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Aug. 23rd, 2013 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDespite all my better judgement, I got hooked on Whodunnit, ABC's summer reality series where a dozen reality show archetypes are thrown in a mansion and one by one they are 'murdered' in gruesome fashion by a murderer they are informed is... ONE OF THEM! The lone survivor, they are promised, will leave the house with a quarter million dollars.
The special effects people from CSI worked on the show, and so the gruesome murders are quite spectacular and entertaining. Not to mention clever: After every murder, the players investigate the corpse to find clues, so the prop people not only have to create a convincing corpse, they have to create a convincing corpse that has subtle but useful and not misleading clues about a death that didn't really happen. As a wannabe puzzle designer myself, I know how easy it is to accidentally throw people on the wrong scent not with clever red herrings, but with puzzle glitches, and as far as we saw on the show, that never happened because the corpses were so well crafted that the clues were apparent to the clever and never the result of prop glitch. (Though with TV editing, for all I know they had a policy of stopping the taping if a glitch showed up to steer the players away)
But what really drew me in was the show's social engineering design. Each murder would result in three zones for investigation, typically the morgue where the corpse could be investigated, the scene of the crime, and the victim's last known whereabouts. At each site, clues were scattered that together would explain how the murder was committed, but each player could only choose to visit one of the three sites.
The players therefore had to share information to solve the crimes, but the twist was that the player who did the worst at solving the crime each day would be killed, so if you shared too much information you would end up losing any advantage that your information gave you to stay alive. By the end of the second day, the show had split into two clear teams of four and six players, and then the rest of the show was a constant competition between the two teams and constant attempts to lure defections or steal information from the opposing team. In the end, a combination of clever puzzle solving and a much stronger commitment to information control meant that the final three consisted of three players from the team of four. I loved watching the dance of negotiation and misdirection between the various players as they tried to figure out who they could trust and who they couldn't.
My only major complaint was that the final day threw all of this social engineering out the window. The three remaining competitors were obviously not in a position to share information willingly, since they had reached the point where one of their team members was a killer. So for the finale the showrunners/the killer effectively threw out all that had made the show interesting to watch and devised a new final three runaround that frankly speaking, sucked.
['Runaround' is a technical term of the MIT Mystery Hunt, a type of puzzle that usually but not always concludes a Hunt in which a team or player must run from location to location, solving mini-puzzles whose answers direct you to the next location. It is a cousin of another puzzle type, 'The Game', in which this activity comprises the entire extravaganza. What distinguishes the MIT-style runaround is that as the culminating activity of the extravaganza, it often requires puzzlers to recall and assimilate information gathered over the course of all previous puzzles. At the Hunt, this is typically done for two reasons. First, because it is possibly by the Hunt's design to reach the runaround without having solved all of the Hunt's puzzles, these tests serve as a check that the winning team actually has a sufficient number of the puzzle answers to merit winning. But secondly, it helps to flavor the Hunt and bring all the disparate elements of the Hunt together into a coherent story.]
Like an MIT runaround, the Whodunnit finale required recall of information from previous puzzles [murders], but in balancing this need to challenge their players to use everything they had learned against the exigencies of television, they made the recall challenges too simple- several were merely fifty-fifty guesses. But the deeper problem was that the runaround didn't advance the game's story at all. By the final three, the aim of the show should be for the players to deduce the killer's identity. Instead, the players just solved a series of recall riddles that proved that one player was the cleverer, faster riddle solver, and that player was directly introduced to the killer and declared winner. I think even the winner seemed a little nonplussed by it, though obviously thrilled to have a quarter million dollars.
So maybe there will be a second season and it will be better, and maybe there won't be, but I enjoyed it in spite of all its nonsense.
The special effects people from CSI worked on the show, and so the gruesome murders are quite spectacular and entertaining. Not to mention clever: After every murder, the players investigate the corpse to find clues, so the prop people not only have to create a convincing corpse, they have to create a convincing corpse that has subtle but useful and not misleading clues about a death that didn't really happen. As a wannabe puzzle designer myself, I know how easy it is to accidentally throw people on the wrong scent not with clever red herrings, but with puzzle glitches, and as far as we saw on the show, that never happened because the corpses were so well crafted that the clues were apparent to the clever and never the result of prop glitch. (Though with TV editing, for all I know they had a policy of stopping the taping if a glitch showed up to steer the players away)
But what really drew me in was the show's social engineering design. Each murder would result in three zones for investigation, typically the morgue where the corpse could be investigated, the scene of the crime, and the victim's last known whereabouts. At each site, clues were scattered that together would explain how the murder was committed, but each player could only choose to visit one of the three sites.
The players therefore had to share information to solve the crimes, but the twist was that the player who did the worst at solving the crime each day would be killed, so if you shared too much information you would end up losing any advantage that your information gave you to stay alive. By the end of the second day, the show had split into two clear teams of four and six players, and then the rest of the show was a constant competition between the two teams and constant attempts to lure defections or steal information from the opposing team. In the end, a combination of clever puzzle solving and a much stronger commitment to information control meant that the final three consisted of three players from the team of four. I loved watching the dance of negotiation and misdirection between the various players as they tried to figure out who they could trust and who they couldn't.
My only major complaint was that the final day threw all of this social engineering out the window. The three remaining competitors were obviously not in a position to share information willingly, since they had reached the point where one of their team members was a killer. So for the finale the showrunners/the killer effectively threw out all that had made the show interesting to watch and devised a new final three runaround that frankly speaking, sucked.
['Runaround' is a technical term of the MIT Mystery Hunt, a type of puzzle that usually but not always concludes a Hunt in which a team or player must run from location to location, solving mini-puzzles whose answers direct you to the next location. It is a cousin of another puzzle type, 'The Game', in which this activity comprises the entire extravaganza. What distinguishes the MIT-style runaround is that as the culminating activity of the extravaganza, it often requires puzzlers to recall and assimilate information gathered over the course of all previous puzzles. At the Hunt, this is typically done for two reasons. First, because it is possibly by the Hunt's design to reach the runaround without having solved all of the Hunt's puzzles, these tests serve as a check that the winning team actually has a sufficient number of the puzzle answers to merit winning. But secondly, it helps to flavor the Hunt and bring all the disparate elements of the Hunt together into a coherent story.]
Like an MIT runaround, the Whodunnit finale required recall of information from previous puzzles [murders], but in balancing this need to challenge their players to use everything they had learned against the exigencies of television, they made the recall challenges too simple- several were merely fifty-fifty guesses. But the deeper problem was that the runaround didn't advance the game's story at all. By the final three, the aim of the show should be for the players to deduce the killer's identity. Instead, the players just solved a series of recall riddles that proved that one player was the cleverer, faster riddle solver, and that player was directly introduced to the killer and declared winner. I think even the winner seemed a little nonplussed by it, though obviously thrilled to have a quarter million dollars.
So maybe there will be a second season and it will be better, and maybe there won't be, but I enjoyed it in spite of all its nonsense.