Riddles are bad

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A riddle is like a puzzle, except it's purely for the benefit of the person telling the riddle. It's not designed to be fun to solve, or even particularly clever. The only satisfaction in a riddle is for the person telling it, because they already know the answer.

This is because "solving a riddle" usually relies on making multiple leaps of logic and correct assumptions about different metaphors, and there's no way anyone guessing the answer to a riddle could be confident in their guess. Let's take the riddle of the sphinx as an example. This is how I always heard it:

Deducing this would require figuring out what the time of day is a metaphor for, and decoding "legs" as two separate and unrelated metaphors.

You might think that a person walking with a cane can be said to have "three legs", but no one would ever think of a baby as "walking on four legs" unless they were already familiar with the riddle. Babies crawl on all fours. They crawl on their hands and knees; the abdomen also plays an important role. The baby's arms don't become legs just because the baby isn't walking upright. The knees are part of the legs, but nobody refers to knees as "legs". That's why we say "on my hands and knees" and not "on my hands and legs."

But okay, this riddle is from ancient Greece, maybe a lot's been lost in translation, and maybe they had a riddle culture that I don't have access to. Maybe someone hearing the riddle in ancient Greece would've thought "ah, you're using the classic morning/noon/night formulation, so I know you're actually referring to a life cycle." Maybe it was common to refer to babies as "walking on all fours" because they didn't consider babies entirely human yet.

Let's look at a more recent example. I can't think of riddles without thinking of The Hobbit. Bilbo asks:

Gollum gets it right because he already knows the answer, but how would anyone confidently answer if they hadn't heard it before? People have 32 teeth, not 30.¹ Maybe the person in the riddle got two of their wisdom teeth out, but if you want people to be able to solve it, you should make it the number of teeth people have. More importantly, the teeth aren't "on a red hill"—half of them are, but the other half are hanging down from some sort of red ceiling or cliff. Finally, teeth and horses can both "champ", but what would it mean for teeth to "stamp" in this metaphor? What action are the teeth doing that wouldn't also fall under champing?

So maybe "champ" would make you think of teeth (if you know this is the old way of saying "chomp"), and you might throw "teeth" out as a guess, but you wouldn't feel clever about getting it right. You'd feel like you got lucky. "Oh good, I correctly guessed which parts of the riddle are lies." It's not something you'd feel good about solving, but it's something you might feel good about repeating, because you already know the answer and the other person doesn't. You get to feel smart and make the other person feel dumb. A riddle is a prank.

A riddle has to lie to you

This whole post started because I found another obnoxious riddle and need to vent about it. This is from the game MicroMUD, which CRPG Addict covered in 2018. It's really dumb, don't spend too long trying to figure it out.

Here's the difference between puzles and riddles: a puzzle might misdirect you, but it shouldn't lie to you. Puzzles that lie to the player are usually considered "bad". I think the same is true of riddles, but they've just been grandfathered in.

One puzzle format I enjoy is "connections". You're given 16 words or phrases, jumbled up, and you have to figure out how they're connected and make 4 groups of four. The version I'm most familiar with is (unfortunately) on the New York Times website, but I'm sure this sort of thing has existed in other forms. I can imagine a connections puzzle where you have group A:

and group B:

I might assume that "flies" is part of group A, because I'm more familiar with "flies" referring to the animal than the pants fixture. People don't usually refer to "fly" in the plural when talking about pants. So, I'd need to work out what the other groups are before I could be confident which group "flies" fits into. That's the fun of the puzzle: identifying the misdirection. Figuring out what homophones go where.

The person telling the riddle might make this face ->😏 at you and say "you shouldn't have assumed 'flies' is a verb!" but here's the thing: you told me it's a verb, asshole.

You lied when you said "often flies", because you can't often a noun. You can often drive a car, but you can't often a car.² Your fridge might often contain milk, but it can't often milk. Pants often have a fly, but they don't often fly!

Riddles have no rules

Bilbo wins the riddle contest by asking Gollum "What do I have in my pocket?", which even the book acknowledges is some bullshit. But to win a riddle contest, all you'd need to do is go first, because other than "don't ask anything that's clearly not a riddle", there don't seem to be any rules. Anything can be a metaphor for anything, as long as you can justify it. So I can ask:

Or how about this:

How to win every riddle contest

Even if you design a riddle to not be solved—which must be allowed, because how could a rule against it be enforced?—1% of people might luck into the correct answer. If you really want to cheat, ask a riddle with two possible interpretations, and if they guess one of the answers, say it's the other one.

Yeah, it's dumb. Riddles are dumb. The second answer would be totally acceptable if instead:

Conclusion

Riddles are bad, they only exist for the benefit of the riddle-teller, and if I encounter one in a game, I'm going to cheat.