Perhaps the argument can be made that a "plot puzzle", as defined by becky, could be a puzzle, but it would be a stretch to call it gameplay. That would be like saying a mystery novel has gameplay.
I myself wouldn't consider it a puzzle in the video game sense at all. Though it can be engaging, I would call it "plot comprehension" or just "plot".

And it is not a substitute for active gameplay either. Both have an important role in the quality of a game.

But that often happens in real movies too, that have no gameplay at all.

i must be all too dense.
sliders, mazes, combinations, and on, are put in by deliberately by the game makers to puzzle the people.
are these plot puzzles,which i still dont really understand,put in deliberate by the developers to puzzle people? or are they sort of faults when making game?
im still mixed up.excuse me

LindaMarion -- yes, using a plot this way is put in deliberately by the game makers to puzzle people and make them reconstruct the plot or think hard about what must have happened in the story. Some gamers really enjoy it and others (from what I can tell) chiefly find it confusing. It's not a fault, IMHO, it's an added layer of challenge.

Jenny -- yes, I'd say it does occasionally happen in movies. I wouldn't say that it happens a lot. An example would be Momento.

Games draw puzzles from other media too. Sliders, mazes, codes, etc. -- though those are more traditionally "game-like."

The developers of Overclocked did this on purpose - with the overall piecing the time frames together to form the plot. They deliberately made the other puzzles in the game, such as using inventory items or logic puzzles easy, with the main focus on piecing together the story. Like it or not like it, it's still a puzzle to solve. This is different from a game that is just constructed willy nilly and without that intent.

Certainly a plot doesn't have to take a chronological path from what happened first to what happened last, whether it's in a game, a book, or a movie. But revealing a plot -- putting together the pieces of a mystery -- isn't unique to games. You pretty much always see it in mystery novels. Just because the same method of storytelling is used in a game doesn't make it "gameplay."

Hi Becky,
Your "plot puzzles" definition answers some of my personal questions about many of today's games.
I think adventure games are evolving into something else and that something is a lot more complex than adventure. I'm from the old, old school where an adventure was a *quest* and the gamer was part of the plot in a way. We had to look at everything and had tons of inventory to be curious about and to search out answers to make the game move forward. I can't really explain it but (strictly my own reaction to these two well made games) Overclocked was boring in one way and Jack Keane was boring in another way. I wasn't interested enough to try to finish either game, kept thinking that the creators of these two games had *never* played an adventure game so didn't really know how it worked. But then, I come from the "good old days" and the only adventure game worth the name for me this year has been Diamonds In The Rough, a true adventure game gem, nothing rough about it, except in the title, of course.