Riddles

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Riddles

• One of the earliest forms
• Of Interactive Story

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Early comparisons

• Game, Story, Novel, Puzzle
• Poetry (Novak 1991)
• Interactive Fiction is computer gamings best
  parallel with poetry complex, subtle, and these
  days, absolutely unsaleable (Guest 2002)

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Riddle

• Ancient
• Dismissed as being a diversion for children.
• Riddle is often considered poetry (Riddle is a
  short lyric poem that poses a question, the
  answer to which lies hidden in hints Turco 1986)

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Riddle

• Poses a question
• Answered by reader or listener or riddlee.
• Folk riddles A riddle is a traditional verbal
  expression which contains one or more descriptive
  elements, a pair of which may be in opposition.

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Riddle

• Covered with eyes, but it cant see.
• I tremble at each breath of air and yet can
  heaviest burdens bear

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Joke

• How many Freshmen does it take to screw in a
  lightbulb?
• Response format, not a riddle since they do not
  describe something that is genuinely to be
  guessed, but rather provide the set up for a
  punch line.

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Other non-riddles

• Whats that thing on top of the engine that
  controls the mix of fuel and air?
• Simply asking for a term, not offered to be
  guessed but rather in the hopes of learning the
  answer.

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Other non-riddles

• Mathematical problems.
• Situational puzzle
• A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The
  bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him.
  The man says, Thank you and walks out.
• Yes or no questions to figure out why it works

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Riddles

• Meant to challenge the listener but to be
  soluble, rather than those meant to be insoluble
  or those not intended to challenge.
• Excellent riddles have to be both enjoyably
  challenging yet soluble with the information
  provided.

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Riddles

• The unique quality of the riddle as communication
  is that it engages the attention of the riddlee
  in particular ways and contains a test for its
  success. Both parties must be engaged.

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Mystery novels

• Like a riddle but reader doesnt explicitly need
  to solve the mystery
• Ridlee needs to turn the unknown and unfamiliar
  into the familiar in order to know the answer.

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Excellence

• Must have some agreement between riddler and
  riddlee.
• Author is obliged to pose a riddle that is
  tantillizing in its opacity, yet fair in the
  clues it provides.
• Riddlee is obliged to solve the riddle, to
  announce the solution and explain the
  riddle-question and how each of the clues operate.

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Arrangement

• Aristotles Rhetoric
• Pattern of Surprise
• Then delay
• Then excited recognition

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Early riddles

• As old as time, before writing.
• Early surviving riddles from Babylon
• Who becomes pregnant without conceiving, who
  becomes fat without eating?

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History

• Sacred texts contain riddles
• Well-regarded in ancient Greece.
• Legend says that Homer was confounded by a riddle
  and died of frustration.

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History

• Riddle of the Sphinx from Oedipus
• What is that which has one voice and yet becomes
  four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?
• 18th Century Riddles were very popular.
• After that, riddles became more for kids than
  adults.

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Poetry and Riddles

• Principles by Howard Nemerov
• A poem must seem very mysterious.
• But it must have an answer (a meaning) which is
  precise, literal, and total that is,which
  accounts for every item in the poem.
• It must remain very mysterious, or even become
  more so,when you know the answer.

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Principles

1. Invite the interactor to solve the riddle, by
   being enigmatic in a certain way or by presenting
   something to be solved that is alluring.
2. Stimulate the curiosity.

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Principles

• 2. Provides for the economy of objects in the
  world. If there are red herrings, they must add
  to the meaning, even if otherwise extraneous.

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Principles

• 3. When the explicit mysteris of an interactive
  fiction are solved, a work that becomes more
  profoundly mysterious can be played again with
  interest even when the solution is known.

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Examples

• Where did Pilgrims land when they arrived in
  America?
• When do elephants have 8 feet?
• What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?
• You throw away the outside and cook the inside.
  Then you eat the outside and throw away the
  inside. What did you eat?

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Examples

• What goes up and down the stairs without moving?
• What can you catch but not throw?