I just watched the video of Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit talk about the first DASH game. It was pretty cool to see Debbie talk. If you want to know how someone can be nice enough and energetic enough to get people in eight cities to work together on a puzzle hunt, you watch this talk... and you get an inkling.
- DASH had 132 teams! 660 people! DASH spread joy to many folks.
- Goal: low barrier to entry to other cities, start puzzling communities in other cities.
- Shared pool of puzzles—but it's up to each city to decide how to present those puzzles. Each city figures out local logistics.
- Getting eight sets of GC to decide on a date. Aiming out four months in advance, there was one day everyone could make it.
- First, Greg did the meta.
- This imposed/provided constraints on the other puzzles.
- This provided theme.
- GCs came up with clues. Different GCs means a diverse set of clues!
- Map system
- idea came from BANG21/Burninators.
- Audience comment: actually, Burninators got idea from co-eds (SF game?)
- crossword-style clues map to numbers which are on map
- idea came from BANG21/Burninators.
- Having 8 GCs' worth of people can be awesome
- Lots of energy
- Lots of reviewers
- Lots of playtesting
- Didn't need conference calls or f2f. Lots of email.
- Used Google Docs, Google Groups, Google Sites
- Each team has 3 wks to make puzzle, post it on docs for internal review.
- Each GC did a local playtest
- [She doesn't point out: but you need a Debbie to keep all these people playing nice together]
- People traveled to play DASH
- This makes Debbie happy, and is thus a good thing
- Ian traveled
- Wei-hwa too
- Debbie too
- Meet new people, see new places
- [editorial aside: Debbie once said something about how there's a tradition in the swing dancing community of traveling, and it's very positive. Uhm, but I fergit the details.]
- People excited. "When's DASH2?" I guess we should get started on that.
- Lots of email == tough to reach consensus quickly.
- Version control of puzzles not so easy.
- [I wonder if this was part of the impetus behind the new versioned doc upload feature]
- Shared website: Each city wanted to update their content, but all edits going through one harried webmaster Curtis.
- Maybe four months was cutting things close.
- A GC group dropped out! The co-eds wrote a replacement puzzle, yay. But nudging up close to deadline.
- Lessons learned. When Debbie gave this talk, they were in the middle of
- Like using polling software like Doodle for reaching decisions quickly e.g., picking a date.
- Now, planning DASH2: weekly conference calls; again, reach decisions quicker than over email.
- Still using Google Docs, Google Groups.
- Also using a Wiki (oh, Google Sites wasn't in that "still using" list.)
- Putting playtest feedback into Google Doc instead of into email to avoid accidental spoilers
- Using a CMS for the external site.
- Established some roles
- E.g., art director
- Puzzle coordinator. "Oh, gee, someone else already wrote a poker puzzle."
- Instead of all cities review an early draft of each puzzle, only half do. After feedback from that round is done, then the other half looks.
- Slide of Jedi Masters: Patrick McNeal (Boston), Phil Dasler (Houston), Dann Webster (LA), Jan Chong, Yar Woo, Justin Santamaria (Palo Alto), Curtis Chen, DeeAnn Sole (PDX), Debbie Goldstein, Sunshine Weiss, Jesse Morris, Greg DeBeer (San Francisco) Jeff+Jessica Wallace (1st DASH Baby), Peter Sarrett (Seattle), Todd Etter, Sam Freund (WashDC), ... AND MANY MORE
- Announced DASH2
- An inaudible question from Justin Graham. Maybe he's
asking if any of the "new" cities have started doing
their own local things
- Haven't heard of local events. [this must have been before BAPHL] But there's excitement. And more folks participating in DASH2 than in DASH
- For DASH, Debbie had to solicit. Now cities come to Debbie.
- Brent Holman asks: how do you promote this thing?
Promoting something in eight places is hard.
- Local GCs gotta work it out
- But in general, we go social: FB, Twitter
- Craigslist-ish sites
- University posts
- Local GCs help each other: on the wiki, post what you did, how it worked out
- Clarifying question: Keep it beginner friendly?
- Well, balancing that against the risk of the yawn factor that Ian mentioned
- Jan Chong says ...uhm, something about "puzzle" ...something about "bay area"...
- Allen Cohn asks how much work [something inaudible]
is. Oh, from the answer, I guess he asked what a
CMS is.
- It's a database that makes a web site.
- Ian points out another way to avoid giving away spoilers when discussing puzzles via mailing list: ROT13. He's used this, but the bad news is that Gmail starts showing you Ads in czech
- Someone (Alexandra Dixon?) asks for list of DASH2 cities
- List of cities
- Oh man, just one bay area city? With a limit of 30 teams?
- Jan points out that many teams that might otherwise be willing to drive far to play aren't willing if they know that they just missed being able to play nearby. [Psychology is annoying, but you ignore it at your peril.]
