Sea of puzzles
Jan. 26th, 2015 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomThe 2015 Mystery Hunt was last weekend! A solid Hunt in all respects. It strikes me as a lot like last year's Hunt in overall character: not extraordinarily structurally ambitious; not, from my vantage point, a lot of blow-your-mind awesome puzzles (though that might just be a consequence of which puzzles I happened to work on), but a well-organized, well-balanced set of puzzles with some fun surprises and a lot of good solving. Although in writing this, it occurs to me that the very fact that a Hunt with three meta-metas could be described as "not extraordinarily ambitious" says a great deal about how much the structural sophistication of the Hunt has increased over the last decade or so.
The School of Fish round (say, it just occurred to me—did Random choose the ocean as the theme for its Hunt because their team name last year was "One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish", or was that a coincidence?) was the major structural innovation this year—a round consisting of a large number of mini-puzzles, rather than a smaller number of full-length puzzles. This was an idea we talked about a lot in writing the 2011 Hunt—the Street Fighter and Pac-Man rounds were proposals for mini-puzzle rounds that we ended up not using—so I'm glad to see this concept finally making it into the Hunt. Aside from the novel feel it gave that round and meta, having a designated round full of easy puzzles seemed like a friendly gesture to beginning solvers to give them a better Mystery Hunt experience—like the beginning "mini-hunt" rounds with easier metas that a lot of Hunts have had recently. I did find myself personally wishing some of them were longer, though—I'd be working on a fun puzzle, and it'd be over before I knew it!
My one complaint is that the pace of unlocking of new puzzles often felt kind of sluggish to me—I had kind of the same feeling I had in 2007, where it seemed like solving one puzzle on average unlocked one new puzzle, so the number of unsolved puzzles you have stays relatively constant. The problem with this is that the unsolved puzzles you have are likely to be ones you're stuck or stumped or frustrated on, or just ones you're not interested in, and each new puzzle you unlock has a nonzero probability of joining that list. So if the number of unsolved puzzles stays constant, the number of puzzles you can productively work on solving declines over time, and that's kind of frustrating. I realize that there was timed release of DEEP as well, but we weren't so far behind as to get much out of that either.
Metaphysical Plant came in about 10th—yet again, one of the last teams to finish endgame before the Hunt shut down, so we achieved our goal of getting to see the whole thing without having to rush unduly. Still, the fact that we came in 10th, rather than, you know, 4th or something reminds me what an uphill climb it would be if we decided we did want to win again—we're kind of out of shape, as a team! If Random hadn't opened up hinting on metas after the coin was found, it's not clear to me whether we would have finished at all. Comments on endgame: I liked that it was modular, in that the five stations were independent of each other and could be undertaken in any order; but I kind of miss having more of a literal "hunt" element where the team looking for the coin at some point has to make some decision about where to go and look for the coin instead of being steered around campus deterministically. The deterministic station-visiting does probably make it easier to write an endgame that can accommodate multiple teams getting there at the same time.
The Hunt is racking up a large number of corporate sponsors, which still feels a little weird to me, but if it means that the Hunt can do things like give each team a beautifully designed treasure chest and tickets to the Aquarium, I can accept it.
Next post: thoughts on specific puzzles!
The School of Fish round (say, it just occurred to me—did Random choose the ocean as the theme for its Hunt because their team name last year was "One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish", or was that a coincidence?) was the major structural innovation this year—a round consisting of a large number of mini-puzzles, rather than a smaller number of full-length puzzles. This was an idea we talked about a lot in writing the 2011 Hunt—the Street Fighter and Pac-Man rounds were proposals for mini-puzzle rounds that we ended up not using—so I'm glad to see this concept finally making it into the Hunt. Aside from the novel feel it gave that round and meta, having a designated round full of easy puzzles seemed like a friendly gesture to beginning solvers to give them a better Mystery Hunt experience—like the beginning "mini-hunt" rounds with easier metas that a lot of Hunts have had recently. I did find myself personally wishing some of them were longer, though—I'd be working on a fun puzzle, and it'd be over before I knew it!
My one complaint is that the pace of unlocking of new puzzles often felt kind of sluggish to me—I had kind of the same feeling I had in 2007, where it seemed like solving one puzzle on average unlocked one new puzzle, so the number of unsolved puzzles you have stays relatively constant. The problem with this is that the unsolved puzzles you have are likely to be ones you're stuck or stumped or frustrated on, or just ones you're not interested in, and each new puzzle you unlock has a nonzero probability of joining that list. So if the number of unsolved puzzles stays constant, the number of puzzles you can productively work on solving declines over time, and that's kind of frustrating. I realize that there was timed release of DEEP as well, but we weren't so far behind as to get much out of that either.
Metaphysical Plant came in about 10th—yet again, one of the last teams to finish endgame before the Hunt shut down, so we achieved our goal of getting to see the whole thing without having to rush unduly. Still, the fact that we came in 10th, rather than, you know, 4th or something reminds me what an uphill climb it would be if we decided we did want to win again—we're kind of out of shape, as a team! If Random hadn't opened up hinting on metas after the coin was found, it's not clear to me whether we would have finished at all. Comments on endgame: I liked that it was modular, in that the five stations were independent of each other and could be undertaken in any order; but I kind of miss having more of a literal "hunt" element where the team looking for the coin at some point has to make some decision about where to go and look for the coin instead of being steered around campus deterministically. The deterministic station-visiting does probably make it easier to write an endgame that can accommodate multiple teams getting there at the same time.
The Hunt is racking up a large number of corporate sponsors, which still feels a little weird to me, but if it means that the Hunt can do things like give each team a beautifully designed treasure chest and tickets to the Aquarium, I can accept it.
Next post: thoughts on specific puzzles!
