Not Really a Meme

[dr_whom]

I know I don't usually make contentful LJ postings, but it seemed like a good opportunity to make some post-Mystery Hunt comments, both on this Hunt and on my opinions on various aspects of Mystery Hunt theory in general. And really, there's enough of this going around that it practically counts as a meme anyway.

First of all, congratulations to the Bombers overall for an excellent Hunt that really hung together: challenging and interesting puzzles, well-developed theme, lots of innovative concepts. Nice job, thedan, wesleyjenn, and everyone else. I was especially impressed by the thematicity of the whole thing—by which I mean, not the theme itself (though that was just fine too), but the way nearly all the puzzles hung together and related to the theme and especially to the subthemes of the different rounds. All the Round I puzzles tied in to performing arts, Round II to sports, and so on, while still having enough within-round variety in puzzle types and subject matter not to get tiresome (e.g., Round II puzzles weren't all about sports); and at the same time, the Deadly Sin–tagged puzzles were thematic for their respective sins. I'm pretty impressed by this—we made little enough effort last year to tie the individual puzzles in even to the general secret-agent theme, let alone to Boston, Cambridge, Washington, and so on. Because of this this year's Hunt felt more like a unified Hunt and less like just a collection of puzzles.

Next, compliments on the way the sin event puzzles fit into the overall Hunt structure. Last year SPIES learned how easy it is to screw up the relationship between scheduled events and ordinary-type puzzles; congratulations to the Bombers for finding an innovative way of handling this issue.

Also, the dodecahedron metameta was the Best Thing Ever. The only way it could have been better, you know, would have been if it could be completed without the Round VIII meta.... But actually, this relates to one of my hobbyhorses: I think this Hunt had too many potential roadblocks. It couldn't be completed without all ten metas, none of which were backsolvable; and most of the Hell puzzles couldn't be backsolved around either. In my opinion, the ideal hunt should be one in which no one puzzle (except for the metameta or location-of-the-coin puzzle or whatever) is absolutely indispensable to win; it leaves the Hunt as a whole too vulnerable to a single broken puzzle, or can leave an otherwise strong team too vulnerable to a single mental block. The 2003 Matrix Hunt did an admirable job of this, and it's what we aimed for and almost hit last year with SPIES. (The only individual indispensable puzzle apart from the metameta and runaround was the Paris meta; the metameta could have been—with difficulty—solved with any one other meta missing, and the remaining meta backsolved.)

On the other hand—the last three Hunts would all have probably been over by 8pm on Saturday if not for either an unexpectedly obscure meta (Normalville orange star, Hell Round VIII) or a poorly-thought-out round structure (SPIES Buenos Aires). So maybe Noah's right that teams have gotten too good. But does that mean that Hunts will only be long enough from now on if there are frustrating roadblocks, or for the last three years have we just all been overcompensating to avoid another 9am-Monday Time Bandits ending?

I agree with Noah in regarding "pure" metapuzzles—that is, metas where the only data is the puzzle answers themselves, and possibly an ordering on them—as more elegant and appealing than "shell" metapuzzles, where there's additional structure given aside from the puzzle answers. But with four of the last seven Mystery Hunts having had almost exclusively "pure" metas, I can see how it would begin to seem like ground that's been thoroughly picked over—shell metas obviously allow a lot more flexibility in metapuzzle content and style. And I thought the Bombers did a pretty good job at giving their shell metas a consistent structure and style by means of the video gimmick. Also, I'm pretty proud of Metaphysical Plant for the amount of backsolving we managed this Hunt, despite the generally high backsolve-opacity of shell metas relative to pure metas.

One sort of fiddling little criticism I have about this Hunt was that individual puzzle types didn't seem to be spread out very well. What I mean is, for example, the first two crosswords in the Hunt were pretty much back-to-back ("Thinking Outside the Box" and "Pyramid Scheme"), if I'm not mistaken. "Squad Car" came hot on the heels of "Unsound Effects", both cryptograms without word breaks. Late in the Hunt, there were two diagramless crosswords close together. I worked on the first of each of these pairs of puzzles, and then in two out of three cases when the second one showed up pretty much immediately afterward, I was too fatigued by that puzzle class to work on the second one. In the SPIES Hunt we tried to put puzzles of the same general class at least a couple of rounds apart. But this is a minor detail, of course.

Coming up: a few comments on individual puzzles!

Comments

[cananian.livejournal.com]

Two years later: "And cutting it down any smaller would mean that people didn't get to hunt with their friends" -- Hm. I already have more friends that I can possibly solve with on a single team. One's set of mystery hunt friends only grows with time, as far as I can tell. Any limit on team size (and there must be *some*, unless someone writes a cooperative hunt we all solve together) will eventually be "too small" from the solve-with-friends angle. I think you pretty much have to make an arbitrary choice on team size, based on the number of people you can comfortably accomodate in your solving room(s), and work from there. You wouldn't want to write a hunt that necessitated more people on a team than MIT's Mystery Hunt room allocation can accomodate -- although, given advance notice, I think it might be interesting to write a hunt optimized for smaller teams (say, "one classroom" teams instead of "two and a half classroom" teams). You'd want to give advance notice so that the larger teams can split up into "Large Team A" and "Large Team B" subteams in advance, and not arrive at the hunt to find that half their members have nothing to do at any given point in time. No doubt social drama would ensue, but it would be an interesting hunt experiment.