Alice in Puzzle-Land
Jan. 25th, 2014 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomThe Wonderland-themed Mystery Hunt was an idea that was bound to happen eventually. It came in second to the Mario theme on the final ballot in 2011, and in 2012 the proposal survived long enough to be the theme of a meta; I'm glad it was finally put to use as a full Hunt theme in such a successful Hunt. Many compliments to Alice Shrugged (great name, by the way) for pulling it off in style; this year's Mystery Hunt was amazingly clean and elegant with high-quality puzzles all around. I don't think I really felt blown away by awesomeness about any of the individual puzzles, as I sometimes have even in Hunts that were overall quite problematic; but the baseline level of puzzle quality was so high that I scarcely would consider this a criticism.
Alice Shrugged pulled off some feats that are really hard to accomplish; my hat is off to them. First and foremost, every single puzzle, including all the metas, was solved by at least seven teams, which indicates both an amazingly high level of quality control and puzzle difficulty calibration and also fairly clever (or lucky) puzzle organization balancing (for instance, in 2011 we had a puzzle that no team solved because it was inadequately test-solved, but we also had a puzzle that no team solved simply because it was long and late in the Hunt). This might be the single most impressive thing about this Hunt.
Almost as impressive, however, and perhaps more unique, is the following: they got event puzzles right, which I'm not sure any other Mystery Hunt has accomplished since event puzzles really became a thing. The one I went to (the singing event) was fun, got everyone involved, had a meaningful role in Hunt structure, and didn't run too long, and from the reactions of my teammates it seems that the same was true for all the other events as well. Having seen many failed events both from the Hunt-writing side and from the solving side, I feel safe saying this is no mean feat and future teams could learn a thing or two from how events worked this year.
This is something I care more about than a lot of people on my team, but I was also really pleased overall with how well and how often the answers matched the puzzle topics. There were multiple times when we solved a puzzle and extracted the answer and I was like 'Well, of course the answer is ____, that's what the whole puzzle has been about!"—not that I could have guessed the answer without solving the puzzle, but merely that the answer seemed related to the theme or mechanism of the puzzle in a natural way. I always feel that makes a puzzle seem like a more cohesive unit, rather than just a way of getting you one more input to the metapuzzle.
I only have one and a half real criticisms of this Hunt. The half criticism is that the kickoff segue from the fake "academic conference" theme to the actual Alice theme was kind of abrupt and awkward; I don't really think they needed a fake theme at all. I call that a half criticism because it's obviously really trivial.
The real criticism is that I feel the unlocking of new puzzles was too restrictive. I don't mean that in the sense that too few puzzles were unlocked at a time—members of Alice Shrugged have explained that they wanted to keep unlock speed fairly low to avoid overwhelming smaller teams, which is perfectly reasonable—but rather that which puzzles unlocked which other puzzles seemed too restrictive. As far as I understand the unlocking in this Hunt, once you had unlocked a round, further puzzles in that round could only be unlocked by solving puzzles in that round. This type of unlocking is highly susceptible to bottlenecks—Plant was stuck on the Knights round for quite a while, while solving puzzles in other rounds at a decent clip, and being stuck on the Knights puzzles that we had meant we had no way of getting more Knight puzzles to try and solve around them (until a timed release finally opened the rest of the round for us). In 2011, we deliberately avoided bottlenecks; the order of unlocking puzzles was deterministic and any solve contributed to your total points for whatever the next unlock was. That might have resulted in the structure of the Hunt feeling less exploratory; but it made it a lot harder to get stuck somewhere.
Plant came in eighth this year—like in 2012, we were the last team to complete endgame before Hunt operations officially closed down. That means we got to complete the Hunt without working any harder than we had to, which was more or less our goal. It's interesting to see how the conversation on the team has evolved from our post-2011 'LET'S NEVER WIN AGAIN' to 'well, if we won again…' to 'well, maybe we should win again sometime…' over the past couple of years… so I guess, don't count Plant out yet.
Thanks and salutations to Alice Shrugged for a great Hunt, and congratulations to the Random team!
In a later post, I'll probably comment on a few specific puzzles that I found noteworthy.
Alice Shrugged pulled off some feats that are really hard to accomplish; my hat is off to them. First and foremost, every single puzzle, including all the metas, was solved by at least seven teams, which indicates both an amazingly high level of quality control and puzzle difficulty calibration and also fairly clever (or lucky) puzzle organization balancing (for instance, in 2011 we had a puzzle that no team solved because it was inadequately test-solved, but we also had a puzzle that no team solved simply because it was long and late in the Hunt). This might be the single most impressive thing about this Hunt.
Almost as impressive, however, and perhaps more unique, is the following: they got event puzzles right, which I'm not sure any other Mystery Hunt has accomplished since event puzzles really became a thing. The one I went to (the singing event) was fun, got everyone involved, had a meaningful role in Hunt structure, and didn't run too long, and from the reactions of my teammates it seems that the same was true for all the other events as well. Having seen many failed events both from the Hunt-writing side and from the solving side, I feel safe saying this is no mean feat and future teams could learn a thing or two from how events worked this year.
This is something I care more about than a lot of people on my team, but I was also really pleased overall with how well and how often the answers matched the puzzle topics. There were multiple times when we solved a puzzle and extracted the answer and I was like 'Well, of course the answer is ____, that's what the whole puzzle has been about!"—not that I could have guessed the answer without solving the puzzle, but merely that the answer seemed related to the theme or mechanism of the puzzle in a natural way. I always feel that makes a puzzle seem like a more cohesive unit, rather than just a way of getting you one more input to the metapuzzle.
I only have one and a half real criticisms of this Hunt. The half criticism is that the kickoff segue from the fake "academic conference" theme to the actual Alice theme was kind of abrupt and awkward; I don't really think they needed a fake theme at all. I call that a half criticism because it's obviously really trivial.
The real criticism is that I feel the unlocking of new puzzles was too restrictive. I don't mean that in the sense that too few puzzles were unlocked at a time—members of Alice Shrugged have explained that they wanted to keep unlock speed fairly low to avoid overwhelming smaller teams, which is perfectly reasonable—but rather that which puzzles unlocked which other puzzles seemed too restrictive. As far as I understand the unlocking in this Hunt, once you had unlocked a round, further puzzles in that round could only be unlocked by solving puzzles in that round. This type of unlocking is highly susceptible to bottlenecks—Plant was stuck on the Knights round for quite a while, while solving puzzles in other rounds at a decent clip, and being stuck on the Knights puzzles that we had meant we had no way of getting more Knight puzzles to try and solve around them (until a timed release finally opened the rest of the round for us). In 2011, we deliberately avoided bottlenecks; the order of unlocking puzzles was deterministic and any solve contributed to your total points for whatever the next unlock was. That might have resulted in the structure of the Hunt feeling less exploratory; but it made it a lot harder to get stuck somewhere.
Plant came in eighth this year—like in 2012, we were the last team to complete endgame before Hunt operations officially closed down. That means we got to complete the Hunt without working any harder than we had to, which was more or less our goal. It's interesting to see how the conversation on the team has evolved from our post-2011 'LET'S NEVER WIN AGAIN' to 'well, if we won again…' to 'well, maybe we should win again sometime…' over the past couple of years… so I guess, don't count Plant out yet.
Thanks and salutations to Alice Shrugged for a great Hunt, and congratulations to the Random team!
In a later post, I'll probably comment on a few specific puzzles that I found noteworthy.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-25 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 02:19 am (UTC)1. Are throttling and bottlenecking entirely possible to separate in a hunt preparation context, given that the puzzles and structure in a hunt must be simultaneously tuned for a wide range of different team sizes and solving capacities?
2. Given that an identifiable subset of mystery hunters want to find a way to curb the cycle of bigger teams leading to hunts which are longer and wider leading to bigger teams in order to win those hunts, at what point is the amount of disincentive towards continual expansion of large teams that a throttled hunt structure provides no longer worth the risk of potential bottlenecking at some point for small or medium-sized teams?
no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-25 05:37 pm (UTC)Conversely, I was more frustrated than you by the small number of puzzles (and the drip-drip release rate). I felt like it was hard to find the right puzzles to work on, because you were picking from only one or two puzzles. In part I dealt with this by sometimes working on puzzles even though I knew other people on our team elsewhere were going to solve it faster. (E.g. the phonetic diagramless, where Ricky was 10 minutes ahead of us the whole way, but where we still had a lot of fun solving it.)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-25 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-25 07:27 pm (UTC)Evidently such conversations never occurred near me. Never again. NEVER AGAIN. I mean not for a long time anyway.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-26 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 03:46 am (UTC)(I quite agree with your general point.)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 07:10 am (UTC)I actually found being a more casual member of the writing team a lot less fun (although also a lot less stressful) than when I was more involved. I only don't want to win again because last time writing the hunt was really difficult for me, and incidentally not great for my career. I suppose I shouldn't assume the rest of the team feels the same way, and in theory if I could be less involved I wouldn't have as strong an objection.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-25 09:24 pm (UTC)I'm at the point where I'm saying "man, it'd be nice to win again, there are so many things I can do better next time!" Although I was genuinely surprised to see us coming in fourth; I had not expected to be anywhere near the leading pack for another year or two. I think we'll be really ready to win and write again pretty soon, actually, and particularly eager to apply the lessons of last time.
It's probably different the second time around.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-26 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-28 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-30 02:35 am (UTC)I had the same feeling -- wasn't sure if it was just the puzzles I worked on or more than that, but there were less OH MY GOD WHEE moments, but this was outweighed by the distinct lack of #!$%@ ALL THESE PUZZLES moments.
The release rate felt great for me (II&F also) because we were never overwhelmed, but we were also never horribly stuck. I was mostly not working on metas, though, so I wasn't looking at structure much.