[Ace17]

> Why would I want to solve puzzles with known answers that thousands of people have already solved?

For the same reasons you might engage in any entertainment activity.

Real-life still-unsolved puzzles are hard ; whereas puzzle games keep the difficulty under some control (except for the infamous boat puzzle in The Witness).

Real-life problems are hard because, often, proper domain modeling/formalization is part of the problem. Puzzle games generally don't have this 'domain modeling' part, they provide you with an extremely consistent set of rules, and you have to build a solution inside it. Sometimes this set of rules is partly implicit, and discovering it is part of the fun (e.g The Witness, Antichamber) ; but you never have to worry about the real-world and it's complexity.