Since I added two new games to my puzzle collection recently, I've had a renewed interest in playing puzzle games. As has happened before, this has led me to notice things about the way I play them and start having deep thoughts about how I – and how people in general – think.

I notice when playing Solo (my Su Doku implementation, renamed to avoid confusion with www.sudoku.com and/or trademark law) that by far the most difficult thing for me is to scan a large grid and find the one deduction that can currently be made. Solo has configurable difficulty levels (each one requires more sophisticated forms of deductive reasoning than the last) and also a configurable grid size; it turns out that I find playing 2x3 Advanced to be significantly easier than 3x3 Trivial, because I prefer a complex problem I can find to a boringly simple one that I have to go hunting for.

This fits with previous things I've noticed about myself. I used to play a lot of Mao, and always tended to prefer games containing two or three difficult rules to games with fifteen utterly trivial ones; in the former case I tended to feel that the game was a complex mechanism which I was piloting skilfully, whereas in the latter case I tended to feel that I was frantically running back and forth trying to be everywhere at once and invariably missed something.

And it's the same when I'm programming: give me a big hard problem to sit and chew on and I'll eventually solve it (assuming it's not too hard of course), but give me lots of fiddly little things to fix and my to-do list will become disorganised, I'll miss things and get stressed about it. This is why PuTTY is so fortunate to have recruited people who can polish up all the tiny little loose ends after I've done major pieces of development.

Presumably this isn't the same for everybody. I wonder if people reading this have the same tendency as me in this area, or the opposite one (preferring tracking lots of little things to addressing a big thing). Or, even more interestingly, if there's anyone reading this who thinks that distinction is meaningless or misleading, or finds they can work in both modes with equal facility but find some other interesting distinction to be drawn between modes of thought they find easy and hard.