nondigital capacity; that a significant portion of the casual games to be found on app stores, mirroring these analogue games, can only be fully understood through understanding their progenitors; and that we can no longer continue to overlook paper puzzle games, these games’ players, and the habits of play they display.
Firstly, studying paper puzzle games can shed valuable new light on the nature of casual, whether understood as games, as gaming, as players, or as a historical moment. We have been told that casual games mean a reinvention of the game and the player (Juul, 2010, pp. 21–22)—but only the video game. Genre or medium—in the sense of video, card, or board games—is sometimes invoked in discussions of casual games (Oblinger, 2006; RealNetworks, 2006) and yet paper games, as both a material format and an implicit set of design restrictions, remain unmentioned (Kultima, 2009, p. 60; Russoniello et al., 2009, p. 55). Given the arguments proposed here, it is apparent that paper puzzle games are actually more appropriate antecedents for casual than are board and card games, despite these latter two being more commonly invoked as genealogical predecessors. They share all major structural characteristics, and although there are some areas where paper puzzle games are not casual—they are, for example, nonjuicy—there are other areas where paper puzzle games seem far more casual than what we normally call casual games. Paper puzzle games complicate our notions of both players and games (cf. Juul, 2010, p. 53) when it comes to notions of casual: These are groups of players who play no casual video games but who certainly play casual games, and there are numerous casual games far older than video games, and entirely analogue in form, yet which conform to almost every major distinguishing factor of the casual game “revolution” or “rise.” This helps us to problematize the idea of casual as a contemporary trend and points toward potential future understandings of casual game demographics, hardware requirements, and so forth. What we think of as casual games and casual play have a rather longer history than has previously been acknowledged, and it is through paper puzzle games that we can understand some of the longer historical trends behind these sorts of ludic activity. In other words, in paper puzzle games, we find modern play in an ancient medium—pencil and paper.
Secondly, I propose that studying paper puzzle games can shed new light on understanding the digital versions of these games, which makeup a small but significant portion of what is ordinarily understood as the casual games market. As Trefry (2010, p. xvi) notes, “a lot of successful casual games build off of an established market,” and even a short glance at the “paper” puzzle game applications on various app stores will bring to one’s attention a number of interesting dynamics at play through this relationship. For example, among the tremendous number of these apps—primarily crosswords and Sudoku but also branching out into numerous other cousins on the paper puzzle family tree—some reproduce the aesthetic styles of black-and-white newspaper printing and even the use of virtual pens and pencils to mark down guesses, emphasizing that these styles are “pure,” “simple,” or “classic.” These games therefore explicitly present themselves as being in dialogue with analogue games (unlike the overwhelming majority of casual games), marking them out as a distinctive subset whose appeal is contingent upon the mobilization of external aesthetic or even thematic factors that have not presently been studied in any great depth. In turn, these game apps structure themselves around the concept of replay, much like paper puzzle games do in the daily or weekly newspaper, or the large volumes of paper puzzle games one can purchase in specialized collections. Due to their lineage, these apps seek to iterate on idea in discrete chunks of play (individual puzzles) instead of the endless higher level progression of most casual games, thereby representing a distinct part of this market. It is also clear that there is a certain tension in these apps: Many reviewers of these games discuss how they found the apps to be more enjoyable than the original analogue versions, faster, easier to use, freed the user to go about their day without taking around a magazine or a newspaper, and so forth; but on the other hand, others state these apps lack an unclear something of the paper puzzles, perhaps through trying to add too much extra content and losing sight of the core gameplay. We can see that in the first case, these apps seem to emphasize much of what we have noted about paper puzzle games and yet lack the indefinable physicality of their play; through further study of paper puzzle games, we might develop a more sophisticated notion of this physicality and its role in their play. Finally, these apps bring us back to the question of time in casual and paper puzzle games, through emphasizing their ability to “kill time.” Although we traditionally think of leisure as being a free-form set of activities relatively unstructured by the demands of time (Chess, 2017, p. 61), here we see what we might term implicit elements of paper puzzle game design being transformed into explicit ones. Paper puzzle games in newspapers, magazines, and even collections rarely advertise their “time-killing” capacities, and yet in the digital realm, popular notions of casual games are strongly associated with them; these apps therefore offer us a valuable site for examining the relationship between discourses, platforms, and game design. In all of these ways—and likely more not uncovered in this initial consideration—paper puzzle games provide an interesting case study for the relationship between digital and nondigital iterations of the “same games.” Although more research will be required to understand this analogue–digital transition and its complexities in greater detail, the connections between these puzzle games’ analogue and digital incarnations certainly merit further attention.
Thirdly and finally, it is my hope that this article will highlight more broadly the importance of, and consequently open up for concentrated study for the first time, paper puzzle games. I have focused on addressing paper puzzle games through the lens of casual games, for this appeared to be the most promising initial method to begin to assess their mechanics, dynamics, players, historical relevance, and so forth. As the analyses presented in this article have hopefully demonstrated, the lens of the casual game—once disconnected from a specific historical moment and understood instead as a set of intersecting practices and design preferences—is indeed of great value for understanding paper puzzle games. It allows us to begin to construct a body for knowledge for thinking through this material genre of game played by hundreds of millions around the globe, both comparing paper puzzles to existing theoretical perspectives from game studies and simultaneously acknowledging what makes them distinct. Perhaps most importantly, the diverse demographics that play such games, the moments in which they are played, and the mechanical simplicity of these games are all deeply casual. Although only an introduction to their study, this article has served to position these games, their players, and their material entanglements, for further examination within the growing scope of game studies. By doing so, we will be able to gain a greater understanding of casual games, of paper puzzles, and of the most academically neglected yet numerically vast demographic of “gamers” alive today—the paper puzzle gameplayers.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author expresses his deep thanks to Simon Colton for working together on this funding project, and offering a highly supportive working environment while doing so.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
