It's "MIT Mystery Hunt Q&A", an unplanned Q&A session with Erin Rhode, captain of the team that ran the Alice Shrugged MIT Mystery Hunt This here is my notes. [My rambling asides are in italics] and I take some pretty egregious summarize|rephrase|totally-change-meaning liberties with other folks' words, too. Original video at this here link.
- Q: (Melinda Owens) In case not everyone read your
Mystery Hunt Design Philosophy blog post,
could you summarize it?
- OK, so the Mystery Hunt isn't a west-coast-style puzzlehunt
- The players aren't only those 100+-person teams you keep hearing about. Many teams are of the form "8 freshmen in a dorm who don't know what a puzzle is"
- We made a conscious decision to optimize for small teams. Recent hunt escalations have concentrated on keeping 100-person-teams fully occupied. One sad side effect of that: half of the teams, these small teams, don't even solve one meta. [MIT Mystery Hunts tend to be organized in rounds of puzzles, with a meta at the end of each round.]
- We set up our first round of puzzles to be new-team-accessible. Huge experienced teams blew through it Friday afternoon. Small new teams spent most of the weekend on it—but probably got through it.
- It's the MIT Mystery Hunt. [few minutes' pause as the video conference link breaks and folks debug. around the 5:00 mark, we're talking even though the link's not back, but the subject's changed]
- Yeah, so we had this lobster quadrille event
- (Melinda) Did people respond positively to that? The folks our team sent to that came back saying it wasn't even a puzzle.
- camera jostles (Linda) We're not having any technical problems.
- You know, back in the day, puzzlehunts had mixer events. They were just for hanging out. But then folks made it an easy puzzle. And you know how the Mystery Hunt escalates.
- (Melinda) It would have been nice to know it was going to be social instead of puzzl-y. Like, to say "send the funlovers, not the puzzle grognards.
- (Jasters) It's weird that Mystery Hunt always has to be so mysterious. It would be great to give that guidance, but it would break tradition.
- I don't know why that is.
- (beardy Manic Sage MIT Mystery Hunter who I think maybe said his name once but now I've forgotten) You kind of want to make people attend the event. So if you want to make sure they attend and pay attention, you have to either have them solve the puzzle right there or else make darned sure they have the information they need to solve the puzzle back at their headquarters.
- Maybe it's because our team hearkens back to the events-aren't-tough-important-puzzle days, but we generally send our freshmen to events. "Someone has to go to this event. You, you in the corner. You go."
- (someone) (indistinct) worked well. Everyone was collaborating on one puzzle. But everyone who didn't want to work on the puzzle could just eat breakfast.
- (12:05 mark: the video conference is working again. much rejoicing)
- As long as we finally have Portland and Seattle back, any questions from there?
- (voice) Seattle humbly points out you could use Skype or Lync.
- Q: (someone remote) It wasn't just the hunt itself that was run
so well. There was also all this stuff around the hunt. Like surveys
to rate the puzzles. And a tumblr went up right after. All these things
the running team kinda wants to do, y'all actually got them done.
What kind of planning did that require?
- The tumblr was Laura. Jamie made our answer-checker software, and he thought the surveys would be a good idea, so he added them.
- It's too bad you have to write so much software from scratch for each hunt. There's puzzletron at the core, sure. But there's so much game logic to deal with, you have to code it up.
- Q: (Todd Etter) What was the sequence of steps for making a puzzle and
mixing it into this beast.
- First a month of deciding on the theme.
- Then figuring out the structure of puzzle rounds
- Write the metapuzzles. [It's the MIT Mystery Hunt, there will be metas] The metapuzzles lock down what the answers to the "regular" puzzles will be.
- Now ready for puzzles. So solicit puzzle ideas.
- Each nascent puzzle is assigned some editors to shepherd it through the design process.
- If a puzzle idea gels into something solid, Erin gave them an answer-message. (there's some back-and-forth. if the puzzle's baseball-themed and there's an unclaimed baseball-themed answer)
- Q: (Melinda Owens) What fraction of the folks who were on your
2013 winning team slunk away from helping run the 2014 game?
- Let's see. In 2013, our team mailing list had 150 people. But on 2013 game day, only 120 people logged into the wiki, so figure 30 of those didn't even show up to play.
- 102 people piped up saying that they wanted to help write the 2014 hunt. 80 people either wrote something, testsolved something, and/or showed up on hunt weekend.
- There was a core of 30-40 people who were active all year: making stuff, editing stuff, testing stuff.
- Back in 2004, we'd experienced that attrition; also we'd been warned to look out for it by the Manic Sages. A lot of people, emerging from the hunt in January think "That was fun, I'm gonna write eight puzzles! But in February, they've figured out "This is hard! Well, see ya next January."
- Q: (Wei-Hwa Huang) It seemed like this hunt tried to
reverse the recent Mystery Hunt more-more-more-puzzles escalation.
It felt like instead of pushing the envelope of quantity and wackiness,
this hunt went for solid robustness. Was that a conscious choice?
- Our goal was to make a hunt that was fun, not frustrating.
- For this, we relied on testsolvers: if they didn't like a puzzle, it had to change. So an idea so wacky that testsolvers couldn't get a toehold would change.
- Q: (Linda Holman) Did anyone help write this hunt that wasn't
part of the 2013 winning team?
- It was all people from the winning team. You earn your right to run the game by winning the previous year's game.
- [aw dang. I don't like the sit-and-solve hunts so much, but I do enjoy volunteering for them.]
- (beardy Manic Sage MIT Mystery Hunter who I think maybe said his name once but now I've forgotten) Manic Sages let some folks help out who weren't part of of the winning team—but only if they were "team regulars" who just happened to miss that year.
