Mystery Hunt feelings
Jan. 27th, 2018 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomIt's been two weeks since the Mystery Hunt! I got back from the Hunt directly into the first week of teaching for a semester I hadn't adequately prepared for, so it's taken me a bit of time to get my act together enough to write my thoughts about the Hunt; let's see how much of it I remember. This was an unusual Hunt for me also in that I stopped Hunting before the rest of my team; my partner was coming to meet up with me in Cambridge Sunday evening, so I left the Hunt early to join her.
Inside Out was a very clever concept for a Mystery Hunt theme. It allowed for interesting structure and subthemes, with a good built-in quest element. I'm not usually a fan of fake themes, but the "health and safety" fake theme was pretty hilarious, essential to the plot (so that the emotions had something to be emotional about), and—most importantly—dispensed with during kickoff. I was delighted when I discovered that the name of the human the emotions were piloting was (Miss) Terry Hunter.
I really liked the simple structure of the opening round, which was about getting the emotion characters back into the control room. The Inside Out theme provided an elegant thematic way to have puzzles contribute to multiple metas; and Life & Order did a great job at writing puzzles that were actually thematic to the emotions they corresponded to. I also really enjoyed all of the meta solutions in this round—they wittily tied into the emotion themes and the plot of the Hunt without just being guessable.
I wasn't that crazy about the four personality islands, structure- and theme-wise. The fact that the four islands of Terry Hunter's personality were Science Fiction, Gaming, Hacking, and Pokémon seemed a little overly stereotypically MIT-geeky; it would have been nice if her personality felt a little bit less stereotypical or like it had a bit more diversity of character. Pokémon especially seemed a little bit too specific to be a whole personality island (though not too specific to be the theme of a Mystery Hunt round, of course). I'm not certain how I feel about the structural role of the hacking island—concentrating a lot of physical and on-campus puzzles into a single round. I usually prefer to have puzzles of similar types spread out throughout the Hunt, so that solvers who like different categories of puzzles can have things to work on at all hours of the Hunt. It was good that they gave us enough warning before unlocking the round to know that the round depended heavily on on-campus presence, so we were able to save it to unlock during the day, which we expected to be a better time for physical puzzles.
Allowing teams to choose the order in to tackle the personality islands, with little blurbs hinting at the structure of the rounds, was an interesting choice. It must have made it harder for the organizers to set the pace of puzzle unlocking, but it allowed them to spread out the interactions they had to have with teams so that there weren't suddenly 40 teams at the same time needing to do the exact same interaction.
Our team was on the large end of the size range that Life & Order recommended, as a result of which we did spend what felt like a lot of time more or less stuck. The problem with an unlock system that keeps teams at a relatively low number of unsolved puzzles, usually unlocking only one new puzzle on average for each solve, is that you end up stuck with a bunch of puzzles you're stumped by and a fairly small number of puzzles that you can solve and rotate through, which leaves most of the team without much to do. Is this worth it to reduce the ability of mega-teams to run away with the Hunt? I don't know, probably? But it did leave us frustrated some of the time.
Despite what seem like complaints above, overall, this seemed like a really good Hunt, and I wish I'd been able to see more of it! I used to think Sunday late afternoon was the optimal time for the coin to be found, but in the modern era, in which the Hunt remains open for solving to continue after the coin is found, it might be desirable to have a shorter Hunt with the coin found earlier so that more teams have a chance to finish the Hunt by Sunday night.
Below, some of my thoughts on specific puzzles!
Other puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have much to say about: Unfortunate Al, Roadside America, Fuch-sia, Self-Referential Mania, America's Best Friends.
Thanks to Life & Order for a great Hunt, and best wishes to Setec for next year!
Inside Out was a very clever concept for a Mystery Hunt theme. It allowed for interesting structure and subthemes, with a good built-in quest element. I'm not usually a fan of fake themes, but the "health and safety" fake theme was pretty hilarious, essential to the plot (so that the emotions had something to be emotional about), and—most importantly—dispensed with during kickoff. I was delighted when I discovered that the name of the human the emotions were piloting was (Miss) Terry Hunter.
I really liked the simple structure of the opening round, which was about getting the emotion characters back into the control room. The Inside Out theme provided an elegant thematic way to have puzzles contribute to multiple metas; and Life & Order did a great job at writing puzzles that were actually thematic to the emotions they corresponded to. I also really enjoyed all of the meta solutions in this round—they wittily tied into the emotion themes and the plot of the Hunt without just being guessable.
I wasn't that crazy about the four personality islands, structure- and theme-wise. The fact that the four islands of Terry Hunter's personality were Science Fiction, Gaming, Hacking, and Pokémon seemed a little overly stereotypically MIT-geeky; it would have been nice if her personality felt a little bit less stereotypical or like it had a bit more diversity of character. Pokémon especially seemed a little bit too specific to be a whole personality island (though not too specific to be the theme of a Mystery Hunt round, of course). I'm not certain how I feel about the structural role of the hacking island—concentrating a lot of physical and on-campus puzzles into a single round. I usually prefer to have puzzles of similar types spread out throughout the Hunt, so that solvers who like different categories of puzzles can have things to work on at all hours of the Hunt. It was good that they gave us enough warning before unlocking the round to know that the round depended heavily on on-campus presence, so we were able to save it to unlock during the day, which we expected to be a better time for physical puzzles.
Allowing teams to choose the order in to tackle the personality islands, with little blurbs hinting at the structure of the rounds, was an interesting choice. It must have made it harder for the organizers to set the pace of puzzle unlocking, but it allowed them to spread out the interactions they had to have with teams so that there weren't suddenly 40 teams at the same time needing to do the exact same interaction.
Our team was on the large end of the size range that Life & Order recommended, as a result of which we did spend what felt like a lot of time more or less stuck. The problem with an unlock system that keeps teams at a relatively low number of unsolved puzzles, usually unlocking only one new puzzle on average for each solve, is that you end up stuck with a bunch of puzzles you're stumped by and a fairly small number of puzzles that you can solve and rotate through, which leaves most of the team without much to do. Is this worth it to reduce the ability of mega-teams to run away with the Hunt? I don't know, probably? But it did leave us frustrated some of the time.
Despite what seem like complaints above, overall, this seemed like a really good Hunt, and I wish I'd been able to see more of it! I used to think Sunday late afternoon was the optimal time for the coin to be found, but in the modern era, in which the Hunt remains open for solving to continue after the coin is found, it might be desirable to have a shorter Hunt with the coin found earlier so that more teams have a chance to finish the Hunt by Sunday night.
Below, some of my thoughts on specific puzzles!
- Clueless: I like puzzles that turn ordinary puzzle types inside-out. In 2011 we had a puzzle that made solvers figure out cryptic clues based on the words that they clued, and this puzzle is a more complex but somewhat more entertaining version of the same topic. It's like backsolving: start with the answer, figure out the clue.
- Cross Words: This one didn't really feel like a Mystery Hunt puzzle. There have been plenty of New York Times crosswords whose gimmick was that they have a bunch of entries with the same vague clue, and this puzzle doesn't really have much more going on than that. The theme entries in the grid only kind of form a natural class, including fictional swear words (D'ARVIT, DREN), a fictional non–swear word for sex (SNU-SNU), non-taboo mild expletives (BY JOVE, DRAT), and words that are taboo in British English but rare in American English (ARSE, BUGGER). The solution writeup describes them as "fictional or softened versions of vulgar words", which only kind of makes them all hang together.
- Word Search: A cryptogram word search! Fairly straightforward and fun to solve. The only reason I'm mentioning it here is that in 2006 we had a rot-13 word search, which some of the test-solvers solved as a cryptogram without noticing that it was more constrained than that.
- Irritating Places: An etymology puzzle! I only joined in on this one after it the aha had been broken open, but I'm glad I got to contribute to solving it anyway. Maybe the secret to writing a good etymology puzzle is to keep its scope limited, like this one is to words derived from place names.
- Disgust metapuzzle: This is a great pure metapuzzle, with good flavortext cluing and good answer extraction, with one thing that makes me squint at it: I think it's really inelegant that, for half the inputs to the meta, the homophone is half the puzzle answer, and for the other half it's the full answer. And even though the solution involves pairing up the homophones, it's not the case that you pair up each two-word answer with one one-word answer. I assume the reason that this is the case is just because of the structure of the round, where several puzzles are shared between two metas, and so some of the puzzle answers for the Disgust meta were forced into templates that didn't allow them to be a single-word homophone. But from the perspective of this meta, it's really unfortunate that for some of the puzzle answers you have to discard a word before it fits into the meta.
- Fear metapuzzle: A great use of ancillary Hunt material as part of a puzzle. I wonder if any team noticed that, although the invitation to the Hunt that was sent out in December said "review the attached Health & Safety guidelines" and "this letter is not a puzzle," it never said that the Health & Safety guidelines weren't a puzzle.... I feel like there's a whole mini-metagame of Simon Says that could be played around what things the Hunt organizers don't describe as " not a puzzle".
- The Universs and Everythinn: I only came in to this one at the end to help with answer extraction, but I think it's delightful that there was a Meaning of Liff puzzle; in retrospect it seems so obvious as a puzzle concept. Spelling out letters by tracing lines on a map can be a bit tricky, and my teammates were finding gibberish, but I went back to double-check that they actually had the correct location for each point, and once I corrected the errors I was able to read the letters off the maps fairly clearly.
- Lest You Be: Watching our team solve this puzzle would be a great tutorial in how inductive reasoning takes place. The paths by which we went from wrong hypotheses to wrong-with-a-grain-of-truth to partially-correct to correct are fascinating. For instance, for the test that returns PASS if a string has at least three different punctuation marks, we spent an awfully long time believing things like "a string must contain an open-bracket, a close-bracket, and a period" before testing minor variations and eventually realizing it could be any punctuation marks. It's very easy to forget to test close counterexamples! Also, running one session of this puzzle per team was very devious on the writers' part.
- AllSpark metapuzzle: A tough nut that we basically brute-forced our way through. We spent a long time believing that the yellow transformation was just "move a letter forward or backward in the alphabet by a power of two" and tried brute-forcing that, but there were way too many possibilities and we were stuck for a while until David S. suggested "maybe it's just a bit flip?" and that narrow down the possibilities considerably. We never picked up on the flavortext clues, and we never picked up that the output words were supposed to be cars, so we always had multiple possible paths to brute-force our way through for most of the transformations, with no way of deciding which was right. But we got enough words with enough confidence to be able to read off enough letters of the final outputs and call in the answer.
- Starship Enterprise meta-meta: I was the one who had the first aha on this meta-meta, that the inputs from the six power-source metas were all Star Trek episodes. We had four of them at that point, and I looked up the stardates for those four episodes and tried to diagonalize them—that is, read off the first digit of the first one, the second digit of the second one, and so on—and got 48_2_.5. This filled out nicely to 48622.5, which is the stardate of the Deep Space Nine episode "The Die Is Cast". And with the layout of the round being a big spinning cube with numbers from 1 to 6 in the center of the faces, I figured that couldn't possibly be a coincidence and I must be on the right track. Needless to say I was utterly on the wrong track, and the puzzle was much more complicated that that. It turned out to be an amazing puzzle, with lots of moving parts, including not only stardates but country codes and flags and one big circuit diagram. With each puzzle answer in the round cluing one resistor on the circuit diagram, though, I wonder how robust this puzzle was to missing answers. And it required every puzzle in the round to have a two-word phrase as its answer, leading to some awkward-sounding phrases that didn't feel like puzzle answers—some of which sounded more like clues than answers, like SMALL NOVEL and AUSTERE TYPEFACE. I usually have pretty tough standards for what counts as an acceptable puzzle answer, and a lot of the answers in this round wouldn't have made the cut. Like I said, though, I thought this was a great meta, so maybe the lesson for me is I should be more flexible.
- A Tribute: 2010-2017: I always like puzzles that are about past Mystery Hunt puzzles, and I was especially amused that one of the past puzzles that this puzzle used was itself a puzzle about past puzzles. I'm always a little bit flattered when I see a puzzle my team wrote quoted in a later Hunt. Also I really liked "Crimes Against Cruciverbalism" from 2016 and so it was fun to solve another iteration of it.
- This Year's Hardest Crossword: When he was writing for the 2011 Hunt, Julian attempted to embed a Hunt puzzle as the Listener crossword for that week, but his submission to the Listener was rejected and we ended up just including the puzzle as a non-stunt Hunt puzzle. I'm glad for him that he was actually able to get his stunt accomplished this year—even though it ended up making us all have to try to solve a Listener crossword, which nobody on our team was really up to. As a matter of fact the fact that it was actually published in the Listener this time was helpful for us, since when we got stumped (which was frequently) we were sometimes able to find non–Mystery Hunt people discussing the puzzle on Listener online forums and the like. We still had made very little headway into the puzzle when I quit working on it; I don't know how we eventually solved it.
- Shift: We unlocked this after pushing through some puzzles we'd been stuck on and frustrated by for quite a while. We solved it in barely 10 minutes, without even noticing the "red-shift" and "blue-shift" gimmick; someone was just like "Code Names puzzle!" and we all gathered around and solved it.
- Flattery Will Get You Nowhere: Most of the people on my team have basically no interest in NPL flats, and even once the flats were solved this puzzle stuck around unsolved for a long time because we just couldn't break into the aha. Once someone on our team finally got the breakthrough—that the answers to all the flats are synonyms of the word flat—the puzzle became impossible for me to dislike; that's just such a brilliant puzzle gimmick.
- Middle of the Road: This is another one that we were stuck on forever, but it might make the grade as my favorite puzzle of this Hunt. We stared at the list of midpoint towns, and the people they were named after, for hours and hours before someone (Daniel S.?) suggested looking at the distances between the given locations, and Allen started pinpointing the given locations more precisely. Finding that the distances could be paired up as well is what made us realize that the midpoint town namesakes had chronological midpoints of their own. I love when the second step of a puzzle is a repetition of the same process as the first step, but in an alternative or metaphorical way.
- Fowlty Towers: I don't usually think I have a lot of patience for long Duck Conundrums, but this was really a lot of fun to work through. We got about seven teammates together in a side room, each assumed responsibility for a duck and another task (like working out which cube to place each round, keeping track of the duck movement order, and so on), and developed a rhythm pretty quickly of working through the steps. It helped that the instructions were really friendly, offering clues to reassure us that we were on the right track. And the grand finale of the Conundrum was very elegant, with the final board spelling out HEALTH and SAFETY and the MIT logo in addition to the puzzle answer. A very satisfying puzzle!
- Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt: I only worked on this puzzle for a little while when we unlocked it, so I only ever saw the first few rooms of the first level of the game. But I really loved the game concept, requiring multiple players to cooperate and coordinate in order to be able to make progress in the game, I like unorthodox puzzling challenges like that—not just "can you win this video game", but "can you get five or so teammates together to actually work in concert in an organized way to win this game, without screwing up?"
- Joyful Songs: This was the last puzzle I worked on, and I was able to work it beginning-to-end over the course of about two hours—a rarity for my this Hunt, where I spent a lot of time bouncing between puzzles. I usually hate phonetics puzzles, because they're so easy to make writing mistakes in—and in fairness this puzzle does have some mistakes in the phonetics, or at least questionable transcription choices (and how is the solver supposed to distinguish between Elmer Fudd and Tweety Bird's voices in these transcriptions?)—but I didn't mind because the puzzle was so hilarious. The use of the nonstandard IPA character [ʪ], for Daffy Duck's lisp, was what broke me into the puzzle. This was a lot of fun to solve, and to explain to people, and was a great puzzle to go out on.
Other puzzles I worked on and liked, but don't have much to say about: Unfortunate Al, Roadside America, Fuch-sia, Self-Referential Mania, America's Best Friends.
Thanks to Life & Order for a great Hunt, and best wishes to Setec for next year!
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Date: 2018-01-28 04:42 pm (UTC)We had the same experience on The Universs and Everythinn : I was part of the group that solved the clues, and I put the locations into google maps, but due to various mistakes I was having trouble reading off letters, especially the first few. (Combination of obscure places, typos propagating, and the sketchy Russian website we were using having some mistakes). Then Emily and Sachi came to look at it and got stuff sorted out.
I worked on the beginning of Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt but mainly I just contributed to Llamas having the second highest death toll. It didn't help that the group working on it at the time were 2 of us in Boston, 2 in Australia, and 1 or 2 in the Bay Area? Having the same person open the game in multiple different browser windows was a key component part of our strategy.
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Date: 2018-01-28 05:55 pm (UTC)We also used multiple browser windows in Twitch Plays Mystery Hunt. And, while I was there, about three people in one room and two people in New York on Skype. Having everyone in the same place probably would have made it easier.
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Date: 2018-01-29 06:04 am (UTC)Anyway, I didn't get to solve that many puzzles, mostly just Friday evening when Emily and I were able to go to a 6-person SF satellite solving session. But I DID get to solve Message In A Bottle, which was lovely and my favorite. (I can't link it, or in fact view any puzzles, because I need an MIT certificate now??)
The stumped British people helped us a bit more on the Listener puzzle, but I only banged my head against it a few times more.
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Date: 2018-01-29 06:39 am (UTC)Message in a Bottle looks great! There's always a bunch of puzzles I discover when I'm doing these writeups that I wish I'd actually seen during the Hunt.
(Not sure why you're having difficulty viewing the puzzles!)
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Date: 2018-01-29 02:07 pm (UTC)Then Andrew spent a while scratching his head about "why is this a Klein bottle, why does a Klein bottle split into two mobius strips" and I got to talk him through the topology. (I came in that morning wearing my Klein bottle hat, offered it to him for reference. "Can I cut it into two mobius strips?" "No!" So it wasn't actually useful.)
Ultimately we built our own model, cut it and reglued, and Andrew immediately figured out the extraction. So my main contributions on the puzzle were talking to Andrew about topology (Talk to him about 2-manifolds, or topolgoy in general. He enjoys it!) and cutting out a bunch of squares, but it was fun!