Jotting Notes on John Owens' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Metas I Have Known"

Jotting down some notes from John Owens' talk about Metapuzzles at GC Summit 2010. I sometimes think that people think too much about metapuzzles... but on the other hand, just last week I was helping someone to brainstorm a mini-hunt, at the very beginning trying to figure out how to get started with no idea what puzzle to pick, I asked: well, is there some final answer that all of this is leading up to?... Because if we have that, we can sorta work backwards to the rest. Oh wait, I'm supposed to be jotting notes about Owens' lecture, not about my conversations and/or possibly spoiling a mini-hunt. On to Owens' lecture...

• It goes back to at least the 1981 MIT Mystery Hunt: answer twelve questions, put together the twelve answers, they tell you where to go.
• OK, so let's define terms. What's a metapuzzle?
  • metapuzzle combines stuff you've seen earlier
  • it's not enough that it wraps up the story: it's gotta be a puzzle
• Pure meta: you just need answers from previous puzzles; contrast w/
• Environmental meta: you need additional info
• Some conference room game examples
  • Pure Meta example from 2002 Mystery Hunt "Monopoly", Dark Blue hotel puzzle. [When I look at the MIT website, I only see 4 sub-puzzles leading into that meta, which uses six words. I guess the other two are around somewhere, but by golly that was a big hunt; I'll never find them... oh wait, here's one of them; not sure how it was clear to the players that it went with the others, but whatever.]
  • Another "Pure" example: Mystery Hunt 2006 "Spies" hunt had several metas, including one from the Buenos Aires puzzles. It turned out that each answer word in that round of puzzles had an interesting property. So again, it's a list of words that leads to an answer.
  • Environmental meta example: vatican meta from MIT '04: you took the answers from previous puzzles and plugged them into a "stained glass" diagram.
  • A great example: the "las vegas brochure" from Microsoft Puzzlehunt 8, "the hard way". Brochure of puzzles, each puzzle w/part of instructions on how to fold, spindle, and mutilate the brochure to reveal a message. [Yeah, that was awesome]
• Mystery Hunts vs. The Game:
  • Mystery Hunt: you have all the puzzles. So you might solve half of them, then try to plug their answers into the meta.
  • The Game: you get one puzzle at a time. You might not see the meta until the end.
• More design considerations
  • Explicit vs Implicit metas: When you "receive" the meta puzzle, do you know it's a meta?
  • If players shouldn't toss out info as they figure it out, do you warn them?
  • Is the meta optional?
  • Can you solve it "along the way" or do you need to wait until the end? Can you crank on it a little "along the way" even if you can't totally solve it, just enough to keep you busy in the van?
  • What does it solve to? The finish line?
  • What if GC skipped you over a clue? How do you get the info you need
• Some Bay Area Game examples
  • Example: The BATH 3 double-meta—only one team gets to solve the second layer. Also, because there's all this info running around for the second layer, it's tougher to solve the first layer because there's so much "noise".
  • Example: Coed Astronomy's SF Game Meta didn't just re-use hunt'ss answers, but also re-used processes. That was new and cool. [Yeah!]
  • Example: First Game Owens ever played: ISETV in LA. Along the way, you pick up a diary that mentions a device, and later on along the way you pick up pieces of the device. By the time you reach the end, you have put this thing together and it plays a message telling you where to go for the end of the game. Really well done.
  • Example: The 420 Game on a matrix theme gave you strips of a math matrix. There was a "crank to turn" during the game: decoding these strips. But you couldn't jump to the end w/partial information: you needed the numbers from all the strips or you couldn't solve the matrix.
  • Example: The Genome Game They gathered cards as they went, each showing a "nucleotide". But not until the last site did they get some info they needed: which column was A, which was T, which G, which C.
    • Muttering from the audience: you know, there's a standard ordering of ATGC, and if you tried to solve it that way it didn't work...
    • Yeah, but we only made one team cry over that.
  • Example: The Jackpot Game had an optional meta. You got a card at each site. At the end, there was something to do with the cards, but you didn't have to. Except, by frenzied gamer logic, there's no such thing as an "optional" activity. [John Owens gives a little more detail about this meta in his Jackpot game writeup]
  • Example: Espionage Game. You pick up some triangles along the way, along with some rules for turning triangles into letters. Then you get a big board on which you can plug in the trianges—then recognize that this is a map of your route, with the triangles showing bridge crossings, take them in order to spell out message.
• Interesting thing to try: MIT Mystery Hunt has multiple metas. Bay Area Game doesn't really do that. But it could. [Hmm, yeah. Zorg and Ghost Patrol had several run-arounds. Each of them could have been a meta. For Zorg, didn't we pick up some alphabet blocks at each UC Berkeley location, then put them together somehow? Did the blocks relate at all to the puzzles we were solving along the way?]
• An MIT-style meta-meta might be too much to cram into a bay area game. Interesting to consider, tho.
• Question time!
• Brent Holman: Do you like metas? If a game doesn't have a meta, are you sad? Some teams get frustrated by a tough meta after 36 hours of solving.
  • Yeah, I like it. It's I feel like I'm building up to something. It's a nice thing for a designer to think about.
  • Dan Egnor: To avoid the exhaustion-after-36-hours, maybe try to make your meta more fun and not-so-difficult.
  • Yeah. You know, if I were doing Genome again, I'd make it easier. Yeah, that's an important thing to learn.
• Linda Holman: you know, in the Amazing Race, they kinda have metas. Like, put the flags of the countries you visited in proper order. Or list every animal you encountered in order.
  • That might fail the easy-fun test, though. It's hard on a team at the end of this multi-day race when they do poorly on that.
  • Rich Bragg: If you're gonna pull something like that on teams, make it clear to them that they'd better keep track of stuff. It's easy to lose things in the van.
  • Yeah, and if it's something to collect, maybe make it easy to carry.
• Wei-Hwa Huang: The Hogwarts Ending: was that a meta, or just an activity?
  • I guess that was an activity. It wasn't a meta: it didn't take answers from lots of the puzzles you'd had along the way. It was just this one thing you learned.
  • Brent: It was kind of an epilog. It wasn't a puzzle, exactly, but it was an important piece of the story's plot.
  • Yeah, not all games need metas. That was the perfect way to end that game, given the theme.
• Ian Tullis [kinda hard to hear what he's saying]: I love metas! In the past few decathlons, there have been some multi-part puzzles. And so that multi-part puzzle kinda has a meta. But there hasn't been a whole-game meta.

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Jotting Notes on Dan Egnor's 2010 GC Summit Talk "Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation+Solving"

Jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Dan Egnor on Computer Tools for Puzzle Creation and Solving. When I saw the talk live, I didn't follow it all, and got distracted from the most useful stuff by the stuff that I understood. So here's a chance to slow down and pay more attention.

• Screen Grab from Midnight Madness: the team who cheated by using a computer that could figure out all the answers.
• There's not gonna be any brilliant concepts; we're gonna read a laundry list
• Text Search Tools
  • Tea: only runs on Windows
  • OneLook: Not just a dictionary; you can also search its definitions. E.g., words whose definitions mention "patio". (Egnor says we probably already knew about OneLook but I didn't.)
    • (Doesn&apos't mention wordnet a handy thesaurus/related-word-finder. Available as a command-line tool. Now that I see OneLook, I bet OneLook is better for puzzling. But wordnet might be a fallback when teh internets is not available.)
  • Didn't talk about anagrammers in talk, but they're on a slide: Internet Anagram Server is good for Anagram and there's Anagram Genius, some Windows software. But Nutrimatic does anagrams just fine...
  • Nutrimatic [the thing I should have got out of this talk when I saw it live, but didn't] Nutrimatic searches for useful words and phrases. But instead of some silly dictionary, it searches Wikipedia, and it ranks its answers by how much they appear in Wikipedia, so you'll see gummi bears before garibaldi biscuits; roughly a good ordering for finding answer-worthy phrases.
    • Example is Triple Sec, a complicated puzzle.
    • Nutrimatic can help you solve it, but you need to mention some weird characters to tell it to restrict to 18 characters. [Well, they're not that weird, but when I heard "ampersand underscore curly brace 18 close curly brace", I assumed that nutrimatic was going to have a steep learning curve, and I set it aside to learn later.]
    • [But I shouldn't have set it aside! You can get good info out of nutrimatic without learning all that weird punctuation. And once you know that, you can learn to narrow things down with weird punctuation later.]
    • [Also, goes well with writing your own tools.]
  • Metatron: a meta-solver written by some MIT hunt nerds. No longer available at the address mentioned in the talk, so I didn't get a chance to try it out just now.
  • grep, python, rolling your own programs. Very versatile, yay! Assuming you know how to program. Also, you need a good wordlist.
    • collection of wordlists
    • wikipedia dumps [unavailable due to zorched hardware as I write this, but usually works OK] The list of article titles is useful. [He doesn't mention it here, but nutrimatic lets you search wikipedia and gives you answers ranked by popularity, kinda. Which is darned useful, because a lot of wikipedia article titles are typos and/or stupid. The more you get into these big wordlists, the more you want a way to sort them by relevance.]
    • http://subtlexus.lexique.org/ Word frequencies as measured from film subtitles.
    • Google's Lists of N-Grams from the Web Big list of N-grams (e.g., 3 words that appear together are a trigram), with text read from all over teh internets. Have you ever wondered which phrase is more common "ceramics collection is" or "ceramics collection of"? Wonder no longer:

      ceramics collection is	68
      ceramics collection of	76
      ceramics collection |	59

      This data comes on 6 DVDs. I.e., you're probably going to have to massage it a bit just to get it into a form that you want to scan.
• Cipher Solving Tools
  • Rumkin.com Cipher Tools
  • DialABC specializes in phone stuff making words w/keypad letters, DTMF, ...
  • SCBSolvr, the Secret Code Breaker Monoalphabetic Cipher Solver Program. Windows only, unfortunately. Not much UI. [So even if you independently figure out that Z is X, you can't use that knowledge to help it] OTOH, it solved this impossible-looking cryptogram from the Paparazzi game—which theoretically, teams should have needed more info for.
• Crossword Puzzle Tools
  • OneAcross which can search through a big database of crossword answers and clues.
  • Crossword Compiler for making crossword puzzles; Windows-only. [Ian Tullis recommended this too. I tried and failed to get it running under Linux via Wine.]
• Logic/Constraint Puzzles
  • Sudoku solvers abound!
  • And for some other puzzles... uhm, there's some not-great stuff.
  • Burninators' library of handy solver code
  • Learn about dancing links to solve constraint puzzles
• Logic/Constraint Puzzles
  • Shazam music recognizer. If you wondered why that Shinteki puzzle used just a few seconds of each song, I bet this app is it.
  • Puzzle Pal, Chiu-Ki's solving helper phone app. [aka, about 30% of the reason I want an Android phone]
• Miscellany
  • TinEye searches teh internets for images. So if you upload an image of some strange critter that GC used in a puzzle, Tineye will tell you that GC snagged that photo from the Wikipedia article for "meerkat", and maybe you thus just found out what that critter is.
  • Burr Tools tools for making 3-D puzzles. Might also help for manipulating some 2-D griddish puzzles a la assemble these tetrominos into a rectangle.
• The world ain't perfect yet: still could use a polyalphabetic/non-unique cipher solver. Solvers for non-Sudoku constraint puzzles. Better ways to deal with images in puzzles, e.g., an "alphabet" of images.
• Question Time!
• Brent Holman asks: Will you join my team?
  • Nice try
• Ian Tullis says he's been thinking of writing a cryptogram that solves to "GOOD JOB COMPUTER USER, THE ANSWER IS..." (I can't tell what he says here) Anyhow, GC has to be aware of these tools. That solve in the Paparazzi game was an eye-opener: the cipher had no spaces; that's supposed to be really hard.
  • [From Egnor's answer, I guess that Ian suggested a cryptogram that automatically solves to something—but if you the team does it the "right" way they get another message.]

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Thinking about Puzzle Hunt Answer Systems, Unlock Codes

The goal of the Universal Longshots Scoring System is: A team's score should consider hints and time spent on puzzles; it should not consider the time between puzzles. You can agree or diagree that this is a worthy goal. But for now, suppose it's your goal.

In practice, this means that you need to know how long the team took to finish. If you've got a fancy-pants online answering system, you know when the team entered the answer. But you might not know when the team started.

You could have teams use the fancy-pants answering system to note when they started on the puzzle. That's what Shinteki does. Teams enter a "start code". Shinteki doesn't use the Universal Longshots Scoring System, but if they did, there would be a problem. Suppose a team messes up while entering their start code but, in puzzling frenzy, didn't notice. They solve the puzzle, go to enter the answer, and only then notice that they never officially started the puzzle. They can enter the start code now, and then answer the puzzle. The scoring system might think they took less than a minute on the puzzle. OK, you think, we can solve this "by hand". We just need the team to report what time they started on the puzzle. But that same frenzy that made them screw up the start code probably means they didn't think to write down their start time anywhere. (This isn't a problem in Shinteki because, again, Shinteki doesn't use the Universal Longshots Scoring System. If a team messes up their start code, they hurt only themselves; quick solving times don't boost their Shinteki score; if they don't enter the start code, they miss useful free hints.)

BANG25 and DASH2 had GC volunteers enter start times for the teams. A team runs up, says "We are the Anagram Cyclones". A GC volunteer notes that the Anagram Cyclones started on the Hoozit puzzle at 3:45. That worked pretty well! And yet, I find myself trying to refine this. This system puts pressure on the GC volunteer. I've been in this conversation a few times:

ME: Howdy! Welcome to the puzzle site. You're team "Yellow Snow", right?

    (scribbles on clipboard)

THEM: Actually, we're team "Snow Job".

ME: Oh, uh, hang on.

    (stops scribbling, starts erasing)

I want a system that's easier for the GC volunteer, makes teams do more of the work... but that system should "notice" when a team has messed up. Here's a protocol that might work:

1. Team presses a button on fancy-pants answering system to signal that they're starting a puzzle. (This can just be a button. It doesn't have to be an unguessable word a la Shinteki; teams don't want to start early.)
2. Pressing that button displays a screen that legibly makes it clear that the team has started the puzzle.
   Puzzle: Hoozit Conundrum

   Enter your answer:

3. GC volunteer hands over puzzle to team, but only if team shows that screen.

Some teams don't have smartphones and can't use fancy-pants answering systems. So GC volunteers would still need a way to enter start/stop times for the low-tech teams. But most teams have smartphones, so that takes a lot of pressure off the volunteer.

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Jotting Notes on Scott Blomquist's 2010 GC Summit Talk: Confidence and Acceleration in Puzzle Theory

I'm jotting notes about another Game Control Summit 2010 talk: Scott Blomquist talks about Puzzle Theory, conceptual thinking about puzzle design. (Yeah, he talked about puzzle theory in 2009, too.)

• We do Information Reduction Puzzles. We get this mysterious pile of information. We want to reduce it to a secret message.
• Today we're talking about confidence and acceleration
  • Confidence How much you trust some piece of the puzzle that you maybe-figured out. "I kinda think that 37 across is THUNDER LIZARD but maybe not because that conflicts with 22 down being POSSE."
  • Acceleration You can go faster as facts reinforce each other. That last square on the Sudoku's the fastest to fill in.
• Not that we tend to finish filling in our grids. I don't need the whole crossword, just those ten circled letters—well, really, nine of them and figure out the tenth.
• If players need to extract some fact from one layer of a puzzle to get to the next (or to finish) make darned sure they can be confident of that information. Negative example of a crossword in which two "weird" words cross.
  • Maybe have more than one way to get at that fact.
  • Maybe let them get to the next layer with not-quite-all the facts from this layer.
• Shout-outs to folks who think like puzzle theorists and write/talk cogently:
  • Ian Tullis for his talk from earlier in the evening
  • Eric Prestemon for his Solving Really Hard Puzzles blog (with frequent guest star Jonathan McCue)
  • Foggy Brume of P&A Magazine posted some "Puzzle Standards": things you can do for a puzzle to make players think without frustrating them.
    • Foggy Brume's Puzzle Standards Part 1: Don't ask players to ID more than 20 pictures; it's hard. If your puzzle leads to a clue (e.g. "Child or Roberts") instead of a word, make sure it's darned specific; don't be coy. Check your answers (in the sense of how a crossword's across answers "check" the downs they touch); give confidence. Make the puzzle fit the answer; theme.
    • Foggy Brume's Puzzle Standards Part 2: Keep flavortext simple; less red herrings, please. Give solvers blanks or a grid to fill in; don't be so mysterious, give players a clearer goal. Don't just keep writing Identify-Sort-Index-Solve puzzles; Foggy's so sick of these mystery hunt staples that he coined the ISIS acronym. Play through the puzzle, even though you know the answer; think about "usability", the mechanical experience of solving the puzzle. Ordering: if it's not important, order the clues anyhow, if only to indicate that ordering isn't important; "Oh, they're in alphabetical order, so there's no information in the order".
    • Foggy Brume's Puzzle Standards Part 3 Don't confuse obscurity with difficulty; kids have teh internets now. Too few "a-ha"s is bad, so is too many; it's like Ian's wow factor. Give your solver a starting point; as the Anonymice would put it, give them a crank to turn.
• Q&A!
• Brent Holman asks: Scott, what puzzle design have you done lately?
  • Tinkering with some software to aid crossword construction, but it ain't close to ready yet. Keep your eye on Puzzlepro
• Alexandra asked: where should we talk about this?
  • How about forum.puzzalot.com?
  • Brent: People don't tend to talk about puzzles except for right after a game.
  • Scott: getting the critical mass for a conversation in some virtual space. You can talk about this stuff over pizza and beer after the game, and pretty much say what you wanted to say.
  • Scott: And there is some conversation, albeit not so much in a forum. Like there's some freak puzzlehunt bloggers.
  • Sean Gugler: I don't tend to go looking for that stuff.
  • Scott Royer: maybe we could set up an aggregator feed.
  • Scott: Or a hashtag. Man searching for puzzle stuff online is hard because there's all those get-rich-quick poorly slapped-together "free sudoku game" sites.
• Corey askes: Do you have a collection of puzzles that have been theoretically decomposed?
  • There have been maybe three or four puzzles. Check out the Puzzle Theory Google Group.
  • In general, not good collections of old bay area puzzles; let alone decompositions thereof. Some of the old web sites have fallen off of the internets. Joe DeV (et alia?) put together a great list of MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles. There's a good collection of MS Puzzle Hunt puzzles, but it's behind the MS firewall.
• Sean Gugler points out: maybe some of these case studies could be possible points of discussion in a forum.

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Jotting Notes on Debbie Goldstein's 2010 GC Summit Talk "DASH 1: One Game, Eight Cities"

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
• 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.]

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Ghost Patrol BA'NG: some photos and a line chart

I posted some notes about Ghost Patrol BA'NG, mostly some photos from one of the puzzle-construction parties. I attended two puzzle-construction parties. (But during the second one, I didn't work much. Instead, I spent half my time "supervising" Jesse as he set up a Subversion depot.) As you might guess, this group was a fun one to work with. You might look at these photos and think "Oh man, they spent hours crumpling up little pieces of paper," but there was a lot of joking and laughing going on, too.

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Question for GCs: Observing Playtesters

The latest episode of Snoutcast is about location scouting for games. But my brain got ahold of one little twist in the conversation, and then drifted off to a little incident and then... Like, when they talk about the things that GC likes might not be what the players like, and how players are all different. So then I think, since we're all different, how can we even tell what we... Ahem, sorry, I'm rambling.

OK, here's questions for you experienced GC folks to pontificate on in some upcoming LJ post/Podcast/screed/Soapbox oratory: How do you observe playtesters? How do you second-gues interpret their feedback? What have you learned to look for?

Wow, that question (or, rather, set of questions) is pretty wide open. Sorry about that.

It's kind of a touchy subject to talk about. You don't want to say anything bad about playtesters—they are awesome for volunteering to playtest. They're trusting you to watch them when they're, uhm, exposing their fallibility: there's this puzzle that nobody sure if it's possible to solve, and they're taking the chance that you'll be watching them fail to solve it. It makes it kind of hard to talk about interpreting playtester feeback. "We decided to ignore that remark because that guy was basically a loser." Ha ha! I exaggerate. I've been lucky with playtesters so far: they've been smart; they've delivered criticism without getting whiny or stab-by. I don't want to say mean things about them because they don't deserve to have mean things said about them. They've been great! I guess I can fall back on anonymity. And now that I think about stories, I don't think they say mean things about the playtesters. Or about GC. One of these stories is about GC.

(If any of these stories seem to be saying mean things, that means that I'm telling them wrong. I just double-checked; in all of these stories, people were acting reasonably.)

Anyhow, here's some things on my mind which prompted the question...

OK, here's a story where I didn't know what to do with playtester feedback. This was in the 2-Tone playtests. A team had struggled with one puzzle for a long time. The 2-Tone puzzles are of, uhm, varying a-ha-ness. A couple of them flow kinda like you'd expect. A couple of them... uhm, you have to figure out a couple of things before you even get onto the right track. Oh man, sorry about that. So they struggled for a long time. And one of the players seemed, y'know, kind of pissed off about it.

At the end of the day, I asked "So, I gave you more puzzles today than I actually want to use in the final. Which two puzzles should I cut?" I thought for sure that puzzle would be on the chopping block. But it wasn't. Instead it was... one of the favorites?!? The thing was, when that team solved that puzzle, they felt great triumph. Like a mother forgetting the pain of childbirth, this guy had forgotten the agony of the struggle.

So what do you do with feedback like that? Try and smooth out the middle of the puzzle, I guess. But try to leave the ending alone.

What if you can't watch the players? What if they're remote playtesters who are just emailing you? What kind of feedback do you want?

I'm playtesting the Ghost Patrol bang, delivering feedback by email. I'm guessing at what kind of feedback would be useful, going by the kinds of notes that I take when I'm watching playtesters. The various approaches taken, time spent on them. But of course my notes to myself... make no sense to anyone but myself. So I tried a Prestemonic Presentation, by which I mean I copped the style of Prestemon's excellent Solving Really Hard Puzzles Blog.

My notes to myself are terse, and these notes are like that. And most time is spent on false trails, of course. That's how it goes, right? And then I notice that I send off one of my reports and the reply from GC sounds concerned: Oh, we should have warned you, that puzzle's really hard... I think that they thought I was genuinely upset.

You know how people say that email is a bad medium for collaboration? It tends to devolve into flame wars? Because you can't see the other person. So that quirk of word choice seems like they're totally unreasonable and upset. And you have to keep reminding yourself that they're probably nice. And I look back on my emails, and they're pretty easy to interpret as flame-ish. Oh man, this guy is cataloging every possible false step along the way! It's like a litany of things going wrong! From such emails, flame wars can erupt. (It didn't happen in this case. But I wonder how I could have made that email, uhm, better... how to convey "This turned out to be a false lead, but I didn't, you know, resent it or anything.")

I don't know how to convey upsetness-level in an email report. I'm not sure if I (or any playtester) can even self-diagnose upsetness-level. At the time you're solving the puzzle, you're in the frenzy. If you get stuck, then you say "I was angry! That frenzy was the frenzy of anger!" If you solve the puzzle, you say "I was thrilled! That frenzy was the thrill-frenzy! Don't change a thing!"

So... what do folks like to see in an email report?

Something that makes me sad: a puzzle gets some "this oughta change" feedback in playtesting, but then GC doesn't change it. There seems to be some correlation between that and a puzzle's owner not being there to watch the playtest. It's a very compelling experience to watch a team struggle with your puzzle. They're struggling with a puzzle; they probably remind you of those times when your team struggled with a puzzle. When they fail (and they sometimes will fail; that's why you playtest), it breaks your heart.

If your a puzzle owner, I'm guessing that the watch-the-playtesters experience is much more powerful than the get-a-report-later experience. If you get an email report from someone else on GC: Hey they playtesters had a lot of trouble with your puzzle. Do you think we can so something to guide folks through the chainsaw reassembly step? It's so abstract. You didn't watch those playtesters struggle. It's so easy to think Oh I'm sure it wasn't that bad.

Suppose you're one of the GC folks who observed a playtest, and you have to convey some serious feedback to a puzzle owner who wasn't there. How do you convey the... well, the upset-ness levels? This part could change; the players seemed kinda grumpy about it. But this part really has to change.

For the 2-Tone game, for the first few rounds of playtesting, I changed anything that a playtester seemed grumpy about. For the last couple of rounds of playtesting, I changed smaller things, or tried changes thinking "depending on how this goes, I might need to change it back." I didn't want to make big changes after the last playtest: better a known kinda-broken puzzle than a we-don't-know-how-broken-it-is puzzle.

Probably some of those changes weren't necessary; but I don't know which ones. I'd just set up this policy in my head: if somebody says anything about changing some thingy, then that thingy changes. If I were good at second-guessing playtesters, maybe I'd know which pieces of feedback were genuine and which were just that... somebody needed a hug. But I'm not good at it, so I just made changes.

It helps if you know them. For the 2-Tone playtests, I had a much easier time "reading" Team Longshots than I had reading AC Durand. But I'd solved puzzles (and failed to solve puzzles) with two Longshots already. I'd seen them in times of adversity, in times of triumph. I had some idea of what facial expressions to look for. (But then, I was watching them. Suppose that they were remote-solving and sent me email. Would I have known what to do with their feedback?)

Maybe I should talk to somebody who runs marketing focus groups, I dunno.

OK, that was all over the map and in a bewildering set of font styles. If any part of that inspires you to start delivering wisdom, go for it.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Bvrlingame

Behold, it is a handful of photos from BANG23. You notice how I'm carefully staying ambiguous about whether there's a full writeup coming anytime soon? Let's see how long it takes me to finish writing up the Yellowstone trip before I make any rash promises.

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Jotting Notes on Ian Tullis' 2010 GC Summit Talk "Reflections on Puzzling"

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.
  • An amazing feat of construction!!
  • But maybe it's not much fun to solve. There are some lame words in there.
• 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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Book Report: This is not a Game

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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Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality

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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"And they look at the puzzle and they say 'Oh that's so hard; I could never do that'"

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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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Justin Herman Plaza and SoMa

The Shinteki folks say that they're not keeping Decathlon 6 under wraps anymore, so now I can reveal more photos on the Mystic Fish vs Decathlon 6 page, along with a couple of photos from the Shinteki Scramble. (I worried that I'd accidentally revealed the photo of the giant heads too early; I was walking downtown with my parents and they pointed out the heads. But they weren't pointing them out as a game thing. They were just pointing them out as noteworthy giant heads.)

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Link: Snoutcast

If you're wondering What is this mysterious "conversation" for which Larry felt he needed to come up with "talking points" ahead of time? the truth can now be revealed: it was a Snoutcast interview. Go listen! As evidence of the Snouts' superior interview skillz, you'll notice that they expertly steered me away from my incoherent thoughts about Good Housekeeping magazine's tiki party how-to and towards the 2 Tone Game.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Hypothetical Magazine Articles

This afternoon, I talked with a couple of people about puzzly treasure-hunt game thingies. Now this conversation was kind of important, so I'd planned for it. I'd sketched out some talking points. Now you're thinking That sounds sinister—"talking points." Larry has a hidden agenda. I guess it would be sinister if I had stuck to those talking points. But instead, I followed the flow of the conversation and didn't think to mention any of the stuff I'd been thinking about aside from a tangled breathless rush at the end. We sneer at politicians who stay "on message", totally ignoring questions. But we should respect that skill—ignoring questions ain't easy. We should respect that skill, but perhaps not admire it.

But I have these things on my mind, and since I failed to shoehorn them into that conversation, I suppose I'll blog them here.

A while back I was reading something in some blog tangentially-related to our puzzle-hunt games—some ARGer or some transmedia specialist, something like that. And they were saying our work [ARG or transmedia] defies categorization. And that sounds cool, but actually it's not so much.

There's a whole industry around making movies. If you make a movie, perhaps many many people will see it. There are established theaters in cities, where people gather to see movies. There are agreed-upon standards for movie advertising posters, companies who distribute movies. Because you work in an established category, people know how to help you. It also helps your customers. Not only can they find your product easily, but they also have some idea what to expect. If someone asks you "Do you want to see a movie?" you know that you'll have time to grab some dinner beforehand, sit and watch a performance for a couple of hours, then go home.

You know, I tried to buy some Google search ads for the 2-Tone Game. The way that works, you choose some terms that you think people will search for and then provide an ad to show. So what search terms did I want? [puzzle game], maybe? But people searching for that probably are looking for Bejewelled. Aside from puzzlehunters, nobody knows to look for the 2-Tone Game, because nobody knows about this category of event.

If someone asks you "Do you want to participate in this uncategorizable thingy?" you don't really know what you're getting into. So... after this "Bay Area Night Game", will there be time for dinner? What should I bring? And the Bay Area Night Game is well enough established that I think... I think I'd know what to tell a player. It's a category now. There's a template, you can describe it. To a player.

But I've been thinking about the DIY nature of this puzzly treasure-hunt activity. That's what I first loved about it, that's what I still love about it. And the thing is—we have all this information out there for players but the instructions for GC are still pretty sparse.

What is the "template" for GC'ing a game? What are the steps? There's more to say to GC than there is to a player. It's easier to tell someone how to watch a movie than how to make a movie. It's easier to tell someone "It's a party, bring something to drink," than to tell someone how to host a party.

So that's when it struck me—there are those magazine articles on how to host parties. Like, I guess they're in magazines like Good Housekeeping. You know, with titles like "How to Host a Tiki-themed Party" all with sentences like "A pineapple makes for a festive centerpiece." Like, we could have an article like that on how to host a BANG. And you're thinking "Wait, there's no way an article could capture all that. There's creativity in running a game." But of course, there's creativity in hosting a great party. Like, you put the pineapple in the center of the table and you realize That is not a festive centerpiece; I need to figure out some stuff to add, and then add that stuff, pronto.

So if the "How to host a BANG" article just said "Traditionally, there is a Morse puzzle, a Braille puzzle, a Semaphore puzzle, and a Binary puzzle, put you can make up any kind you like."

So this article would do a so-so job at explaining how to run one of these events. But the article's existence would throw some interesting subtext at the reader: there is this thing called a BANG. It is a category of event. And you might want to host one. And if you hosted one, your guests might enjoy it. If you read an article about how to host a tiki party, you probably have some ideas about whether hosting a tiki party would go over well with your peer group.

So where am I going with this train of thought? A plan to subvert the households of America by planting a "How to host a puzzlehunt" article in Good Housekeeping?!? To spread Game culture with a magazine article? Wow, once I write it out like that, it seems like a terrible idea. Maybe it's just as well I failed to steer that conversation this afternoon. Anyhow, that's where my head's been at lately, Game-wise.

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Paranoia is Everywhere You See It, even just South of Market

When Debbie talked about why she wasn't that enthused about continuing with the Games of Nonchalance, she described her experience as "creepy". And there's plenty of creepiness going on. A few weeks back, I played in a live event for the game. The backstory involved two secret societies in conflict. The players had found a contact with one society. But it gets creepy: during the course of that event, the players found a video left behind by the other secret society. This video was a sort of annotated surveillance of stuff we'd done earlier in the day. Creepy.

Last week, I was on my way home from work and walked past one of the sites from that game. And there was a car there with a couple of guys in there. They were shooting video of the site. So here's where the paranoia kicks in.

• Is there really a secret society surveilling that spot? (no wait, that's crazy)
• Are these folks from game control getting some extra footage of that spot that they can use to put together a future creepy video? (maybe, but seems unlikely)
• Are these just a couple of art students trying to get some video footage of that spot? (maybe, but seems unlikely; the spot's not so interesting)

I snapped some photos of the video-takers. They're probably just innocent art students. But I guess if I recognize them at future nonchalant events, I'll know to be on my toes.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, albeit one less place

Corby sent me mail yesterday: some of the environmental data for the 2-Tone Game went away. I was already planning to take today as a vacation day, so now I had a morning activity. Confirm that the data was gone (yep) and then tweak that puzzle to work around. Things change, cities change. But the the 2-Tone Game adapts and survives. And now players won't have to walk as far.

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Puzzle Hunts^W^W LARPs are Everywhere, Even the Transbay Terminal

Girts noticed something Nonchalant-Game-ish to do this evening in San Francisco. There was a nicely-done stroll. (It was fun! I'm glad I went! I still don't want to do Nonchalant-ish things that don't have strong direction. But by golly, when you do one of their events in the correct order, you really appreciate their design and their production values!) We got through that. And then there was something else: Girts got an SMS saying that something was going on at a nearby bus station. And there we found out that the Games of Nonchalance also have a LARP-y aspect: a figure in black kowtowing to a strange diagram. In the evening's activities, we'd learned some backstory: two groups in conflict. We were "earning" our application to join one group. This mysterious figure in black was no doubt from the other group. He hopped on a bicycle and rode away. Girts and I could have tried to stop him, but we didn't.

LARPers are, I guess, into the role-playing elements. I say that because when we talked to some of our fellow players afterwards—well, one of them chased after the mysterious black-clad bicyclist. Another one wanted to catch the bicyclist and wrestle answers out of him. Chasing. Wrestling.

I remembered helping a man with a broken ankle, helping carry him to a bench where he could sit down. He broke his ankle chasing a "henchman", just running around in a park. I remembered the catch in DeeAnn's voice, as she talked about this. DeeAnn of that game's Game Control, someone who cared deeply about her players' safety. It sounded like she wanted to cry when she talked later about that guy and his ankle.

These kids, running around, talking about wresting non-player characters... I hope these kids remember that we can be fragile. I doubt I want to be running beside them if they forget. I've collided with gamists before; it wasn't fun.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, and yet you can be in the wrong place

Yesterday after work, I stood on a painted rectangle of sidewalk for about 45 minutes. I did this for what turned out to be no good reason. I thought that somebody was going to call me on a payphone. That didn't happen. I thought I was following some instructions from the Games of Nonchalance. But I wasn't really. I'd found a partial set of instructions, thought I'd found the whole thing. And thus I stood out on this patch of sidewalk in the Mission for the better part of an hour, waiting for a phone call from a member of Godot's equivalence class. This wasn't awful. It was an interesting corner. Neighborhood kids played with water guns, using me as cover. That was kind of fun. But overall, I was disappointed. I'd shlepped out to the Mission and waited around for nothing.

The silver lining: it was just me. On Sunday, I'd dragged Peter Tang around a few blocks of the Mission for about an hour. I thought we were following some trickily drawn clues on a map of the neighborhood. But actually, we were "solving" things in the wrong order. We were supposed to pick up something before we tried to navigate the map. Instead, we tried to follow a map that made no sense. How were we supposed to know the proper order to tackle these puzzles?

Standing still on that patch of sidewalk, I moved past some threshhold of distrust for the GC of the Games of Nonchalance. I was no longer eager to "explore" their world. (Don't worry, Girts; I'll still tag along on Monday.) If it was pretty obvious that going someplace would lead to something fun, then great. But if it wasn't clear, don't risk it. Maybe it's just another out-of-order half-clue that would leave me stranded.

I had plenty of time to think. I thought back a few years to when I was working in the video game industry, working on "New Legends". This was a 3-D game, you play a martial artist who runs around and beats up bad guys. But there were other things you had to do: disable gun turrets; push buttons to lower gantries, shut down force fields... Try to cross the bridge without disabling the gun turret first, and you'd get blown away. How is the player supposed to know the proper order in which to do things? The game had to "break the fourth wall": Pop up a list of objectives, show it as UI. Maybe the player can succeed if they carry out these tasks out of order. But if they carry them out in the order shown, they're guaranteed not to get stuck.

It's surprising how much direction you need to give the players. Do you wonder why, in a video game, you'll see a signpost saying "This way to the castle" while your AI wingman tells you "We need to storm the castle right now" and a text message blinks constantly at the bottom of the screen "GO: CASTLE"? In the first revision of that game, they just had the spoken dialog; players got lost. In the next revision, they added the signpost; players still got lost. Blinking text finally got the point across. As a game designer, you keep thinking "If we just tell them this then they'll figure it out and we don't need to break the fourth wall." You keep thinking that.

I kinda wished that this Nonchalance game would say "Don't try to follow up on this unless you've also seen the other thingy." It would break the fourth wall. But it would also mean I wasn't standing out on this little patch of sidewalk, gradually realizing I'd been set up to fail.

I had a lot of time to think about this and thus had time to embark on some self-improvement. Because, of course, the 2-Tone Game has had a similar problem. There were a couple of puzzles where players might think they could leave a puzzle site after they snapped some photos... But then they solve the puzzle and it asks them a question about the spot they left: "IN MURAL BOOKSHELF WHO AUTHORED RED BOOK?" Oh man, I guess we have to drive all the way back to Coit Tower. Some teams liked this; more of an excuse to run around the puzzle site. I liked this: one of those puzzles was so constrained, I was darned glad to get a halfway-coherent message out of it. But some players didn't like it. They'd gathered data, gone home, done some solving. And now they found out that they were supposed to drive across town again to pick up one last piece of information. They wanted those puzzles altered.

Nonchalance sends over-enthusiastic folks like me to puzzle sites too early, before we have all the information we need. But 2-Tone Game was luring people away from puzzle sites too early, before they have all the information they need. Flip sides of the same problem.

So anyhow, tonight I tweaked those 2-Tone puzzles, adding some text to them: "When you've figured this out, it will tell you to find something else around here." Instead of re-designing those puzzles, just break the fourth wall, warn the players what's going on. I'm a technical writer; I write documentation. You think I would have thought of that solution without having to stand on a patch of sidewalk for 45 minutes, but maybe I'm a little slow.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Prelinger Library

So I finally visited the Prelinger Library, after having heard about it for months. The front door was locked. I wasn't expecting that. But it made sense: the Prelinger Library shares space with other places. A dance studio. A room full of copying machines? They probably don't want just anyone wandering around in there. But when I called up on the intercom, Freya the librarian buzzed me in.

When I walked into the library proper, I glanced sideways for a catalog, but Freya was talking to me about the collection, handing me a pamphlet. I was happy to receive a pamphlet about a library that specialized in ephemera. But I was here on a mission: continuing on the Games of Nonchalance. I told Freya the name of the work I was interested in, and she knew just where that was. And so I sat and flipped through false ephemera for a while.

I looked up: Freya was back, saying something about sharing. Freya was talking to Heather. You remember Heather, Heather of "Girts and Heather", intrepid 2-tone playtesters, the couple I'd played the first episode of these Nonchalance Games with. I'd played the episodes out of order, but apparently I was now catching up with Heather nonetheless.

Heather and I chatted a little about the game. We all had more fun with the 3rd episode than the 2nd. Maybe because we'd all tried to do the pieces of the 2nd episode in the least-convenient order? Perhaps. Or maybe it was lack of food. Anyhow. We studied.

I glanced through the stacks as I walked towards the exit. Who reads these things? The Prelinger Collection collects things unlike what I'm used to. I believe in archives, I'm glad someone is willing to watch over this stuff. Still, it was strange; to see these old items, written with no sense that anyone would want to preserve them. I write computer documentation; my subject matter fades to oblivion; I don't read my old stuff. I doubt anyone preserves it; I do not resent its fading.

The library has a guest book. I bent over to sign, looked up at previous visitors: before me today, one visitor. Last visitors yesterday: a couple there for the Games of Nonchalance. Maybe that's a hint as to who visits this place. What will happen when the Games of Nonchalance are done, when this game's collection of false ephemera becomes true ephemera?

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even ****where (and more than usual today)

I [think I] finished off another episode of that Jejune Institute San Francisco persistent treasure-huntish ARG thingy. I guess I should call it Games of Nonchalance. Advertising posters went up recently, and they call it Games of Nonchalance. My parents spotted a poster in a pizza parlor; I noticed a couple on some Irving Street shops. The posters point at a website which is much more appealing than that of the Jejune Instiute. If you look at the Jejune Institute site, you think you're dealing with insane icky mind-control cultists. But that Games of Nonchalance site makes it clear: it's a game.

Maybe word's getting out about this game. Maybe it's the posters. Maybe it's Debbie. However it's happening, word's getting out. Today, I picked up a necessary game item at the boba shop, and the proprietress said: more people than usual are playing today. That seemed strange; it's Tuesday. Why more people than usual? I'd expect that on a weekend maybe. Who's playing? Students out for summer? Outside not-exactly-a-post-office, I saw a trio of youths reading a familiar-looking transcript, another item from the game. But they didn't seem to know about the item I'd just picked up. So there were even more folks playing today than that proprietress realized.

(Maybe I shouldn't have told that clarinet player that there was no reason to think a big wave of players was coming along.)

If you decide to try this game and are also thinking of attending that Steven Gould appearance whose announcement Curtis retweeted recently, be aware that Episode 2 of the Games of Nonchalance takes place in that neighborhood. Show up in the neighborhood a few hours early with a mobile-internet laptop and a CD player and you can make plenty of progress even if you haven't done Part 1 yet.

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Shinteki Decathlon Photos

Behold some photos from Shinteki Decathlon 6. I played last weekend, volunteered this weekend. It was pretty awesome. I got to see some places in San Francisco I hadn't visited before. Speaking of which, I have a couple more photos from playing, but they're photos that show places that will probably get used again soon, so I'm not showing those photos yet. But you'll be glad to know I got my act together enough to rescue them from my camera!

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Decaying

You remember how I wrote that Blood and Bones behaved particularly classily on a spaceship-sized climbing structure? That climbing structure is gone now, it's just a big sandpit at the bottom of some slides. Did its swivel break? It would turn around on kind of a swivel. Did kids get hurt? That thing seemed awesome, but seemed like a dangerous kind of awesome.

The Jejune game has you talk to some street people to get some objects you need for the game. In theory. I talked to a clarinetist in a subway station. He used to carry those objects around, but he stopped. People weren't asking for those objects often enough. He asked: "Oh, a girl asked me for one of those just last week; is there a wave of people starting up?" I thought Oh, wait, that's probably Heather and said nope, no wave. No reason to think that part of the game's totally broken; there are other places to get these objects; only one of them needs to work.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but the Edges are Fuzzy

On my way to Saturday's excellent Shinteki Decathlon game, I swung by a few places to take care of a few things. E.g., I stopped to take an unhurried look at that worn-down Jejune sticker I'd spotted a few days before. I'd thought that the sticker was too worn down to read, but I'd been wrong. Now that I could stop and contemplate the sticker, I saw that it was still legible. I snapped a photo, knelt down to put my camera back in my backpack.

Now, I was on my way to Shinteki, so I was decked out in my Mystic Fish outfit—silly fish hat, triclops headlamp, braided magic lasso. And I'd been taking photos of a utility box. So I wasn't that surprised when someone touched my arm and said, "And they think we're crazy?" It was this dude; mostly kempt but somewhat scruffy. I'm mostly kempt but somewhat scruffy, too, so I was inclined to listen to what he had to say.

My first thought, of course, was that this was some planted actor from the Jejune Institute game. Debbie said that she wasn't sure she wanted to keep playing the game because it got "creepy". Being touched by a stranger is creepy. Was this what she meant? Then again, this guy didn't look like an art student. And though our conversation went surreal, it wasn't surreal in a Jejune way.

"I'm going over to that Culinary Academy. I'm going to go in there and teach those kids. I know how to prepare anything. Go ahead. Ask me something. Ask me how to prepare anything."

"Uhm, like anything?"

"Well, it's got to be possible."

"Does it have to be something that I know how to make? Or can it just be, like, something I can imagine? Or..."

"Just ask me."

"OK. Uhm... OK. Right. How would you prepare a dish with durian that doesn't stink?"

"A dish with durian that doesn't stink. All right. First I'd cut the durian into slices. Then I'd soak those slices in milk for three days."

"Huh, OK, that might--"

"Then I'd dump out that milk, and I'd pour in some more milk and I'd soak 'em for another three days."

"Ha, well, OK, that could--"

"Then I'd pour that milk out and then I'd pour in some buttermilk and I'd let that soak for three days."

"Wow, that ought to--"

"And then I'd throw out the durian."

I thought that was pretty funny. The guy was fun to talk to. He had sort of a Fred "Ice" Crimi dissipated-genius vibe going on. I guess he spent a lot of time talking to strangers in bars. I don't think he was part of a game, but he was a good thing.

Sunday I walked through Chinatown past the corner where St Mary's church watches St Mary's square. There was a flurry of motion ahead of me. Through the slowly-milling tourists flashed a quick-moving trio. A mother and sun in matching t-shirts being hustled along by a man handing them an envelope. "Now this is the last clue," he said. "You'll be going up to the fourth floor." And I Jejune-ishly thought No wait, if it's Sunday you go to the third floor. but of course they weren't playing the Jejune game. They went into some tourist knick-knack building across the street from the church. Just another treasure hunt game going on in San Francisco. You can't keep track of them all. Well, I can't, apparently. Man, who were those freaks?

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The One with the Hats

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Sharing Space

After the playtest on Saturday, we walked and talked with Debbie. We talked about the Jejune Institute, which Debbie and Sunshine had played; the rest of us had not. I'd seen mention of Jejune on Cardhouse, but it didn't sound like a game; just some absurdist cacophany thing. But Debbie explained it in terms I could understand: it's a game. But it's not puzzle-y like a Bay Area Night Game. You wander around San Francisco, you spot things. It's not exactly a brain-twisting challenge, it's more like you're following directions. But it's fun. The game creators have hidden their clues in creative ways. Debbie's not sure if she wants to keep playing—the game has a story; the story gets creepy.

Sunday, after Bay to Breakers, Girts and Heather and I went in to Jejune for Induction. I knew Girts and Heather from their excellent 2-Tone Game playtesting. And soon we were wandering... we revisted some of the haunts of the Kung Fu Fright. B-b-but now we knew to look for certain features. The Kung Fu Fright was not the only weird thing going on in that neighborhood; and that neighborhood is still haunted. Girts and Heather and I finished off that "episode" of Jejune, but it was clear that there was more to do. That evening, I pored over the internets. This game had been going on for over a year. A few episodes had been released. It seemed like we were supposed to figure some things out from the internets, but... this game's been running for more than a year. A lot of this stuff has been out there for a while. I found plenty of material, but couldn't be sure which of it applied to the second episode. I found something that was obviously the start of another episode. Telegraph Hill, right next to North Beach.

Tuesday, I helped run the corporate puzzle hunt. This was the thing we'd playtested on Saturday. I packed up the remains of a puzzle, saw a bus pull up. I needed to catch that bus to make it to my next puzzle site. I ran across the street to catch the bus, ran past a utility box, saw the sticker about the mind-control rays. I recognized that sticker—I'd need a phone number off of that sticker, it was part of Jejune. But information in the city decays. That sticker was worn down. I wasn't sure about the phone number. I had to catch the bus.

Tuesday evening, I ducked out of the corporate puzzlehunt's afterparty. I tromped around Telegraph Hill. I was playing Jejune out of sequence, but: this was a good episode. Sure, I come off like a Puzzle aficionado, but I swear it's not about the puzzles for me. Okay, I like watching the way that ideas move around a van. But... I'm not into the conference room games. I like it when the Hunt brings me someplace I haven't seen. And this Telegraph Hill tromp: it brought me to some places I hadn't visited. Like, I'd traveled the general area before. I've been up and down that hill. Heck, that's where we chased Lucky for the excellent BANG XX game, right? But... but... There were places that BANG XX didn't send us. Like, these little side nook places. These places wouldn't work for a BANG: if 200 people showed up at once, it would be a trample-y mob scene. But Jejune's like the 2-Tone game: not everyone's playing at once; everyone's on their own pace. So Jejune pointed out some public art I'd overlooked; some of it planted by GC, but some of it already there. And yeah, I can see how the game's plot gets creepy, and I can see why Debbie might pull away, but... that was great, better than the Induction episode. Like my neighbors' planter box zebra non-sequitur, I love these little flourishes upon my town.

So... the Jejune Game Control folks conceal art and media around the city. And it decays. On my way to that game on Tuesday, I stopped off at a certain corner to look at a children's game mentioned in a Jejune clue. It had been there; was now effaced. As I followed the instructions around Telegraph Hill, the game carefully had me record some numbers, implying I'd need them to open a box. When I reached the box, it opened though I didn't use the numbers. I guess there was a combination lock on the box before, broken off now. And yet... and yet... It was still satisfying to find the numbers, still satisfying to find the box. The game decays, but the essence of the hunt survives. That utility sticker had worn away such that I wasn't sure I could read the phone number. But on Telegraph hill, I found something else that also has that phone number, so... It'll be OK. The game goes on.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, like Lindy Hop

Yesterday, Debbie Goldstein was at a playtest and so was I. And thus I got to hear a little about her trip to New York City. Debbie is, as near as I can tell, the force of cajolery behind the DASH hunts, somehow convincing puzzle freaks in multiple locations to coordinate on puzzle design and puzzle hunt operations. As a side effect, she traveled to New York for the recent DASH game.

Well, hey, except that maybe it wasn't just a side effect.

When she's not herding puzzle hunters, Debbie swing dances. She talked a bit about swing dancers. I knew there was a local swing dancing community—but now I find out it's not just local. It's wider-scale than that, stuff all over the country. (Country? World? I forget which.) One nice aspect of this (and maybe something that helps keep the wide-scale community going) is that swing dancers travel from place to place. They stay in each other's homes, show each other around their hometowns, dance with each other.

So... Maybe the puzzle-huntish community could do this, too?

Of course, that already happens. Half the travelers between SEA-SFO must be puzzle hunters by now. If you want to see the Microsoft puzzle hunt, you go to Redmond. (Well, the previous one was simulcasted in Stanford, but who knows if that'll keep happening...) I'd gone to Redmond for the Microsoft Puzzlehunt, and had a good time. After the fact, I found out that some east-coast folks had shown up for a bay area hunt—and they'd heard about the bay area hunts from the bay area folks who played in the Great American hunt a few years back.

There are tricky bits, though. I guess a swing dancer can show up at some event and ask folks to dance. That ain't easy, but... Wow, if a puzzler shows up at some event and asks a team "Hey, you don't know anything about me but can I join your team so we'll all be in close proximity in this van for the next 12 hours?" that might be a stretch. Then again, if those people got to know each other, perhaps by occasionally hanging out on some community site or something, that might help people to get to know each other.

New York was, by modern standards, understaffed. We're grown accustomed to "someone from GC watching each clue site", not so much with the "Open up the newspaper box and look for the next clue; hope that no 'civilian' has compromise the clue site." This approach is good: there's someone right there to confirm answers, give hints. This approach is bad: you need somebody to watch each clue site. Have you read about the relay that Curtis and DeeAnn did so that two GC folks could watch several clue sites for the Portland DASH? Madness. Well, that's kinda like the situation that the NYC organizers were facing: not many people running the game; a lot of people playing.

So Debbie went to New York City. And it was a relay. And it was kind of tough. And it was a 5km course, so she had to rush to get from one clue site to the next. But it was fun. New York is fun. Oh, and there was celebrity gossip.

There was a celebrity sighting: a puzzler let Debbie know: OMG we saw Neil Patrick Harris!!?! (I had to ask: he's the Doctor Horrible guy.) Of course, spotting famous people in New York City is no big deal. In the first hour I spent in NYC, I saw Sam Shepard and Ethan Hawke; it's normal there. But but but Neil Patrick Harris isn't just another actor. He's into pervasive games. No word on his feelings about puzzle hunts, but he liked this ARG called Accomplice in New York to (if I understand correctly) come on as a producer to help it keep going and expand out to a Los Angeles version. One of us, one of us.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Places that are Gone

This is another spoiler-free (I think) post about the 2-Tone Game.

Things change. Cities are things. Therefore, cities change.

Last weekend, I was in the neighborhood of a puzzle site, a puzzle from The 2-Tone Game. This puzzle uses "environmental data". That is, it tells you to look at something real, and then interpret that in a puzzly-way. E.g., "Go to such-and-such place. Look at the commemorative plaque. It mentions two historical people. Combine their initials to make a word." That kind of thing. A few puzzles in the 2-Tone Game use environmental data. Since I was in the neighborhood, I looked at the puzzle site. There was a sign posted on it: an application for a permit to something something. Basically, the people in charge of this thingy had posted a sign that they wanted to change their thingy. In so doing, they'd break this puzzle.

Fortunately, this puzzle is "fixable". Instead of using that thingy, I tweaked the puzzle so that it uses another few thingies instead. It's probably OK. Though I worry—nobody's playtested the new edition. Maybe it's too difficult now. I guess we'll find out.

A while back, Nick Baxter wrote to me. He's trying to figure out when to play this thing. He asked: will it still be running in August? I said I didn't know for sure. I don't have any set date to shut this thing down. But the city changes. My puzzles' environmental data will "decay." Is decaying. I was able to repair the game this time. But if something happened to the ______ _____ _____ or to the _________ _____, I don't know what I'd do. I'd probably give up and shut the game down.

The 2-Tone Game is themed on the 2-Tone Records logo, a black-and-white checkered pattern. When I was putting this game together, I knew for sure that I wanted use the site of the "Black and White" puzzle from BANG 5. It used a place in the city that had a checkered pattern. Except. Except. Things change. The city changed. That spot isn't a checker-patterned tile wall anymore. Now it's a wall painted solid magenta. So I didn't use that site after all.

At some point, one of those puzzles will break in a way I can't fix. I don't know when it will happen. Months from now? Years from now? But it will happen. That's life.

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Book Report: Pervasive Games (Theory and Design)

Several months ago, I ran into a little post from a blog called "Pervasive Games". The blog post was interesting, so I wrote a little blog post about that, as one does. But I didn't really notice that the blog itself was so interesting. After all, I "knew" that pervasive games were annoying events like "I Love Bees", not the kind of games I play. I was wrong, course. Fortunately, Skott at Puzzalot browsed the Pervasive Games blog and paid attention. He noticed that they wrote about many games: The Game and LARPs and ARGs and... And they were writing a book. He blogged about that, so I knew to pay attention to those Pervasive Games people. So I read their book, and it's about a wide variety of games and I'm darned glad I read it: Pervasive Games.

Careful, it's a tough book to get through. Academic folks wrote it. I think they tried to make it readable, and I appreciated that. You run into sentences like "One way of structuring tiered playership is using a layered onion model with outer and inner modes of participation." But since some parts of the book are quite readable, you understand that these people are trying. It's more than you can say for most academics.

So... if a non-pervasive game is a board game played by a few people in your kitchen or a sport played by a handful of players on a court, what's a pervasive game? It might be played in a bigger space—a college campus, a district, a city. Maybe it's played on the internet, from anywhere. Maybe it's played in a bigger time range. Those Farmville crops take a while to grow. Maybe it's played with more people—maybe existing friends; or maybe you expect communities to form to crack a mystery.

They talk about an interesting effect of these games as they "ooze" out into real life—they can make "real life" more boring as it overlaps with the game. E.g., if you're playing an "assassin" game, you're always experiencing that intense paranoia because you never know when someone is stalking you. People in bay area treasure-huntish games have pointed out that they sometimes try to talk to agents of Game Control, only to find out they've instead accosted civilians... who then want to find out more about the game.

They talk about cultural influences that have melanged together to form Pervasive Games. I skimmed that part. Yeah, sure, acting, RPGs, LARPs, kids' games on the street a la stickbal... all that. I'm not so interested in the catalog of cultural themes. But the specific games, those are interesting This book had pieces of history that interested me: they had quick essays describing several past pervasive games. Those were darned nice.

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2-Tone Game: Pacing

Yar wrote some email talking about the 2-Tone Game. One of my answers got pretty long. I guess eventually it should find its way into a game write-up. But it won't if I lose it in my old mail queue. So I'll copy it here.

(I don't think there are any spoilers here.)

> I'd be really curious as to how you think this format went -- since it's
> such a drastic change from the standard game format, I'm sure that a lot of
> things went differently than you expected (for better or worse). Any
> insights?

Yeah, it didn't go as I expected. I announced all that stuff about "leisurely" and "take it easy", but still expected a wave of hyper-eager folks to nigh-overwhelm the server at 10:00 sharp and then race and race to be first to finish. But that didn't happen. People trickled in, solved some puzzles, took breaks, resumed...

One aspect where wrong assumptions lead to wrong decisions--

There's this logic on the server that tries to send teams to the same location at the same time so that gamers have a better chance of bumping into each other. But there haven't been that many people playing at the same time.

That same logic means that two people on a team who each use the server, each one using their own account, can get confused and dismayed--they solve puzzles in the same order, but get sent to different puzzles, just because one of them entered the answer at 10:58 and the other one entered the answer at 11:02. The server sends people to locations based on time of day, hoping that folks will thus bump into each other... but that's not obvious. The confusion isn't a terrible thing, and you can imagine it being justified by a trade-off. But the other half of that trade-off turns out to not exist.

(I should probably dismantle that logic.)

Another thing I didn't expect--I figured someone would have finished the game by now. There's a few folks who, like yourself, are just one puzzle from finishing. But no-one's finished. So... I mis-characterized gamists as hyper-competitive hyper-kinetic folks.

It's strangely satisfying to check the game logs and realize that people are playing this game during their lunch hours and visiting sites after work. Like, uhm, it's nice to see that they're making this thing fit into their lives.

Over the course of the week, there's been about as much activity as one week-end day. Not so much going on at any given hour, maybe just one person playing at a time. But it adds up.

Another thing that felt good about the pace: When it rained so hard on Sunday, I was glad the game wasn't "forcing" anyone to get wet. (A couple of folks were at puzzle sites around then, but they could have stayed home.)

But I know that the pace isn't right for all people. I talked with my friend Andrea Frome, who's played some BANGs but didn't want to play this game. She likes the focus of BANGs. Andrea's pretty intense. For her, "leisurely" is a bad thing. I bet there's a bunch of people who feel that way.

Maybe there's correlation between the hyper-kinetic folks and folks who don't want to play a leisurely-paced game. That might explain the hey-it's-been-five-days-and-nobody's-finished-yet thing.

Anyhow, there are good aspects and bad aspects. Maybe a way to keep the good aspects but clear away some bad aspects: have an optional-but-encouraged starting event that gets players together at the start. Then maybe more players would be playing at the same time, and thus more of them would bump into each other at puzzle sites. And it would be an excuse to be sociable.

Overall... I think I like "live" events better. I like having a web-based "LEON" for a live event—it worked well for the Back-to-School BANG. I'd like to apply lessons from the 2-Tone experience to a live event.

But I could see doing other just-set-up-the-web-site-and-point-people-at-it thing. The lack of logistical stress is nice :-)

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Link: Blue Door Puzzle Trail

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Puzzle Hunts Are Everywhere, even in Brent Holman's Memories (but not so much in writeups)

Veteran gamist Brent Holman Facebook-replied to my post yesterday about recaps, the internet, and memetic monoculture. His post deserves a wider audience than my Facebook friends, so I'm posting it here. There's a lot of wisdom in what he writes, reminding us of the difference between book larnin' and experience. And he gently points out that I got his idea backwards and then attributed it to him so... uhm, yeah, that's worth clearing up. Sorry about that.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brent Holman:

This is a thought-provoking post, Larry.

I could look back at the early Games I played and laugh at how easy they seem by today's standards, but that would be pointless: it didn't matter, because we were having fun. Would those same types of puzzles be fun for us now? Possibly, but likely less so than they were at the time. This isn't because the puzzles have changed, it's because we have. When we read about other events, in a small way we deprive ourselves of that type of personal evolution.

Most will agree that we learn best by doing. If someone in Anytown hears about Games and wants to learn more, wouldn't it be ideal if she could find a way to actually play instead of reading a bunch of recaps of other events? A real experience, no matter how simple, seems preferable to a second-hand experience, no matter how fantastic the original might have been.

Granted, with the limited and temporal nature of Games, this isn't always practical or even realistic. Someone needs to step up and run a Game before anyone can play. But it could be argued that the prevalence of event recaps on the web makes prospective GCs that much less likely to throw their hat into the ring for fear of retreading old ground. At the very least, it makes the playing field that much more un-level.

Imagine this scenario: if you don't read up, you've potentially already fallen behind before you've even started. If you do read up, you've potentially lost the joy and wonder of many new discoveries. Which would you choose?

I don't think a monoculture is the real worry. People who get bitten by the Game bug will take things in their own directions, no matter what other people have done in the past or will do in the future. That's just the nature of creativity.

To me, the interesting question is more about where the Game begins than where it ends up. Gamers (current and future) are information-seekers by nature, and the more there is to devour, the more they'll consume. This fundamentally changes the starting point. Technology (which has always been a big part of the Game) has made the truly n00b experience very difficult to come by, except possibly for the extremely disciplined who are willing and able to insulate themselves.

But to clarify a point from the beginning of your post, I wasn't really saying that the new players come in really knowing their stuff. Quite the opposite, in fact. They come in thinking they know their stuff because they've read up on previous events. In many cases it's knowledge without understanding, lessons learned without effort. They only have a history of success (or of reading about success) and not of failure. Any old-timer will tell you that you learn as much about puzzles by trying things that don't work as by trying things that do.

As long as there's information to share, people will share it. And as long as there's shared information, people will seek it out. That just means we're all doing what we're predisposed to do. Trying to stop that cycle would be a fool's errand. It's up to the creators to rise above that challenge and keep things new.

My most treasured Game memories came in the early days, when everything was completely unexpected. My lack of knowledge put me in the perfect frame of mind to be amazed. It's that sense of wonder and the joy of discovery that every Gamer relishes, so I can only hope that wherever any player's experiences begin or wherever they may end up, they'll be able to experience those same feelings again and again. But in some ways it's never quite as good as the first time, so you might want to think twice about trying to get started too far along the curve...

So, yeah. (This is me, Larry, again.) A word is but a pale shadow of the thing. A narrative is not reality. A Game write-up is not the Game.

It's like... you're talking to someone at a party about these hunts. And he says "Wow, that would make a great movie." And you have to say "No wait, hang on. It only sounds like a great movie because I left out this stuff. Because narratives don't really have a way to convey what we do. I left out... I left out... I left out the hour of frustration staring at that pile of flourescent-painted lumber scraps. I left out the argument over how to interpret those hummingbird flight patterns as ternary (and the dreadful moment of realization that the argument had gone on longer than the time it would take to try doing the ternary both ways). I left out the frisson of strange queasy joy and regret I experienced when I found that leftover piece of chocolate in my pocket at 4 AM and realized that I'd been forgetting to eat. I left out the things that make The Game The Game, because the English language is not suited to describing these things. You need... you need... You need to go read Eric Prestemon's puzzle-solving diary and pay attention to the times. And... and..." But by now your fellow party-goer has decided they really need to go talk to their friend over there.

I am a writer because I love language; and yet I know that language has limits. I love these puzzly-hunty things because they put us into a place that language can't describe well. I found out about these games because I found a write-up. You n00bs take note: that write-up didn't make me want to read more write-ups. It made me want to play The Game.

I should link to this from my write-up page.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, with no hidden niches

There was this conversation at the GC Summit. Brent Holman of Shinteki/the Scoobies said something. It troubles me. Maybe it shouldn't but...

We were talking about making these puzzle-hunty games accessible to nOObs. I guess we were all thinking about phenomena like the Green Game. That's how the culture spreads, right? NOObs play games, then they're not NOObs anymore.

Maybe that's not true anymore. Brent organizes a lot of games, right? And he pointed out: When these people show up, they've read some stuff on the internet, right? They know their codes, they know what to do, they know all this stuff. [Updated: Brent replied to this post to gently let me know that I got his point backwards. And along the way he also shared some genuine wisdom about games and life. Go read what he had to say.]

That makes me worry about monoculture, right?

Part of what makes evolution works is that there are places that are tough to get to. There are islands, hidden valleys. Occasionally a macaw will make it to one of these places, and this colony of macaws will spring up. It's separate from the main macaw population. It's under different pressures, evolves differently. They explore a different part of the possible genetic space. Occasionally some of these weird colonist macaws make their way back to the main population. It's where diversity comes from, it keeps the species strong. If all your macaws live in just one place, if they don't have any kinda-tough-but-not-impossible-to-reach places around them.... If they don't have these weird little niches to go and stew for a while... You lose diversity.

Memes are similar, right? A lot of weird stuff happens on Japanese TV. We in America don't know much of it, because there are these semi-permeable information boundaries. Occasionally something wonderful and strange stumbles through the boundary, and the world gains another "Iron Chef". The language barriers, the copyright hassles—they create these information islands. Strange things thrive there, and occasionally one comes back.

I read about puzzle-hunty activities in different places and they are different.

Ravenchase all Poe-like and artistic.

Hot Springs Arkansas with less find-the-information-in-this-diagram and more cleverly-navigate-this-physical-challenge.

Competitive New York City's Midnight Madness where you can interfere with other teams in ways that fit the game.

What would have happened if those people had read my write up of Justice Unlimited and thought "Oh, so that's how we're supposed to do it."? When we share what we do, we're being generous with our ideas. But we're also influencing people. We inspire them, but we inspire them to react to what we've done.

OK, I'm not terribly worried about a monoculture. For example, I think that D.A.S.H. is an awesome idea.

And within the bay area community... you couldn't even call that a mushy homogenized monoculture. Sunday, I asked a playtester, Peter Kimball, about his previous puzzle-huntish experience. He said he'd playtested one Game, that it was Paparazzi. Imagine if that was the only Game you ever played. "So, this is what it's like? Getting driven around in a limo to a swank nightclub? Awesome!"

And it's not like everybody follows everything that's going on. I think I looked at two puzzles from the recent MIT mystery hunt. I could read more. They nicely put everything up on the internet. There's no, uhm, memetic barrier there. Except for that thick one around my brain. I guess as long as we have those, there will still be variations.

And maybe there are hidden niches after all. You still hear mention of dorm Games at Stanford. They don't invite us old duffers to play, there's no long reports posted, just a microblog mention of a treasure-hunt-like game. Maybe in a few years something new, wonderful, and strange will burst out upon our scene.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Rashomon Gate

• "Yeah, I figured out it was Morse at about the same time you did. Yay us. Let's keep going."
• "Of course it's Morse. That's why I was just now suggesting that the ants were dashes and the aphids were dots. That suggestion, I suppose, is how you 'discovered' the Morse."
• "Because my self-worth is totally tied in my puzzle-solving ability, I will now convince myself that I knew this puzzle was Morse all along."

From Player A's point of view, he figured it out first. From Player B's point of view, he figured it out first; Player A was just the first to articulate it.

If Player A blurts out "It's Morse!" no sane team takes the next five minutes to work out who did/did not already know the puzzle was Morse. Instead, they're going to pull out their Morse code cheat-sheet and start to work on the next stage of the puzzle.

Afterwards, Player C's chances of capturing how the idea spread through the group... Yeah, basically doomed. That's too bad. And there's a non-trivial chance that Player B will eventually become grumpy as he keeps reading about all of Player A's insights. "Oh, hey, I'd already thought of some of these, where's my credit?"

Finding out how ideas move through a team is darned interesting. Writing about it is interesting, too. My approach is: leave people's names out of it. If someone pipes up with an idea, I tend to say "someone" instead of "Dwight" or whoever. I talk about the strange ways that theories make their way through a van, but usually stay hazy on exactly who was sitting in which van seat. It seems to keep folks from yelling at me about the writeups. YMMV.

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