Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's GC Summit 2012 Presentation: Designing Portable Puzzles

It's Scott Blomquist talking about Designing Portable Puzzles. This means "portable" as in "works well for simulcasting." As in "If your puzzle doesn't require a giant troll statue under a bridge, maybe you can use it in places that aren't Seattle's Fremont district. I re-worded liberally, and when that wasn't quite obnoxious enough, I [added comments in square brackets]

Has perspective on things that work in multiple locations because he keeps moving. Dude should be a guest on Technomadia or something.
This is Scott's third puzzle theory lecture, implying the existence of numbers one and two.
Most common puzzle structure for our "information-reduction" puzzles:
- Identify [Hey they're all car logos!]
- Transform [Let's write down the manufacturer names!]
- Eextract [The first letters spell something!]
- (Repeat) [They spell MORSE, so now we know the next step]
[Oh hey, it's like iter, Latin for "journey"]
What are we even trying to accomplish by making puzzles portable?
- Don't lock it to a location; don't lock it to an occasion. Shinteki Disneyland is almost an "event in a box," not tied to some particular day... on the other hand, it only works at Disneyland.
- Portable across medium: that gimmicky Segway logic maze might retain some fun as paper-and pencil puzzle.
- Make puzzles share-able with a wider audience after event. DASH's puzzle archives are awesome, partly because they had to make puzzles portable from the get-go.
What makes it tough?
- Maybe you can't use that cooool location.
- Maybe you can't use that cooool artifact.
- Maybe you can't make it a "fair contest".
OK, how do we portable-ify our puzzles?
In Identification step, different data
Don't make puzzle solution "GO TO PULGAS WATER TEMPLE." Make the solution be "AVOCADO" and if teams call in "AVOCADO" tell them where to go. You can tell bay area teams something different from what you tell Seattle teams.
BAPHLers make two versions of each puzzle, easy and difficult. [not sure why this got mentioned in this talk. portability between mortals and geniuses, maybe?]
If it's a simulcast, do something like DASH3: give teams in each city one piece each of a puzzle, force them to collaborate inter-city to get the big picture.
Different cities have cool locations if you don't force them to be too specific. Don't insist on a troll statue under a bridge, just a scenic bridge.
Medium portablity in DASH: for Tombstone puzzle, some cities make wooden "tombstones", others handed out paper.
OK, maybe you need a unique location... but maybe for people in other places, you can show them a lot of photos of the location and that's good enough. You might want to have those photos handy for playtesting anyhow.
Wow, I kept mentioning DASH as an event that does a good portable-ness. Yay DASH!
Questions?
Someone who might have been Corey asks: How do you catch phrases that mean different things in different places? If a Miami person writes a puzzle that refers to "Vancouver" and sends that puzzle to Portland (which has a suburb named "Vancouver"), that puzzle's going going to be subtly broken
- Yeah, I was talking to Debbie about this. Make sure you playtest in Portland before you let a bunch of teams play there.
Bob Schaeffer, DASH world coordinator points out Mike Selinker et al. will run [did run] DASH in Seattle this year, huzzah.
Dave Howell You have to think about whether a puzzle is locally unique versus globally unique. [wha?] In Seattle, if you tell teams to go to HQ of "a Really big Software Company", people know you mean MicroSoft. In Chicago, there might not be anything that folks recognize.