It's a fantasy novel in which our characters start out in the normal world and then discover a magical gateway to a world beyond our own where blah blah blah. It sounds like the plot of the worst teen fiction potboiler ever. But this one's written by Gene Wolfe, and he manages to turn it around. Maybe because he reminds us that there's a power in kindness, while at the same time working in some rather snarky jokes.
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In this talk, Ian Tullis talks about puzzle design; in general and in the puzzlehunt style. He talks about what makes puzzles interesting in general; and the weird areas that the puzzlehunt community's been exploring for the past few years. If you read my 2-Tone Game write-up, you might remember where I said:
I had a halfway-brilliant idea: since this game wouldn't be a one-time event, since it would be this persistent thing, it would be a way to introduce new folks to puzzlehunts...
I don't think I followed through well on this idea.
This talk gets into some ways that I could have followed up: remembering to include "fun" along with the "wow". Including what the Anonymice call a "crank" for the player to turn while they wait for inspiration to strike. Anyhow, some notes:
GC Summit 2010: Ian Tullis "Reflections on Puzzling"
- We're talking about puzzles. Ian likes puzzles.
- Puzzles are little worlds in which everything's there for a reason.
- In real world, defining the problem's impossible, let alone solving it.
- You look at a puzzle, and when you understand it, you know you understand it and you know that your team needs to get back in the van and drive to "that Chevy's by the Bay Bridge."
- You get to exercise your <napoleondynamite>skills</napoleondynamite>. The German word for joy in exercising your skillz: Funktionslust
- Huntish puzzles are different: there's an answer to extract. You aren't done when you fill in that crossword. You're done when you extract the answer phrase out of that crossword. Whether you filled in the whole grid or not.
- There's a goal-oriented nature.
- [note-jotter's aside: Did the necessity of answer extraction nudge us towards multi-layered puzzles? After all, so many puzzle-huntish puzzles have a pair of steps: "fill in the grid" / "extract an answer phrase". If there's an answer-extraction step that's itself puzzly, then you've drifted into multi-layer territory.]
- Thomas Kuhn, the "Paradigm Shift" coiner uses "puzzle" to talk about useless scientific "problems". The stuff a scientist might work on because it's an obvious place to apply already-existing scientific knowledge; not shifting paradigms.
- And you can say that he's not using the same definition of "puzzle" that we are, but he does point out "the assured existence of a solution".
- Kuhn worries that these puzzle-y problems might insulate a scientific community from problems that can't be reduced to a puzzle-y form.
- [note-jotter's aside: Admittedly, I have made zero progress on eradicating Malaria while I worked on puzzlehunts]
- Ian says: "Our puzzles are different, dang it!"
- In our puzzles, you have to figure out the rules. Yar talks about "the pleasure of being stumped."
- Our puzzles point out connections between different things.
- E.g., Ian made a puzzle which gave you Latin names for critters ...
- which were of the form earth tiger or fire snake...
- which leads to Chinese sexagenary cycle (zodiac+five elements)...
- This leads to some design principles by which you can make puzzles that Ian will like:
- Principle Microcosms in which everything exists for a reason
Achieved by Everything points to the answer; no extraneous data streams
(With a shout out to Scott Blomquist for "data streams")
- Principle Unexpected connections between familiar things
Achieved by Novel subject matter or mechanisms; a “twist”
(This is to delight people. Not just to confuse the n00bs. Right? Right??)
- Principle Have clear answers (which may be part of a meta)
Achieved by Answers fit into metas, or at least fit their puzzles thematically
- Principle The pleasure of being stumped / figuring out rules
Achieved by Intriguing, but a “battle of wits that the writer expects to lose”
- Principle They put the Fun in Funktionslust!
Achieved by The solving process must be fun; should be a crank to turn
- Let's distill this into two metrics: "Wow" and "Fun"
- Wow: novelty, elegance, cool constraints, cool connections. Puzzle snobs write about them. They have a gimmick you can talk about, especially if you're a puzzle snob writing in your LJ.
- Fun: enjoyable process, humor, team-friendliness
- A Wow example: NYTimes crossword puzzle Dec 23, 2008. The crossword's answer is symmetric: e.g., if in one area you see EDISON, the radially-symmetric grid area will be NOSIDE.
- A Fun example: that Jumble acronym puzzle that's in your daily newspaper. They give you AGLND and you figure out GLAND.
- It's totally clear what to do. You've done a million of these already.
- But at the end, the most you get is a chuckle.
- So where are we now? We are in a golden age of puzzling. The field's wide open. Teh internetz have made the world's knowledge universally accessible and useful; this in turn makes people interested in concepts and cool connections—which our style of puzzle can provide.
- But bad news about the future:
- We might run out of forms. Our constraint is: somebody looks at this thingy and figures out how to get a phrase out of it.
- We're becoming less accessible.
- Let's talk more about the bad news. Hey, maybe we'll even figure out some workarounds.
- Our forms are constrained there are only so many ways to extract an answer
- Almost all puzzles use a mechanism from the short list on the slide.
- There are so many where you're getting stuff letter-by-letter such that a valuable team skill is looking at V__L__N_O_R_F__N__I_ and yelling "Vallaincourt Fountain! Get in the van now now now!"
- IWBNI more often it was implied via a connection, sequence, or omission
- Conventions "Old Standbys". Make puzzles less accessible to n00bs.
- Experienced solver is bored: aa aaa iai iii i Hey, it looks like Morse. Ho hum, I'm bored.
- N00b solver is flummoxed: aa aaa iai iii i ?!? Wha- no explanation. I am totally confused?!?
- Also, can be misleading. Example of a puzzle that looked semaphore-ish but wasn't semaphore. Semaphore is so common that if something looks too 45-degree-angle-ish, it could be a red herring.
- What's an answer extraction that n00bs can understand?
- _ _ _(_)_ _ Probably OK
- _ _ _ _ _ _ (4) Probably not OK
- neTWOrk (=2 =network(2) =E) "Oh I would never get that" (which means "I've lost interest")
- [note-jotter's aside: So when I talked about "too hard" puzzles, in hindsight I realize I was plagiarizing this talk. Though I didn't realize it. I guess I internalized this talk :-)]
- network 23 (= network(2) network(3) =ET) "Oh I would never get that" (example from Scott's recent BANG puzzle (?))
- In this list, an experienced solver will get the first two, but won't be especially impressed. Will get the third and be impressed. Probably won't get network23. Why not? It's not convention, though it makes about as much sense as _____(2).
- Hey, maybe ____(3) is a crappy convention. N00bs don't get it and l33ts aren't impressed. Favor "Jumble-style" over indexing.
- Constraints
- constraints inspire great art
- harder to write
- can result in a less-fun puzzle.
- [note-jotter's aside: Yeah. I think this is why "remote solvers" don't enjoy the "remote" version of the 2-tone Game. A puzzle that meets the constraint of using data from Coit Tower is impressive if you're sitting in Coit Tower thinking "whoa, they made a puzzle from this?". But if you're at home, looking at some photo of a Coit Tower mural, you think, wow this puzzle sure had to "stretch" to get some of these words. Wow, that's an awkward reach.]
- n00bs don't know enough to notice
- As we reach further and further for novelty, we leave the n00bs further behind. Are we painting ourselves into a corner? "Our puzzles are so cool, not like some word search" Hmm
- Ian's seen before:
Diverse! then Stagnant. In old
poems from Japan
- How can we do great stuff w/out locking ourselves in our own ivory tower?
- Keep doing what you love
- As you strive for novelty, maybe don't do it by combining existing conventions. The n00bs might recognize Morse, might recognize semaphore. But do you really think they'll spot the combination of them?
- "Where's the fun?" Don't forget the fun.
- Q&A
- Justin Graham asks a question into his hand and the mic doesn't pick up what he's saying. I'm nodding next to him and stroking my chin contemplatively, so it must have been pretty profound. Maybe we can reverse-solve the question from Ian's answer:
- Sometimes you get lucky and the constraints help point to an answer.
- But often you're so constrained that you don't have that choice.
- Eventually, you mature enough as a puzzle designer that you learn to let some ideas go.
- John Owens asks a question into the back of Deeann's head. We can't hear him, but he's making nicely expressive hand gestures.
- Yeah, there's the danger of an "arms race" between constructor and solver.
- Was looking at puzzles from an old puzzlehunt. By modern standards, those puzzles seem easy. But they're precise, clean, simple.
- Cultures go through this. In China, they look back to idealized ages when rulers were perfectly just.
- More recent puzzles can't be tackled by one person in an hour. You need a whole group.
- Who's she (24:48)? She must be saying something interesting; Sean Gugler is scrunching up his brows and thinking about it. Ian sez:
- We're lucky to be in the bay area where this scene has been happening.
- Thanks to Debbie et al, rest of USA has DASH
- Boston has the Mystery Hunt, but doesn't have something BANG-like. [self-destroying prophecy as BAPHL has since come along and is going strong as I write this in late 2010, a few months later]
- Brent Holman points out: maybe we shouldn't worry so much about the n00bs. There's this thing called teh internetz. There's dorks making spoilery game write-ups that give n00bs a baseline of knowledge. Ian sez:
- Yeah, I worried about using a puzzle concept that had one element similar to something from 1999 mystery hunt. A puzzle snob might have turned up his nose at that.
- Corey Anderson: view point of playing versus designing–
- I've forgotten what "playing" is like.
- You'd think you could give them a "codebook" and they could come to the game knowing about analog-clock-to-semaphore-to-letter code.
- For the Shinteki Disneyland hunt, we gave teams codebooks.
And there are Disney fans who do puzzly scavenger hunt games!
But they don't use our particular conventions.
And for every puzzle that relied on "aha, it's Braille" or whatever, those people hit a wall.
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It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting musements upon the nature of games, crowdsourcing, and the like. If you don't like thrillers, you might prefer all of this material in a series of essays. But it's nevertheless OK. I bet if I liked thrillers, I would have liked this book a bunch. I don't like thrillers, but this was a fun bit of fluff.
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If you've played through the 2-Tone Game and emerged, thinking Wow, that was strange; I wonder how it turned out that way?—you're in luck. At long last, some rambly essays about how the game came to be, how it was received, and why I stared fixedly at a window in the Stonestown mall for a couple of minutes while muttering to myself.
Source code? Yeah, sure, there's source code, nerd.
How did I choose things to write about? The topics are based on questions that people asked me. If there's something you want to know that's not covered, you know what to do.
Go read 2-Tone Game notes GC notes.
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Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for
act two of the
Games of Nonchalance
a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't
spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful is that, once
your in the game, you know what you have to do; It's
obvious that you're supposed to do this unethical thing. But if you want to
go through the experience with no idea of what to expect, then you should
play that game before you read this.
Also, this blog post even less coherent than the drivel I usually spew.
First, a rambling intro for folks who don't know what I mean by
ARG, LARP, and only have the vaguest idea of how a role-playing
game might differ from these...
There is a power in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG),
but maybe it's pointing the wrong way.
So in these Alternate Reality Games, the world is the "game board".
You play a character in the game; that character is probably basically you.
The layers of abstraction between you and the game are very thin.
Chess is very abstract; in theory it's a desparate battle between
two kingdoms, but it doesn't feel like one. A "tabletop" role-playing
game is less abstract. You say "My elf knight steps forward to battle
the goblin horde." You're playing a character; the character is not
you. The character probably has a place in the game world. If the game
is a swords-and-sandals barbarian axefest, the rules make it easy to
create a barbarian; they nudge you away from creating that noir detective.
As in a chess game, you might move a miniature figure around on a
map to represent your movement. It's still pretty abstract.
In a Live Action Role-playing Game (LARP), you walk around in some
area, carrying out some of your character's actions. Your actions
represent your character's actions. Things are still abstract;
you're not really a wizard, you can't summon lightning, so maybe you
just throw pieces of candy while
yelling "Lightning
Bolt!".
In an ARG... your actions are your character's actions. The line
between you and your character is so thin... Most people play the "character"
of themselves.
Why is this on my mind?
So I played through those Games of Nonchalance. And at one point in this
game—last chance to stop before the spoiler—you
need to open up somebody else's mail. You pick up a sealed envelope
containing a personal message from one character in the game to another.
To make progress in the game, you need to read that personal message and
get some information.
Reading somebody else's personal mail is wrong, of course. Oh, if it's
on a postcard, maybe it's not so bad, there's no expectation of privacy.
But at around the time you open up a sealed envelope to read somebody's
mail, you know that you're heading into evil territory.
And this game makes you do that... well, it doesn't make you. You can
stop, stop making progress. You can quit the game. You have that choice.
The thing is—it's that physicality, that physical breaking of the
seal. That makes it awful. Nerving myself up to do that, that was
dreadful.
I read plenty of fictional characters' private stuff
without worrying about it.
I read epsitalor... epistolarr... I read those novels-in-the-form-of-letters
things. I feel no qualm. But those are pretty abstract; the letters have
been rendered in type; they are bound up in a book.
In the McGuffin game,
I read those journal entries. No qualm.
Would I read your private journal without your permission? No.
Would I read a fictional character's journal?
Handwritten? Well... it was photocopied. Someone else had taken the
physical action of opening that journal, copying those pages out.
It helps that he was a fictional character. And... maybe it helped
that I only knew him through the journal; until I started reading it,
he was basically an abstraction with no more personality than a rook on
a chessboard.
But... in the Games of Nonchalance, I held an envelope. No abstraction
to shield me, just a physical envelope to open.
In the end, I opened it.
I reminded myself: the envelope's sender, the recipient, they weren't
real. They were fictional characters. Unfortunately, the Games of
Nonchalance develop their characters. There's so much story, so
much backstory. I felt like I knew something about one of them; I was
pretty darned sure she would not appreciate me reading mail to
her from her mother. It's all very well to say "it's just a character
in a game." If you know something about them, you don't want to be mean
to them. Being mean to real people isn't fun.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I've shot my share of Space Invaders. I had
a fun time doing it, too. But I'm not a stone-cold murderer. If that
game had started by giving me a sympathetic biography of each invader,
and then told me that my mission was to shoot them... That would not
have been a fun game.
Violating a character's privacy... Not fun.
Of course, I worry more about privacy than most people do. I work at a
large internet company; the company has a lot of private user data. I've
trained people in how to work with that data in a secure way, to avoid
exposing private user data. I.e., I have spent hours, days of my life
thinking about my responsibility to not violate people's privacy.
I don't think that the designers of the Games of Nonchalance thought
about the ethics of opening up a fictional character's mail. They're
artists. I think at least one of the designer likes combinations of
mail and art. Later stages of the game are in the form of an
otherworldly stamp collectors' club that does stuff with mail art.
I think they got that envelope into my hands beause they thought it was
kinda neat.
I reminded myself that, in the ARG, I wasn't exactly me. I was
kinda playing a character. In the Games of Nonchalance, I'm this guy
named "Judge". He's a lot like me, though. He basically is me. After
all, it's not like I knew ahead of time "oh we're playing a space opera
game, so my character should be a Space Ranger with a Mysterious Past".
You just start playing the game. It's not clear what traits "Judge" needs
to make sense in the game world.
So I was holding this sealed envelope. I was nerving myself up to open it.
I told myself, "They're fictional characters," but still couldn't bring
myself to open the envelope. I told myself "You're playing a character.
The character's like you, but he's an asshole who's willing to open up
somebody's mail."
And then I could open the dreaded envelope. And it felt awful and horrid.
And I read through the personal letter inside, found the password I needed
to continue in the game.
Back when I was in middle school, I played table-top role-playing games.
One day, one of my fellow players said "I'm tired of playing good characters
all the time. Let's play chaotic evil characters." I tepidly argued against
it; but he really wanted to try it. And so we formed a trio of evil folks.
It wasn't much fun. He thought it was going to be fun because he figured
we'd all go terrorize a bunch of villagers and feel powerful. And we did
a little of that. But he forgot that evil folks shouldn't trust each other.
And soon my evil wizard made a series of sneaky maneuvers—and enslaved
the rest of the party. Then folks were pretty happy to go back to
playing good characters.
I can shoot abstract Space Invaders and enjoy doing it.
I can play a character who's not like me, doing horrible things.
But if you take away too many of those layers of abstraction,
if it feels too much like me doing these terrible things,
it's not fun. All that power of reality, turned towards making
you feel like you've done something awful.
(Acts 1 and 3 were fun, though.)
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I ran into Mahlen and he recommended this book. It turned out to be pretty good. It's about the place of museums in society. Yeah, I know it sounds awful, but hear me out. It's sufficiently interesting such that I didn't throw it across the room even after it mention Habermasian publ%&*@
Sorry, I had to throw this laptop across the room when I noticed that this blog post was in danger of mentioning Habermasia... uhm, mentioning that. What was I talking about? Oh, right Museum Legs. Uhm, she points out some interesting things about the economics of museums. Like, we folks of the public trust the museum bigwigs to pick out art for us. We trust them to not just buy things from cronies. We trust them to pick out art that we should see, not necessarily the art that we'd naively choose.
She points out that when a museum offers art lessons, those lessons are popular. And she lobbies for the idea of educating museum-goers about making art. We'd appreciate art better if we had some idea of how to make it. Those frickin' Rothkos are more impressive when you start thinking "Whoa, wait, how did he do that?"
And there's some noodling and philosophizing about the role of art in society, what it could be. And that museum in Philadelphia, yeah that one. And the history of museums as instruments of temperance and... and other stuff I'd heard already.
But the economics and the art-lessons were new to me. Good stuff. Special bonus: this Kindle book said "em" when it meant "span". E.g., instead of saying "Spanish", it said "emish". Since <span> and <em> are HTML tags, I wondered if Kindle format is somehow related to HTML format. And maybe that "emish" is the artifact of some search-and-replace gone wrong. Anyhow, fun read.
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It is another issue of Giant Robot.
- There is an advertisement for Android figurines decorated by Andrew Bell.
- There is an article about MSG advising you should use it even though a few people have allergic reactions to it. Since I'm one of those allergic people, I'm going to take that advice with a grain of salt.
- There's a reminder that Devo has a new album out. Oh man, my first time trying to buy MP3s from Amazon since I upgraded my Ubuntu box to Lucid. 15 minutes lost figuring out how to enable purchasing music on a fresh install, still much less time than it would take to walk to music store and back
- Another article with Eric Cheng talking about underwater photography instead of about puzzly The Game thingies. They are very nice underwater photographs, though, so no complaints.
- Review of a Jim Jarmusch movie "The Limits of Control" that's listed on Amazon's "Videos on Demand" but is Not currently available. Yeah, like I'm going to walk to the video store.
I'm not sure whether this blog post turned out as a report on Giant Robot or as a report on the difficulty of buying content online from Amazon if you're totally flummoxed by the slightest obstacle. Anyhow.
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Pardon me as I once again use this blog as a place to keep track of notes to myself. I'm keeping track of some photos that seem boring, and that I hope continue to seem boring. They're photos of a notice that was taped in the lobby of my apartment building. I'm not a lawyer, but it looks like Brendan G. Spier et al owe Cathay Bank some money and have been slow to pay up. And it looks like Maureen O'Neill, one of this building's owners, is one of the al. So, anyhow, in case I need to dig up this info later, photos. And some text I can use to search for this: 330 parnassus ave.
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It's been a glum time at work lately. A co-worker was sick for a long time. Last week, he passed away. In our department, we could count on him to cheer people up when things went wrong. So now we miss him all the more.
I'm in no mood to write a book report, but of course I already have plenty of them saved up. Here's one that's appropriately glum: Whole Earth Discipline.
This book told me that we're doomed.
In another 20-30 years, our climate will have snapped into a bad state. Droughts will hit some areas; floods will hit others. We won't be able to grow food.
If we stop burning so much coal and switch to nuclear, then maybe we can last 50 years instead, and maybe we can create some more resilient food sources... so maybe our civilization will just have a soft crash and we can come back in 500 years. But we'll also leave around buried piles of radioactive waste, which will be bad news for that nascent civilization.
So... this book told me that we're doomed. I hope it's wrong. It's pretty well-written, and talks about a few interesting topics for folks who want to save the world:
- nuclear energy
- genetic manipulation of crop foods
- slums
It also talks about Jimmy Wales' fable of the steak knives, a way to think about our tendency to concentrate on the wrong security risks.
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SnoutCast #25: "Puzzled Pint #1 Debrief" (around minutes 17-19 or so) talks about folks who say "I could never do one of those puzzle-hunt things; the puzzles are too hard." And if you're a BANG enthusiast, you'll say "Aw c'mon, it's not too hard. GC, like, playtested this thing. We'll get it, don't worry." But, as DeeAnn points out in that SnoutCast, those folks don't exactly mean "That puzzle is too hard." They mean something more like "I don't want to do that."
I've dragged some of my in-real-life friends along on puzzle hunts. Some of them had a good time, but they didn't all have a good time. If I had to choose a moment to guess whether one of these people would have a good time, I would...
Look at their face when you first pull a puzzle out of an envelope. The puzzle shouldn't look like a "classical" puzzle. At that moment, the puzzle makes no sense and nobody knows what to do. Look at the players' faces. How do they react?
Me, I get a thrill in that situation. Curiosity; adrenaline rush from getting in "over my head"; some lizard-brain reflex to attack things I don't understand. I don't know where the thrill comes from, but I know it's there. I like these games because they force me to stretch; sometimes I won't be able to stretch far enough, but overall I'm having a blast...
Some folks seem to retreat, though. Here I attempt to put words in their mouth thoughts in their brain: There are already so many situations in life where you don't know what to do but have to act anyhow; opportunities to fail. Why on earth would I voluntarily put myself in such a situation?
It sounds like I'm insulting these people, saying that they're dummies who can't handle a challenge, but that's not what's going on. Some of these people are smarter than I am, and they still react to these puzzles as "too hard". (Maybe because they're smarter than I am, they're not accustomed to being in situations where they don't know what to do?) They can handle the confusion, but they don't enjoy it.
"Too hard" can be a shorthand for one of several things. People aren't going to tell you exactly what they're thinking when they bow out. We don't really know what's going on in our own heads. Language can't express it that well. And our friends don't want to hurt our feelings; "too hard" is more polite than "not fun." But out of all the polite things they could think of to say, "too hard" is probably trying to express something. I kinda think it's trying to say "I don't enjoy being confused."
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