seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2021-01-24 09:03 pm
seekingferret) wrote2021-01-24 09:03 pm
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I've tried a few ways over the past week to talk about my Hunt experience in a way that would be interesting. I haven't figured it out.
The basic summary of my Hunt experience is that for most of a weekend I sat at my computer solving puzzles while coordinating with my teammates on Discord via voice and text chat. On Sunday night, I sat at my computer in a zoom chat and helped my team find a coin hidden in a video game. I can't talk about my adventures on MIT campus, I can't talk about funny things that happened in our solving room, I can't talk about most of the usual stuff I talk about in a Hunt recap.
Nonetheless, stuff did happen. ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ built an entire MMO world as part of the Hunt, as a place to find puzzles, a place where puzzly minigames happened, and a place for other in-Hunt interactions. It was an incredible creation that made the Hunt feel immersive and replicated some of the feel of an in-person Hunt.
We solved the intro meta about an hour and a half into the Hunt, introducing us to the MMO world of upside down MIT- ⊥IW, the Perpendicular Institute of the World. I worked on puzzles for another couple hours and then logged back after Shabbos. Saturday night we solved several more submetas and two metapuzzles, I got a teeeny bit of sleep and then as everyone on the team woke up Sunday we picked up steam all day to make it to the finish line. We've been told that we solved our final meta about ten minutes before the second place team, that's how close it was.
It's hard to get the vibe of a room when you're all online, but I felt connected to my team through the whole Hunt and I felt like we were never really brutally stuck at any point in the Hunt. We were always making incremental progress on something, we were always good at communicating and redirecting puzzles to the right solvers, we were astonishingly good at avoiding talking over each other. When we were down to our final metapuzzle of the Hunt, we had about 80 people in a Discord room and Google Spreadsheet all working on the same puzzle, throwing out ideas and experimenting with solution paths and it never felt like chaos, and I have no idea how we managed it but it was amazing. I have no idea who to credit for the final solve, because probably two dozen people contributed meaningful insights, and the whole team was involved in data management and logicking and figuring things out. Our win was such a team effort.
After we solved the last meta, we went into a zoom call with Team Galactic, and we all uploaded ourselves into the MMO and went around the virtual campus comparing measurements provided in the real world via a Galactic member streaming video on MIT campus to measurements in the virtual world of the MMO. We solved one final geometry puzzle using this data and we found the coin, stashed in a vending machine at ⊥IW. It was a profound feeling of accomplishment. I've been going to the Mystery Hunt since 2006. I have been on a lot of losing teams. I was not a major contributor to us winning this year, but I did contribute and it feels so satisfying to have been part of this.
And now my calendar for the coming year has to accommodate working on writing the coming year's Hunt, which I am both excited and nervous for. And which you will not see very much about on this blog.
The basic summary of my Hunt experience is that for most of a weekend I sat at my computer solving puzzles while coordinating with my teammates on Discord via voice and text chat. On Sunday night, I sat at my computer in a zoom chat and helped my team find a coin hidden in a video game. I can't talk about my adventures on MIT campus, I can't talk about funny things that happened in our solving room, I can't talk about most of the usual stuff I talk about in a Hunt recap.
Nonetheless, stuff did happen. ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ built an entire MMO world as part of the Hunt, as a place to find puzzles, a place where puzzly minigames happened, and a place for other in-Hunt interactions. It was an incredible creation that made the Hunt feel immersive and replicated some of the feel of an in-person Hunt.
We solved the intro meta about an hour and a half into the Hunt, introducing us to the MMO world of upside down MIT- ⊥IW, the Perpendicular Institute of the World. I worked on puzzles for another couple hours and then logged back after Shabbos. Saturday night we solved several more submetas and two metapuzzles, I got a teeeny bit of sleep and then as everyone on the team woke up Sunday we picked up steam all day to make it to the finish line. We've been told that we solved our final meta about ten minutes before the second place team, that's how close it was.
It's hard to get the vibe of a room when you're all online, but I felt connected to my team through the whole Hunt and I felt like we were never really brutally stuck at any point in the Hunt. We were always making incremental progress on something, we were always good at communicating and redirecting puzzles to the right solvers, we were astonishingly good at avoiding talking over each other. When we were down to our final metapuzzle of the Hunt, we had about 80 people in a Discord room and Google Spreadsheet all working on the same puzzle, throwing out ideas and experimenting with solution paths and it never felt like chaos, and I have no idea how we managed it but it was amazing. I have no idea who to credit for the final solve, because probably two dozen people contributed meaningful insights, and the whole team was involved in data management and logicking and figuring things out. Our win was such a team effort.
After we solved the last meta, we went into a zoom call with Team Galactic, and we all uploaded ourselves into the MMO and went around the virtual campus comparing measurements provided in the real world via a Galactic member streaming video on MIT campus to measurements in the virtual world of the MMO. We solved one final geometry puzzle using this data and we found the coin, stashed in a vending machine at ⊥IW. It was a profound feeling of accomplishment. I've been going to the Mystery Hunt since 2006. I have been on a lot of losing teams. I was not a major contributor to us winning this year, but I did contribute and it feels so satisfying to have been part of this.
And now my calendar for the coming year has to accommodate working on writing the coming year's Hunt, which I am both excited and nervous for. And which you will not see very much about on this blog.