As I finish up the playalysis (play + analysis) of Fez for my Indy Hobo series I have one powerfully lingering thought: There are so many different types of puzzles in video games; are they all interacting and stimulating only one type of brain?
Instantly, thoughts dating back to Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror come fluttering to my mind - a time when I exhausted a lot of my energy developing my inductive/deductive categorical theory of puzzles. First, I will explain what deductive/inductive reasoning is by using the example that first introduced me to their differences. You are given a book of recipes. By deductive reasoning you would look at a new recipe book and think,"It is known that all recipe books have a chapter for desserts, therefore I can safely assume this new recipe book will also contain a chapter for desserts", and by inductive reasoning you would look at the new recipe book and think, "The past five recipe books I have used contained a chapter for desserts, therefore I can safely assume that this new recipe book will also contain a chapter for desserts" Both forms of reasoning result in the same assumption, but the path to this assumption is completely different. In times past it was the analysis of the differences in this path by which I tried to categorize whether some puzzles are inductive vs deductive and it appears I have yet to finish this analytical adventure.
Deductive reasoning is also referred to as top down thinking. This means that ones draws from common knowledge about the item under analysis to bring out new meaning. What this means is that before a proper analysis of an item based on deductive reasoning can occur, one must first have a basic understanding of what is popularly understood about the item in question. The fewer the number of people that believe a certain piece of information about the item in question as truth, the less validity that piece of information has in an analysis of the item based on deductive reasoning. Please behold this amazing graphic I created in 1 minute (and gave me carpal tunnel in the process ) if you need a visual aid in understanding this logic.
Deductive reasoning starts at the top. Once you have an understanding of what everyone knows about the item, you start working your way down. Inductive reasoning is the same model as deductive reasoning but flipped. Instead of starting at the top with information many people know as true, you start at the bottom with information that only you know and work your way up.
Well, I have just introduced two ways in which humans reason, or think, or come to a conclusion, or try to understand things, or solve problems, or solve puzzles. Yet, why did I do this? Let me tell you a story. There was a boy who had a computer that stopped functioning as normal. He didn't know how to fix it so he consulted the internet. Using a search engine, the boy had a little difficulty finding the right site, but he was finally able to find an article that addressed an issue that fit all the problems his computer had. After reading it, he tried the proposed solution on his computer, and it worked. This entire process took about 10 minutes.
What form of reasoning do you think the kid used here? Don't worry, this sentence I am currently writing is to be used at time for you to seriously think of an answer because in the next sentence I write I am going to tell you the answer, but only indirectly.
If the boy had tried to find out what he didn't know inductively, he may very well have came to the same conclusion as above, but it would have taken much more time - the reason being the fundamental difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. If a solution attained from deductive reasoning means starting with everything that is most commonly accepted as fact about an item in question and then working down from there to sift through all the information to find what is most relevant to your particular issue, then inductive reasoning would mean to start from the bottom and try to find a solution from nothing. In the case of our computer deficient boy, this would mean he would forgo the internet and just tinker with the computer on his own; thinking of what the problem might be and trying one after another of the many possible solutions he could imagine. The survival of the computer would be dependent on the boy's bank of knowledge about computers and his ability to draw relevance between this knowledge and what he learns from his tinkering. In addition to the boy running the risk of not figuring out the solution, he also might destroy his computer in the process (if he doesn't do this first). It is clear why many people choose the deductive route when dealing with their computers and simply consult the expansive body of knowledge out there before trying to solve the problem themselves.
So when would someone ever use inductive reasoning to solve a problem or seek an answer to a question when it is clear that starting with what everyone already knows is much more efficient (and safe)?
The answer to that question is also the segue into how I use inductive/deductive reasoning to categorize every type of puzzle I come across in video games and also the segue into how I hope by doing this I will better understand what type of intelligence(s) these puzzles are targeting. And you can segue into all these segues if you click here.
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