Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even St Louis

You must enjoy this St Louis travelog, aka how I traveled to DASH4. And it's also my report on DASH4 itself. Remember when I micro-blogged about tornado warning sirens? I wasn't kidding.

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Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis

While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. Those folks had only found out about DASH because I happened to know Prof Bryan Clair, who passed along word to some SLU faculty and students. Us organizers had tried some other publicity things, but they hadn't borne fruit.

So I tried wandering around a couple of other St Louis school campuses in search of recreational math clubs and such. This isn't necessarily a smart way to go about finding potential puzzlehunters, but it's what I thought of.

MU-StL has a Math/CS department with some kind of Math Club. In my wanderings, I didn't see much sign of it or find someone to talk to. If I found the departmental office (which, depending on what sign you read is in room 303 or 311), then there was a lady in it who was on the phone the whole time I was wandering the halls. One room in their area had a sign out front labeled 'Math Club / "ACM"' Why was ACM in quotes? I don't know. So if I wanted to track down a math club in MU-StL, I'd start by calling up the math department on the phone. I dunno how useful it'd be, but it's at least as useful as wandering around lost on campus.

Wandering around lost the fifth floor of WUStL's Lapota hall (an engineering building) was more promising. I saw signs for events organized by ACM. And a big ACM banner hangs over a lounge area; so the ACM seems capable of organizing gatherings and such. Looking up the WUStL branch of the ACM on the internets, we can see they are sufficiently puzzle-y to have their own puzzle trail, in which I failed to solve so much as the first puzzle but let's not hold that against them. (Am I supposed to recognize an ASCII cow saying "phizzbuzz" from somewhere? I've heard of fizzbuzz. I know about a dogcow that says "moof". But that's as close as I get.)

I found the WUStL math department office and asked the nice student behind the desk if there was a local organization who was into "recreational math, puzzles, that sort of thing." He said that sounded like the Math Club, who was faculty-sponsored (or something) by this guy, Professor Chi.

After I told Prof. Clair of my investigations, he pointed out, "You could have just asked me; we St Louis math people talk to each other about stuff from time to time." So of course, that would be an important question for anyone you do manage to get interested: who else should I tell?

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Thunder, lightning, tornado warning sirens, golf-ball-sized hail, rain... most adventurous DASH ever!

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhen in San Mateo

Because the dream of the 80s is also alive at Paine Memorial High School, here's a write-up of the Doctor When Game, a pretty amazing weekend-long puzzle-hunt time-travel-story game a bunch of folks played in a few weeks back.

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Just read @jfagone's @wired article about The World Henchmen Organization Game. (It's available on Kindle as part of the magazine.) Fun stuff!

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Embedded Reporter Seeks Team

I still dream of playing with your team for the WarTron game and then writing about it. If you're up for that, please let me know. Ideally, let me know before application day (just a few weeks away!) so I can help you to get in :-)

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Book Report: This is not a Game

Thanks to a Snoutcast interview, I learned of the existence of This Is Not A Game, a non-fiction book about Alternative Reality Games by Dave Szulborski (not to be confused with the novel This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams). It starts out slow—the first quarter of the book careful defintions and academic categorizing when all you had to say was "Y'know, like I Love Bees"—but once that's out of the way, there's some good stuff. You know you're in for a good time when you reach chapter 7 when you see it's all going to be about The Beast. Szulborski has been a player and a Game Control for these games. He writes about things that happened and how the influenced what happened next. ARGers, like players+customers everywhere, don't know what they want. They say they want realism, but they react better if new content comes out on a regular schedule and if there are puzzles and... And these things make it challenging to write an ARG.

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Sorry About That

So as Team Mystic Fish sat down at the finale of the role-playing-intense The Game earlier today, someone seated behind us cracked a joke: "Oh, you're sitting in the front row. So you inherit our duty: If [any character attempts a twist ending here], it's up to you to jump up and stop them. Just pile on." Except... Uhm, I didn't realize it was a joke. It seemed like a fun bit of direction from Game Control.

So, uhm, there was an attempt at a twist ending, I hopped up, lumbered over and stopped it. So, uhm, I kind of messed up the game's planned ending. It wasn't until later when I was talking to Erik Stuart of Game Control that I found out for sure I wasn't following GC's plan... though I'd started to suspect it when that character actor looked so surprised...

Sorry about that.

(It got me to thinking about the finale to Jejune Institute: infiltrators who kept waiting for the signal to act. What if their instructions had been: "It's not necessarily up to you to act, but if you're in the front row then yeah, it's you." Would they have risen up?)

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Book Report: The Timetables of History

It's a summary of world history, presented as a timeline. It's a few hunded pages. The rows are years. The columns are different, uhm, sectors of culture: art, science, etc. I hear tell that this is a translation of a German work called Kulturfahrplan. OK. Man, I forgot I had this. It's huge! It weighs a lot more than wikipedia. And there's this time travel themed The Game coming up soon. So now I gotta decide: does this bulky book go in the backpack, go in the van, or stay in the apartment?

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Spoiler-Free Real Escape Game Notes

Team Sharkbait was there! Well, they played the session before us. Rock on, Team Sharkbait.

The toughest thing I did all night was give up a spot on the team with people I knew. Leading up to the game, I'd been insufferable: "Hey, guys we should get there early so that we're sure to be on the same team." But getting there early didn't help. The organizers assigned people to tables. Of the five BANGists in attendance... four went to one table and I went to another. In hindsight what I should have done is wandered over to the table with the four BANGists. There were also two non-BANGists there. I could have asked the two extras if one of them would trade seats with me. It turns out that they knew people at the table I'd been assigned to, so they might have gone for it. But I didn't do that: instead, I looked around the room for clues. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

In theory, it's nice to meet new people. But... this was basically solving puzzles. There was no van ride filled with idle chatter in between. Sitting around a table with puzzles, not so much idle chatter. So I learned that Trish is surprisingly good at [redacted] puzzles, solving one in seconds that had confused me and another guy for minutes. And I learned that J.J. was good at Ahas. Yeah, somehow I don't really feel I got to know them very well.

The puzzles were nice! An hour-long puzzlehunt feels different from other kinds. It's more of a sprint. If you're playing at SF's New People gallery, the room's not really air-conditioned; one of the guys on my team was overheated. It made me glad that so many of our local events are outside in the open air.

That's the spoiler-free advice I can give: I wish I'd tried to trade seats with someone; and I'm glad I wasn't dressed too warm.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere

Is [some of] your team hoping to head to Portland for The WarTron Game? If so, I'd like to tag along as an "embedded reporter". I.e., I'd play the game with y'all and write it up afterwards. Folks are curious about how other teams operate; I'm curious too, and like to write about that stuff. (No, I haven't seen any huge variations in how teams do things. But folks seem interested in the little variations anyhow.)

Two teams have let me do this embedded-reporting thing so far, Continental Breakfast and The Smoking GNU. I do this when there are two The Games in one year, playing the first game with Mystic Fish, my regular team, and one game embedded with another team. (Though that means the project's been on hiatus since 2008. When I first came up with this idea, I thought I'd be writing a bunch of these because of course there are going to be multiple overnight games each year... Uhm, anyhow.) I'd sure like to do it again, maybe this time with your team.

So if you're willing to let other folks see how your team operates, I'd sure like to tag along. And maybe when you told your team, "Hey there's a game coming up..." they were all Yeah! and then you continued "...in Portland." and half of them were still Yeah! but the other half started to look down at the ground and mumble about their dislike of airports; maybe you're looking for a spare puzzly person to fill an empty slot. I'd sure like to hear from you. You might even be glad to have me along as a player. I'm not the world's best puzzler, but I'm no slouch.

(On the other hand, if it doesn't feel like many of your team's "regulars" will play, then I'm not so interested. Folks want to read about how Team Such-and-such plays; they're not so interested in how Two Players from Team Such-and-Such Plus One Player Each From a Smattering of Other Teams play. Or at least I don't hear anyone conjecturing about that at GC Summit conversations or whatever. Anyhow, figure if three of your regulars are playing, then I'm interested. But if it's just two of you... then I sympathize with you as you scramble to assemble a team, but... sorry.)

Interested? Drop me a line at web+comment@lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us. I'd love to hear from you. (No, I'm not just looking to get out of town because of the earthquakes. C'mon.)

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Nice writeup of Shinteki Disneyland in Wired http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/shinteki-disneyland/

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Someone solved the 2-Tone Game meta yesterday, ~6 months since the previous time someone solved it. Hmm, just a few days after I mailed the Real Escape Game info-line to say "You should play this game while you're in town." Could be a coincidence, of course. Could be.

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Even SF Japantown

Who else wants to play @realegame? It's ~1.5 hours long with about an hour of team puzzling in SF Japantown. They're running a few sessions, so you can choose when you want to play. Most of those sessions overlap with the first running of the Dr When game, but not the ones the Friday evening before (Mar 23rd @ 6pm, 9pm). It might be fun to try to pack those sessions with local Gamists (and maybe even out-of-towners in town for Dr When).

I'm not 100% sure that Friday night is the best idea, though. Getting into SF on a Friday night's not so easy—folks who live on the peninsula or the East Bay might not think the drive is worth it for just one hour's puzzling; folks who aren't playing Dr When's first weekend might prefer to play this Real Escape Game during the weekend proper. I dunno. What do you think?

official web site, video which gives flavor of event

(Thanks to @gfilpus for the pointer!)

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Book Report: The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour

It's more young adult puzzlehunt fiction, so you won't impress your grown-up friends for having read this. But it was fun! A group of friends at a NYC catholic school team up to solve a long-forgotten birthday treasure hunt. They take the hunt kind of slowly—they'd figure something out and then wait until the next morning to follow up on it. But that's what happens when you have the clues from a decades-past treasure hunt. "Oh, we can't go into that church now, it's closed for the night." It was cool to see how the characters worked together to solve the puzzles.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, so I'm traveling to DASH again

Remember how last year I had a blast in NYC helping run DASH there? I'm doing something similar this year, but this time St Louis. Once again, I put myself into the hands of fate and said I'll volunteer someplace, who'll take me? (Actually, I ruled out places I'd traveled to in the past few years, which turned out to be a lot of DASH locations.)

I recommend it. It was an excuse to travel. I met some fun folks I otherwise wouldn't have. I learned about Manhattan's Dastardly Manhattan puzzle geocaches. (Oh, sure, now you've heard of them because the Dastardly folks got interviewed on Snoutcast. But I'm the one who told the Snoutcasters "Hey you should interview these freaks," and I wouldn't have known to recommend that if I hadn't met them. So there.) No, I bet you don't have to leave the location in the hands of fate; I bet if you want to volunteer in a particular place then you could just ask 'em. Yeah, yeah, traveling to play is fun, too. And if you really want to stick around the bay area to play, I'll still respect you. Someone's got to stick around to play this thing here. I'm just saying that I had a great time and I'm doing it again and you might like it.

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Book Report: The Seventh Level

It's more puzzle-hunt young adult fiction by Jody Feldman. You remember how I liked her Gollywhopper Games book, aside from the magical realism parts? This book has a school that's also somehow the headquarters of a secret society of everyone from St Louis who's ever done anything cool and they arrange fundraisers for the school that the kids all love and... And there were some puzzly bits, but man I had a really hard time getting past the unbelievable-premise bits. It might have helped if this book's game was team-oriented; Feldman's shown she can write about that pretty well. As it is, our protagonist has friends, but he must ditch them for the most part when he's puzzle-hunting.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even inside Puzzle Hunts

The MIT Hunt had an amazing recursive puzzle. @Prestemon blogged his solve so you can experience the majesty without having to bust your own personal brain for eight hours. (Well, as I post this, he hadn't posted a completed solve yet. But maybe by the time you see this.) (The Mystery Hunt, of course had many many awesome puzzles. I'm just mentioning this one because the next time someone asks me what I mean by "recursion" in a puzzle, I'm trotting this one out as the $&#*ing epitome.)

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Todd Etter: best day job ever?

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Book Report: The Gollywhopper Games

It's young adult fiction answering the question: What would happen if there was a puzzle hunt in a toy warehouse that was magical like Charlie's Chocolate Factory? On the one hand I wanted to read this book because, oh hey, puzzle hunt, yay! On the other hand, I'm not really a fan of magical toy factories. I didn't like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, OK? There, I said it. I like my real stuff real; I like my magical stuff in a more magical world with dragons and stuff. So on the one hand, we have some interesting characters running around and solving puzzles. And these puzzles have great physical components that would be awesome... except if you're a boring stick-in-the-mud like me who's helped run games. Because then you cluck your tongue and say "Oh, that would break, you couldn't really make a puzzle like that." It's too bad I let my anti-magical grumpiness distract me; this book's got a lot of good stuff going on. The characters are interesting, and their interactions with each other are also interesting. The puzzles are fun. And there are some familiar moments: solving one stage of a puzzle, having some idea of what you're looking for next, stumbling around some area, looking for... something but you're not really sure where you're supposed to look or am I going to have to search this whole building or...? Good stuff.

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kinda-Puzzle-Hunts are everywhere, even SFMOMA

I went to SFMOMA today to play their ArtGameLab games that I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Though I only actually played the Bedcannon Game, a fun scavenger hunt in the permanent gallery plus a hide-in-plain-sight installation and a pretty darned cool thing at the end that dispenses a prize. Android programmers may get excited at one point. It was an excuse to move through the museum with focus and purpose. (Though I didn't make the same mistake that I did at the Brooklyn Museum Game. After playing this game, I took time to wander around the museum in a relaxed museum-browsing way, not in a blindered gaming way. And at the end, I found Waldo! Which just goes to show something.)

Super Going also had some material in the ArtGameLab. It was cool, but didn't seem like as much fun as the online version of their game. So if I was first encountering them at SFMOMA, I might have been excited. But since I've already had a chance to try it out, I thought "A museum ain't such a great place to be creative" and moved on. (When I wrote about Super Going before, it probably sounded bleak and empty. But it's not! I took on one of the "dares". And though I don't know other people on the service, there's a community there. And someone awarded me some points, I leveled up, I had the whole gamified thing going on there for a bit. Which can be satisfying.)

There was one activity that just seemed like a stinker and two that seemed more fun to read about than to participate in. Of those, one was a sort of Art Jargon bingo by Sudhu Temari and Benjamin Carpenter. But you couldn't just mark squares if you heard someone using an art jargon term. You had to carry out a sort of mime gesture for that piece of jargon. The other was a kind of Interpretive Text Mad Libs. That might have been fun if I'd come to the museum with someone else. But as it was, I would have been filling in the Mad Lib while being able to see what I was filling in. That seemed like cheating; worse, it seemed like it would lead to something not-funny.

Anyhow, I recommend the Bedcannon game; and if the other games sound promising to you, then you might like them, too.

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WHO SF Bay Area re-run Writeup

By the time you finished playing the World Henchmen Organization game a couple of months back, most of the mysteries had been wrapped up. Which supervillain betrayed Big Boss. Who was Big Boss? Can the world be saved by anagramming? But not everything got tied up so neatly. In case you were still wondering "Hey, what did Team Bloody GoldFish Meat talk about in the van between puzzles?" now's your chance to find out: go read My Hench Life. Read it before your friends do. I was too lazy to revise it. So if you read it now and spot errors before anyone else points them out to me, you'll have a great opportunity to make fun of me.

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Link: thelatitude The Nonchalance website (GC behind Jejune Institute) updated recently The Jejune Institute is now CLOSED. Our adventures concluded in 2011 with hidden episodes IV and V. For information on our ne...