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Related essays
"Getting It Wrong Isn't the Punishment" — 20 Puzzle Developers on Redesigning Failure
One piece today: "Designed to Fail: Puzzle Game Developers' Perspectives on Designing Challenge and Failure" by Craig G. Anderson (University of Utah) and Nasim Eshgarf, Zack Carpenter, David DeLiema (University of Minnesota), published in the FDG 2026 proceedings. Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 professional puzzle game developers, the paper shows that developers reframe "failure" away from wrong answers or performance and toward complete player disengagement — which they treat as a failure of the design, not the player. Trial and error and wrong guesses are viewed as an intentional learning mechanism that encourages experimentation and nudges players toward solutions. ACM's download page returned a 403 error for me, so this summary is based on the authors' published abstract, cross-checked across academic databases.
"Simple-Looking, Surprisingly Tough" — Generating Slit Paperfolding Puzzles at FDG 2026
One piece today: "Difficulty-based generation of paperfolding puzzles" by Stiliyan Nanovski, Mrinal Dhume, and Rafael Bidarra (TU Delft, Netherlands), presented at the Procedural Content Generation Workshop co-located with Foundations of Digital Games 2026 (FDG '26), held August 10–13, 2026 in Copenhagen. The paper generalizes an existing square-grid, slit-based paperfolding puzzle into a model supporting arbitrary shapes and slits, and builds a constraint-solving generator that derives folded states for a given paper shape and size. Puzzle difficulty is scored based on the types of folds required, and the generator surfaced new fold types made possible only by the slits. I was unable to load the full PDF due to its file size, so this summary is based on the authors' published abstract.
"When You're Stuck, It Quietly Gets Easier" — Reactive Crossword Construction from FDG 2026
One piece today: "Dynamic Crossword Difficulty via Reactive Puzzle Construction" by Colan Biemer and Seth Cooper (Northeastern University), presented at the Procedural Content Generation Workshop co-located with Foundations of Digital Games 2026 (FDG '26), held August 10–13, 2026 in Copenhagen. Unlike a conventional crossword where every square is fixed before play, this paper proposes and evaluates a "reactive" construction method that quietly lowers difficulty when a solver gets stuck and adds easier intersecting "hint" words. Across simulated Beginner-to-Expert personas, the reactive-with-hints variant produced the largest drops in both solve time and surprisal (a difficulty measure). The authors themselves note the method isn't suited for players who want a genuine challenge.
