It's Larry Hosken talking about time and the 2-Tone Game.
- My goodness, what a handsome and debonair speaker. They should have this guy back every year. And how cool is it that he was wearing a "Hectic Planet: 24 Hours a Day" t-shirt, thus alluding to the ska theme of the 2-Tone Game and the overnight nature of The Game? Maximum cool, definitely.
- Wrote a bunch of crap about the 2-Tone Game already, so scraping the bottom of the barrel for a new topic. Let's talk about... timing.
- 2-Tone Game is a self-paced game. Players choose when they want to play.
- So... folks who kvetch about there not being night games anymore... did they play at night?
- And folks who like to kick back and eat a slow lunch had that option. Teams who like to take a month had that option. Did anyone do that?
- Let's look at the logs.
- How late at night do teams play? Looking at hour-of-the-day, when were teams active?
- It's a
bar graph showing at what hours teams solved puzzles.
In summary: Most activity happens 10am-10pm, but there's
some activity at all hours.
- Rumbling from peanut gallery: Shinteki folks folks recognize 10-10, when they run their excellent puzzle hunts.
- Tried looking at the solve-hour data team-by-team. Tried to spot patterns. Are there "morning teams" and "night teams" and...? Maybe, but didn't see a pattern.
- Disclaimer: Should we end all games at 10pm? Nope. A bunch of teams stopped before 10pm because they'd already finished this short game.
- How leisurely was this SF minigame? Given an opportunity to
procrassavor a game for a few months, how long do teams take? - N-tile distribution of team game durations. Summary: ~half of teams took < a day. ~1/3 of teams took a week or more.
- Startling Insight
- OK, so there's these people who take two months to get through a game. They're probably not your day-of players. They're not your main audience. But if you're already setting up a web site with puzzles & answers, maybe there's something simple you can do to help them.
- On your answer pages where you show the method, present it in "hint order". That is, don't blurt out the answer and work backwards. Instead, show how to solve the "first layer", then the "second layer". Leisurely players might be grateful.
- Sean Gugler: Is this game still running?
- Yep. Go play. (June 2011 addendum: Oh man, but some city workers are storing this big planter right in front of this one piece of public art and I really hope they move that planter soon.)
- Dwight Freund:
Are you going to run it as an overnight game?
- Done! You can play it at night.
References: Hectic Planet, the comic book. Ska science fiction at its finest.
