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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9623095" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can't speak for [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER], but What is the square root of 169? is not a mystery. It's a logic puzzle, that might be easier or harder to solve; but the answer is contained in the question. Likewise, say, a chess puzzle of the form "White to mate in 3 moves".I think of mysteries in terms of empirical questions whose answer is not known, is not obvious, and requires the collection of actual empirical information to solve.Game play provides examples of "puzzle solving" that are neither logical puzzles nor empirical mysteries. Charades and Pictionary and rebuses are all examples: the players are not collecting empirical information and making inferences from that; they are being given clues and then trying to engage in interpretive/analogical reasoning (what is this a picture of? what film has a word in its title that rhymes with smile; etc).Empirical information can help in these games, but it is not empirical information provided within the game, but rather empirical information about the participants that the players bring into the game (eg what is pemerton's approach to drawing things - eg what caricatures does he default to? what films has pemerton seen, that he is likely to then portray in charades? etc).Classic D&D dungeon exploration is closer to these sorts of parlour games than it is to either Clue(do) or actually solving a mystery. So are CoC-esque mysteries, I think: the reasoning doesn't actually involve collecting empirical details and drawing empirical inferences from them, but rather collecting bits of information that one, as a player, knows matter to the game, and then working out what picture or pattern of events these point to.</blockquote>

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