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Teammate, as the winner of last year's Hunt, ran the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt. After running last year, my team Palindrome was very insistent that our goal this year was to Not Win, and secondarily to have as much fun as possible and see as much of the Hunt as possible, while, as I mentioned above, very very Not Winning.

WE SUCCEEDED!

The straightforward theme of the first five rounds was a Museum, with rounds based on a science museum, an art museum, a natural museum, and so on. After some time, the AI who ostensibly wrote the Hunt broke down and we ended up poking around in the Puzzle Making Factory, full of weirder and more unusual puzzles and puzzle structures, navigated in a Point and Click video game style. Eventually we met other puzzle-writing AIs who wrote even weirder and more unusual puzzles for us to solve to set things right.

It was the first Hunt back on campus after two virtual Hunts because of COVID, but because COVID is still a thing we were limited in some ways in our ability to be on campus. Teams adopted various strategies of testing and masking and spacing to try to minimize any spread. A lot of our team that normally would solve on campus opted to solve remotely. Perhaps thirty Palindrome team members Hunted from campus, the rest of our ~100 team members were remote. As a result, our solving strategy was to spend most of our time on Discord voice chat solving with our teammates, regardless of whether they were in the same room as us or across the planet.

This was not great for me. We were hit with an immediate setback when we discovered, shortly before Hunt launch, that the MIT Guest wifi network was blocking Discord voice altogether. In a pinch, faced with a puzzle management system that assumed everything was going to be structured around discord, we fell back to using Discord on our phones all week... a strategy that ate massive amounts of data for most of us, and was also full of technical glitches and sound dropping in and out.

But aside from the tech, everyone in the room wearing headphones all weekend was less than ideal. I was excited for on-campus solving to return because I was excited to get to do some face to face solving with people. But there wasn't that much interaction between solvers in the room. I introduced myself to a new teammate at wrapup and we realized that we'd sat next to each other for several hours at some point in the weekend without ever talking. And that's tough... I mean, it was an improvement for remote solvers compared to past years when they sometimes found it hard to find out who on campus was working on a puzzle and how to share information, but the tradeoff was a lot less collaboration in the room. And additionally, it meant that over Shabbat I was substantially more disconnected from the team that I was during past in-person Hunts- though substantially more connected to the team than I was in 2021 when I was just offline for all of Shabbos. I ended up mostly not spending Shabbos Hunting- I spend Friday evening in my hotel room making kiddush and then hanging out, and went to Tremont Street Shul for davening Saturday morning.

The most satisfying solving experiences of Hunt were things like physical puzzles where we were forced to actually interact with our in person teammates to solve. We solved Legend, a metapuzzle involving triangular pieces arranged into a fractal shape, by moving around the physical pieces on a table, then photographing the final result and projecting it on a screen in the room until someone spotted the pattern. It was definitely a highlight of the Hunt. And we worked for a while on a puzzle that involved running around the basements of MIT hunting for hidden riddles that was a lot of fun even though we didn't manage to find the final answer before someone on the team backsolved it.



The overall Hunt was... well, it was the fourth longest Hunt in the 40 year history of the Hunt, with the coin being found around 7:30 AM Monday morning. The puzzles were largely clever and well constructed and the artwork and story around them was great, but they tended to ask for an extra step, and sometimes that meant we'd hit a point with the puzzles where we'd go, "this was cool, but I don't want to bang my head against this puzzle any more." Several of those puzzles I've bookmarked to go back to at some point when I have an evening to devote entirely to, because I think they will be fun out of the context of Hunt. Notably in that number is Dispel the Bees, a really clever puzzle based on the NYT Spelling Bee concept, taken to another level. I really want to solve it.

I really liked our rabid group solve experience on Inscription (Our captain was talking after Hunt about how anytime a word puzzle appeared, Palindrome descended on it like crossword piranhas), a clever nested cryptic puzzle. I loved Quandle, an inspired Wordle variant, and One of the Puzzles of All Time, an incredible meme-inspired puzzle that made a wonderful group solve in HQ. There were some really fun twists on jigsaw-style puzzle assembly including one puzzle involving assembling chopped up mashups of various classical oil paintings, and a number of other great puzzles. But the only way any team got to the finish line was that HQ flooded us with free solve tokens that allowed us to bypass puzzles, and the meta-strategic considerations of team advancements in that context started to drown out enjoyment of individual puzzles. This will not be among my favorite Hunts, but I did get a lot of enjoyment out of it and I'm profoundly grateful to teammate for running it.




And the best part of Hunt was just seeing people again. During the whole year I worked on writing Hunt, I saw only one teammate in person, when I drove up to photograph bunnies for Royal Steeds and met up with my co-writer Jenny. Otherwise the whole Hunt writing process was done by discord and email, so seeing everyone again in person and getting to hang out, both solving puzzles and otherwise, was the best part of my Hunt experience. I'm so happy I got to do that, and also to see friends on other teams.


I slept for eleven hours last Tuesday, but at this point I've finally returned to a normal sleep schedule!

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I love Ada Palmer and I very much enjoy listening to her expatiate about whatever random interests she feels like ranting about, so I've been listening to the podcast she does with Jo Walton, Ex Urbe, and really enjoying it. Except for the most recent episode, in which Palmer and Walton talked to Greer Gilman about Shakespeare stagings they have seen. The first performance they talk about is the Jonathan Munby-directed Merchant of Venice I wrote about five or so years ago. And Oh, Ada Palmer, No!

To briefly recap, the theory of the staging is that Merchant of Venice is a racist comedy, so let's get the audience to laugh and then pull back the curtain and reveal that the audience is racist. The problem with this strategy is if you're Jewish you don't laugh, and then you just end up sitting in an audience full of revealed anti-semites for a couple hours. It was not fun at all.

But Palmer was delighted by it. She argued for some time that Munby's strategy harmonized the dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. She went on rapturously about the experience of being part of that audience. And it was really painful to spend fifteen minutes listening to someone I really admire speaking with absolutely no empathy for how a Jew might feel experiencing the play. She and Walton talk excitedly about the spitting scene, about which I might again detour to quote Henry Goodman on his performance in the Trevor Nunn production: "Nobody spat on his gabardine, which it says in the play they do, but the audience is so sophisticated in a post-Holocaust world you insult its intelligence by blatantly showing Jew-baiting on stage." But Ada Palmer wants the spitting.

Palmer also made a minor factual error in describing the Hebrew song at the end of the play as a 'song of mourning'. "S'lach Lanu Avinu" is not about mourning, it's a confession of sin and a prayer for forgiveness. It's not a big deal, but it reflects again that Palmer and Walton approached the staging without any serious understanding of how a Jew would comprehend it, or any interest in learning.

I keep coming back to productions of Merchant because in spite of its naked anti-semitism I think it's one of Shakespeare's most beautifully written and structured plays. I disagree with Palmer on a textual level that there is much dissonance between the Belmont scenes and the Venice scenes. They're both about the tension between mercenary pursuit of wealth and the obligations of family and the heart and if you just get out of Shakespeare's way and let the play unfold they cast incredible shadows on each other. In my favorite production, Darko Tresnjac's staging with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock, the casket poems are kept on projected screens not just during the Belmont scene but in the following Venice scene, and they informed each other in amazing ways. Arin Arbus's recent Brooklyn production with John Douglas Thompson as Shylock concludes with Jessica singing not "S'lach lanu avinu" but "Kol Nidre"- also a Jewish hymn connected to atonement, but one that is also about the dissolution of economic bonds. As a story about the connections of money and power and social structure and the emotional depths beneath, Merchant is almost unparalleled. But you do actually have to figure out what to do with Shylock for a modern audience and simply 'tricking' the white, Christian part of your audience into acting racist while ignoring the possibility that you might have any Jews in the audience doesn't feel like the wisest strategy. And I think ultimately this isn't going to change how I feel overall about Palmer, that she is an incredibly smart and insightful writer and thinker about the intersections of history and the future, but anti-semitism is in the oxygen we breathe as Jews and every once in a while it hurts to remember that the rest of the world doesn't live that way.