Mystery Hunt Writing!
Apr. 12th, 2022 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSo we wrote a Mystery Hunt this year!
It was kind of my whole life for at least the last six months of 2021. I put a bunch of things on hold. Sorry to the people that affected, but that was worth it. The 20 year old who went to Hunt on a lark in 2006 would have never believed that could happen, so I had to make the most of the opportunity.
A brief history of Mystery Hunt and me: The Mystery Hunt is a forty some odd year tradition at MIT, during their January Independent Activity Period, to hide a coin on campus that can only be found by solving complicated and brain-bending puzzles. It has been generally welcoming of outside solvers, so that at this point it is both a fun thing for MIT students to do on their winter break, and one of the biggest gatherings of puzzle solvers in the world to test their skills. I got dragged up to Cambridge by some friends when I was in college 15 years ago and have been returning ever since. The prize for winning Hunt is the dubious prize of getting to write the following Hunt. Initially I was on a middle of the pack team that never completed the Hunt and just tried to have as much fun together over the course of a weekend as possible.
After I missed a few years in the early 2010s, I discovered the team I'd been on had since fallen apart, and in casting about for a new team to Hunt with I ended up with Palindrome, a big open team of solvers with a wide variety of interests and skills and puzzle solving abilities. Palindrome had won the Hunt in 2007 and written the 2008 Hunt, and after that a lot of the team was reluctant to try to win again, because writing a Hunt is a lot of work. The people who still wanted to compete to win left Palindrome, and when I joined the team, it was a top ten team but not a serious contender to win. But over the next few years as new people joined and people who had written the 2008 Hunt started to change how they felt, we started pushing to win again around 2017. A string of heartbreaking second and third place finishes followed, until 2021 we actually won.
At some point a few months ago I was texting a college friend and she said "I remember you telling me that there was no chance of you ever winning Hunt, you just did it for fun anyway." How grateful I am that I was wrong, that I ended up on such a wonderful team of puzzle solvers and puzzle writers as Palindrome and somehow our fortunes aligned and we won the Hunt.
Our theme was Bookspace, an interconnected magical world where fictional characters from every book exist. Bookspace was organized around the 5 main libraries at MIT, and around different neighborhoods inspired by genres: Heartford for romance, Recipeoria for cookbooks, Sci-Ficisco for science fiction, and so on. Each of those represented a round of the Hunt with thematic puzzles. We actually kicked off things a month early with a set of somewhat easier teaser puzzles about fictional rodents called Star Rats- the intention was to get people excited, and to create a set of puzzles that can be shown to people to give them a sense of what Mystery Hunt will look like, without scaring them away. If you're one of the people reading this who has never touched a Hunt puzzle before, Star Rats is the place to start to see if you might find this kind of thing fun. At kickoff we revealed that obviously Star Rats was a stupid theme and a clear fakeout and segued into our real theme. (We had talked about making the teaser round a Hitchhiker's Guide round, since ours was the 42nd Mystery Hunt, but we decided that we wanted a fakeout theme nobody would be disappointed wasn't the real theme. Various Hitchhiker easter eggs are scattered throughout the Hunt, in any case.)
I did a lot of things for Hunt! I brainstormed and wrote puzzles, testsolved puzzles, made art assets, edited videos, and helped out in a bunch of small ways. Some discussion of each follows, in this very self-centered review of my Hunt experience. I don't know how to do differently- making a Hunt is such a big project and I was only a tiny part of it in a corner, I don't have the awareness to discuss everything we did in a properly contextualized way.
As is usual for me, there will be spoilers for things that happened in the Hunt and its puzzles. Probably less than usual, but I am a spoiler person.
Brainstorming started the day after we won last year's Hunt, really, We'd spent a weekend living intensely in the world that Galactic had created and we had lots of feelings about what Galactic had done well, and what it hadn't done quite as well, and what we wanted to do, and the first week or so after Hunt we did a very freeform braindump where we collected any random thoughts we had about features we wanted to include in our Hunt. After a few weeks, some people started organizing slightly more formal 'jam' sessions where we'd get together to talk about big ideas for what we wanted Hunt to look like.
Whatever you say about the Hunt experience, when we went back and looked at those early brainstorm sessions, it was sort of surprising to us how closely we hit our targets. Most of us wanted a Hunt where the coin was found Sunday morning and a bunch more teams would finish, and we got exactly that. We wanted a focus on accessibility and on a Hunt that made people from as many backgrounds and experience levels as possible feel like it was written with them in mind. We wanted a Hunt full of cool ideas, a Hunt that kept surprising you. We wanted a Hunt that expressed our team's personality, full of puns and curiosity. It's amazing in retrospect to piece together how important articulating our team goals was. We didn't have much in the way of process to check to make sure we were living up to our goals, but I think they were always in the back of my mind as we developed the Hunt, and that was important.
From there we moved on to developing the actual Hunt structure. We had several rounds of voting to select the theme, and the theme we ended up selecting turned out to be a combination of two separate theme pitches: a Phantom Tollbooth hunt and a more general book-themed hunt. We used some of the metaphysics of the Phantom Tollboth, and made Tock a major character in our story, but otherwise freed ourselves up to play with all sorts of books and stories and types of book.
Then the best thing happened. We started brainstorming the metapuzzle answers, which we wanted to be answers that would advance the story in various ways and be figure-outable but not easily guessable. This meant that puns were often the best kind of meta answer. So we literally had pun brainstorming meetings where we sat on a call for an hour making up bad puns. I know I keep saying that if you told younger me that I'd have embarked on this adventure I wouldn't believe it, but if you'd told younger me that I would get to have productive meetings that just consisted of flinging puns back and forth, I would know that I was truly living my best life. Pun meetings were my destiny.
I helped with the meta development process by testsolving and brainstorming, and I wrote a few meta puzzle ideas that didn't get very far in testing. I do love the metas we did end up coming up with, and I feel like being involved was a great learning experience even if none of my own meta ideas got anywhere.
I co-wrote two Mystery Hunt puzzles! The moment when the first of them cleared testsolving and I knew officially that I would have a puzzle in the Hunt was such a monumental feeling of satisfaction and pride. I texted Soctt, the only person who's been with me for all of my Hunt journey since 2006, to celebrate.
"What's in the Box? What's in the Box!?" is a troll puzzle. Every once in a while I end up in a room with people whose trolling instincts match mine and amazing things happen. This puzzle came about because we were brainstorming physical puzzles we could mail to solvers, and someone said "What if we just shipped them an empty box full of packing peanuts, and that was the puzzle?" In ordinary circumstances everyone would laugh and we'd move on to better ideas, all part of the brainstorming process, but no, it happened that it was a roomful of trolls (me, Jen, Shai, and Debby) and we all thought this was the greatest idea ever. We went through many ideas but for practical and environmental reasons the puzzle evolved to use shredded paper as the packing material instead of styrofoam peanuts. So solvers open up a box only to find a bunch of shredded paper they need to reassemble to find the monsters in the box, and thereby decode the answer. The video of our testsolvers opening the test box and shouting "Why do you hate us? Why do you hate us?" gives me joy like nothing else in the world.
For added punning fun, we decided the puzzle should use PostScript (because we were using the postal service for the puzzle, geddit?), so um... then I taught myself enough PostScript to write the puzzle. Mystery Hunt has taught me so many things! As a mostly non-programmer, I didn't expect to pick it up that quickly, but I feel like PostScript was relatively easy to learn for me because I know AutoCAD. Postscript is weird, I enjoy the thought that because of this puzzle, a bunch of solvers know a lot more about how it works now.
There was a nice division of labor in the puzzle as a result of who the authors were. My co-author Debby, a graphic designer, did all the font work, and I, a CAD designer, did all the PostScript drawing stuff. Then we worked with our physical puzzle coordinator Ben to source the materials. And we got great feedback and idea contributions from Jen and Shai as the puzzle evolved.
I don't entirely know how good it is objectively, as a puzzle. Our live test-solve group had a lot of fun, but some virtual testsolvers thought the puzzle was too straightforward. The intellectual work of the puzzle is in figuring out what's going on; Once you understand how the puzzle works, there's no more solving, just execution. This is sort of against our team puzzle aesthetic, we aspire for puzzles that have both a satisfying Aha and a satisfying amount of puzzly solving work, but the overall trappings of the puzzle are such that we wanted the solving to be kind of straightforward, since reassembling the shreds promised to be a pain in the neck. It's a troll puzzle, it shouldn't be excruciatingly hard. We have other puzzles for that.
But after we testsolved the puzzle (three virtual testsolves, one in person testsolve with Boston area people), we had to make it! Physical. actual postproduction! I handled getting quotes from print shops to print all of the pages of the puzzle, and dealt with the printing. Then the plan was that I would drive all the paper up to Somerville to do an assembly line of shredding and packing, but unfortunately I got stuck working on Sunday the weekend that was supposed to happen, so I shipped the paper up to Somerville and my teammates Ben and Debby and Jen (and possibly others?) heroically shredded and packed 200 boxes to send to teams. Debby afterward: "Next time we do anything like this: two shredders." (Getting the right shredder was itself a small feat. Most modern personal shredders are cross-cut shredders, which are more effective for security but slower. 'More effective for security' means way too hard for solvers to reassemble. We needed a strip cut shredder, but most available strip cut shredders are designed for corporate bulk shredding, in places where speed trumps security, and cost thousands of dollars. Eventually we were able to track down an in-budget strip cut shredder.)
My favorite story about this puzzle is that after we made the boxes available online for ordering, a team reached out to us and told us that the people receiving the puzzle on their team were celebrating birthdays that weekend, and would we mind slipping in a birthday card for them? We then had a chat that consisted of me shouting SHRED THE CARD! SHRED THE CARD! We ultimately decided to shred the card, but put it in a separate envelope in the box so that it wouldn't risk being confused for a part of the puzzle. On the weekend of the Hunt, the solvers got the card and were very confused but eventually delighted when they understood what had happened.
Other bits of trolliness: At our in-person testsolve, Joon submitted GWYNETH PALTROW'S HEAD as the answer before he'd even started to solve, because of the puzzle title. We decided to include an easter egg that if any team called that in, we would reply with a message that they had been automatically subscribed to Goop. Sadly nobody did. Also, the very first canned hint for this puzzle said something like "Have you checked your garbage can to see if there's any puzzle in it?" I don't know if we actually sent that hint to any solvers, it was more a joke for the hinters.
"Royal Steeds" is a puzzle that exists in lieu of the puzzle I really wanted to write, which would have been a Cambridge Blue Bike bikearound- a puzzle where solvers would have to ride around Cambridge on rented bikes following instructions and solving clues. Sadly when the Hunt went remote that dream died (and ha, it might have died in an in person Hunt anyway, I'm not sure our editors would have authorized a biking activity in the winter in Boston), but I rebooted it as an idea for a puzzle about identifying photos of Blue Bike stations. Originally it was just going to be a bunch of contextless photos and a clever, puzzly extraction mechanism, but when the extraction mechanism was rejected for being too similar to that of Red Herring, we evolved the puzzle in a way that I think was much better than the original idea, by adding in Boston trivia about the area near each bike station. It became a puzzle designed to give remote solvers a little taste of the Boston experience, and hopefully introduce even Boston locals to cool stuff about the Boston area they didn't know. Boston is such a batshit city. One of the things I've always loved about runaround puzzles is the way they involve you moving around familiar spaces made newly unfamiliar and strange (the greatest runaround moment in Hunt history, IMO, is when Evil Midnight managed to make you see the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse on Mass Ave as the "RAGE WAREHOUSE"), and I was trying to achieve a similar effect here. Like, "You know that staid old historical state house building? It's secretly a unicorn stable." ... "You know that warehouse by the sea port? It's haunted by a sea monster." "You know that chic shopping district in Back Bay? There's a fairy store there." I really enjoyed doing the research for this puzzle, I learned all sorts of interesting historical stuff. I also tried to make a point of emphasis to the African-American history of the Boston area, as highlighted on the Cambridge Black History Ride, the Boston Black Heritage Trail, and the Boston Green Book Tour.
My favorite locus of all the things this puzzle was trying to be about was Kittie Knox, so let me talk at you about Kittie Knox. In the late 1800s cycling was starting to become a big thing in America, and clubs were formed to get cyclists together. Kittie Knox was super-into cycling and she joined the Boston chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, and she rode in a bunch of their races and other events and it was all fine until the national organization passed a rule in the 1890s banning black members, and there was a whole furor until they decided to grandfather her in. USA Cycling's website has this great article about her adventures on a bicycle: I loved that she gave me a fantasy theme hook, and a bicycling hook, and a Boston African American history hook; I also just loved learning about her life.
Also, I decided this was a little too macabre for the puzzle, but the tombstone of one of the judges from the Salem Witch Trials is in Cambridge, and it's super-creepy.
One of the things I most love about Mystery Hunt is that it's such an eclectic experience that it inevitably becomes a learning experience. You will inevitably end up working on a puzzle about something you know nothing about. When we did testsolving, the two most successful types of solvers were native Bostonians, and Australians. I think the Australians had the distance to approach everything completely fresh and with a willingness to learn. I hope this puzzle was educational as well as fun, I hope people learned cool things about the history and geography of Boston from this puzzle.
My co-writer Jenny, a Somervillain, took most of the photographs, but I went up to Boston one weekend to drive them around and get some of the photos that were in more mass transit inaccessible regions. This was really fun. We got to go around, stick an adorable stuffed bunny in the basket of blue bikes, and take a bunch of photos while I geeked out about Boston history. We stopped in on a couple of sites that didn't make the final puzzle, too, like the Dragon for Dorchester. Meanwhile, I can't say enough good things about the work Jenny did, adventuring all over Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville to take the photos for the puzzle. They're all excellent, with just the right amount of detail to make identifying them possible but tricky.
Our editor Katie was very helpful at helping us identify problems and working around them. She was also delightful to kibitz with during our testsolves.
We had a problem in testsolving with extraction: our final clue phrase required solvers to find a particular station from its station number. Using the blue bike map, the only way to do this is to click a bunch of stations until you find the one with the matching station number, which is an inelegant puzzle step to require. There is in fact a list of station numbers with station locations downloadable off the Blue Bike website, which would make this lookup a lot easier, but until recently it was buried in a place that I had been able to find but our testsolvers had not. Jenny solved this problem by reaching out to the marketing team for Blue Bikes and asking them to update the website to make the list more accessible. To our surprise, they were happy to help.
So let me throw out a plug: If you're in Boston and want to move around quickly and have fun, Blue Bikes are an amazing way to do so. I've used them every time I go to Boston the past couple of years, even though I usually drive up and have my car available. During in person Mystery Hunts, they're the quickest way to get from my hotel to our Hunt HQ, no worrying about parking! They were also a great way to navigate the city's Fourth of July crowds while avoiding overloaded mass transit. The bike checkout is easy, the bikes themselves are solid, reliable, and easy to ride, and there are stations everywhere! And their marketing people are great.
I have an author credit on Funny Face, a delightful puzzle about mashed up actor faces, which is probably undeserved but after a testsolve session I spent an hour or two researching and suggesting some alternate people to clue, so I'm grateful that Sue thought that was useful enough to give me a credit for. I also have an almost entirely unearned credit for our Cryptic Dixit event, which I helped come up with along with Shai, designed the initial rule set for, ran one test-solve session for, and then didn't do any work to develop. It ended up being a fantastic event, though! Ashley did an amazing job of taking it to the finish line. It was inspired by a daily challenge on our discord to write cryptic clues for the Merriam Webster Word of the Day, which I didn't actually do every day but we were all having a lot of fun with it and thought that solvers might also enjoy a cryptic clue writing challenge. Our intention was to have a cryptic clue event that was fun for experienced cryptic solvers, but which was accessible and fun for less experienced solvers. So we came up with Dixit rules as a way to try to inspire clues that were reasonably tractable. Our other hope was that in between giving clues, solvers could ask for explanations of clues they didn't get. Hopefully it turned some new people onto cryptic puzzles, which have become my favorite kind of puzzle since the Pandemic gave me time and motivation to finally figure them out. Also at some point in the future I hope to try to run Cryptic Dixit at a CTY reunion.
I'm not going to talk about most of the puzzles I wrote that didn't make the Hunt, because a lot of them have germs of ideas that I or one of my co-writers might still want to use for something in the future. But I failed a lot, and I want to talk about that in at least general terms.
Some of my puzzles failed because there's a big gap between saying "This seems like an idea that could work for a puzzle" and actually working out the details, especially for a relative novice puzzle maker like me. I worked on a couple puzzles where it seemed like the overall idea could work but I couldn't find enough sub-pieces that were fun to solve. I also worked on some puzzles that I definitely could make, but I found I wasn't enjoying the work of writing and designing them. I had a puzzle idea that involved me writing thousands of words of fiction, a needle in the haystack puzzle where solvers needed to figure out what parts of the story were clueful, and I burned out on trying to write all that fiction in a way that was interesting and fun. I also had a puzzle idea with a big Jewish thematic component where the Jewish encoding part was really cool, but the other half of the puzzle didn't work at all when I sat down to figure out the details.
Some puzzles cleared that hurdle and still didn't work for structural Hunt reasons. Sandy and I got pretty far into developing one puzzle idea. We'd worked out a full draft extraction and I'd started to make proof of concept artwork, and then it got rejected by the editors because it didn't comply with some of the requirements of the metapuzzle we thought it would fit into. The same sort of objection happened with Royal Steeds, but in that case we were able to rethink the puzzle and make it work in a different way. But after some further brainstorming, Sandy and I just just gave up on this one. It's still a great puzzle idea, in my opinion, but not for this Hunt.
In one of our first brainstorming meetings, Jen gave a short speech about negative feedback: that we should expect it and listen to it and not take it personally. This is so critical to making a good Hunt. It is hard to work on something for a long time and be told it's not good enough, and it's hard to work on something for a long time and be told that it's good enough but still can't be accepted. But if you want a Hunt that is going to be fun for solvers, you have to have people who can give that feedback, and you have to have people who will listen to it and be willing to accept failure.
Our team tracker says I testsolved 111 puzzles. This number is not quite right, I also testsolved a few meta ideas before the tracker was fully up, and I solo test-solved a few puzzles towards the end that I didn't bother putting in the tracking system. But it's pretty close. It's also nowhere near the highest number on the team, Renee is listed at 144 testsolve sessions. Still, it's a massive number of testsolves and I feel it's one of my big contributions to the Hunt effort. For months, I'd get home from work every day and the first thing I'd do was check and see if there were any testsolves that night I could jump into.
Nearly all of our testsolves were group sessions on Discord voice chat with a google spreadsheet, which meant puzzle authors could watch us solve (and make fun of us in private chat). I think on the whole it worked really well. Authors got to see their puzzles put through the paces and really get a feel for all of the beats of the solving process- what things do solvers see first, what do they need more help finding, how do you adjust the presentation of what they need to see to solve, but not too easily? I also think the experience was incredibly educational for all of us in seeing how solvers think, in learning the differences between broken puzzles and clean puzzles, in thinking about how to make puzzles work, in figuring out how to put yourself in the solver's mind.
Every single test session I participated in, I left feeling more excited about the Hunt we were making. Even the most horribly broken and frustrating puzzles, the testsolve sessions that took 4 hours and felt like they asked us to do arbitrary and unclued solving steps or were full of typos and factual errors(*coughcough*guilty look*coughcough*), showed off the amazing ideas all of my teammates had. All of the writers I talked to were receptive to criticism. I think in general we took the approach that we wanted the most fun puzzles possible, not the most aesthetically brilliant constructions, so solver feedback was everything in the development process.
Palindrome had a reasonably consistent puzzle aesthetic. I mean, there's a lot of us and some of us like some kinds of puzzles more than others, but most of us want essentially the same kind of solving experience: Puzzles that yield to thinking, puzzles where each step has some sort of confirmation so that the solver can say "I don't know where this is going, but I know I'm on the right track" when they're on the right track. A lot of our puzzles are hard, but I think even the hardest is tractable- it has ways in that are reasonably well signposted, so that if you look at it and are flummoxed, you can at least say "I'm baffled, but at least I have an idea of what to do to start, and maybe then I'll figure out what comes next."
Some of my favorite puzzles that I testsolved, and that people should check out, include this list of puzzles. I've tried to break them out between those that might be on the easier side and those that are tougher or require domain specific knowledge, but puzzle difficulty is deeply personal and hard to judge. The range of puzzle styles on this list is amazing, my team is incredible.
Three Blind Mice
Peter Pan
The Missing Piece
Your Name is a Song
Harold and the Purple Crayon
THIS IS NOW A PUZZLE
Eat Your Words
Ice Cream Roll
Albumistanumerophobia
Minor Details
49ers
Dancing Triangles
Midterm of Unspeakable Chaos (and its amazing predecessor that nobody got to see because it was too hard)
How To Spell With Gears and Arrows
Protein
Repetition and Variation
Sorcery for Dummies
The Colour Out of Space
The 4500 Year Itch
Beaux Taurus
Crow Facts 3000
Word Search of Babel
But I testsolved over a hundred puzzles. And all of them are amazing, even the ones that didn't make Hunt because of testsolve feedback. And also there's another hundred or so puzzles I didn't testsolve, and all of them are awesome, too. My team is the coolest, guys. You can see the rest of the puzzles right now a https://puzzles.mit.edu/2022/puzzles/ .
We also did some other testing- testsolving of events, testing of larger sections of the Hunt website and how they interacted, testsolving of the endgame in various stages of completion.
I flipped back through messages and we started talking about how we were going to present the story theatrically in August, which is about two months two late in my opinion. We had our meta structure and story in place by early May, we should have been developing scripts immediately. We didn't for two reasons: One, it was partially just an oversight, nobody was put in charge of doing it and everyone figured someone else was worrying about it. But two, we were still at least theoretically planning to be able to deploy either a live Hunt and a virtual Hunt until August when we finally decided we had to go virtual. This made planning for acting hard- the scripts you write for video are different than the scripts you write for live performance. So we hit August, decide we're going virtual, and everyone suddenly realized we're going to need a lot of video and we don't have anyone working on it.
Our amazing acting captain Jenny took over and I got assigned to be in charge of video production. Which was not what I'd been really looking for. I'd volunteered to help with video editing because of my experience with fanvidding. But fanvidding and video production are not the same thing. Fanvidding involves taking footage that for the most part has been filmed and graded and assembled by professionals who mostly know what they're doing, and re-assembling it in the editor. Here we were getting raw footage of wildly varying quality and trying to make it look good and tell the story we wanted to tell. This was a lot of new stuff for me! So I'd hoped to just be able to contribute rather than leading the team. I'd hoped we would turn out to have someone who actually had experience working with a whole video production process, but nobody else stepped up so I had to. This started with writing up the guidelines for how video was shot. I tried for straightforward, easy to understand guidelines that weren't fifty pages long but gave guidance that would make my life as editor easier. I probably should have been more specific, in retrospect, and some people could have read my guidelines more carefully. There were definitely time-wasting problems with the footage that could have been avoided if we'd communicated better. But warts and all the video I received to edit was amazing. I kept laughing again and again as I edited it.
There's a difference between knowing that problems lie ahead, and actually dealing with those problems. I learned a lot in the process. I think we produced videos that are good enough for the Hunt, but not as good as I wanted them to be. My driving principle was that it's better to have bad looking video than no video at all.
What we have is significantly better than bad looking video, but most of the credit goes to the actors, who uniformly did an amazing job of inhabiting their characters and making them funny and real. All of the videos can be seen in our story archive and I highly recommend watching them. One of the most lightly edited by me was Recipeoria, which had an amazing performance by honorary Palindrome member Weird Al Yankovic.
We had a lot of video to do. We obviously needed a video kickoff, that's essentially a requirement at this point. The rest of it was open ended but we essentially wanted to tell our whole story in video so our acting captain mapped out the story beats and we farmed out writing of all of the scripts for each story beat. The scripts got written through September (I wrote the ones for Whoston, full of innuendo about petty academic feuds), edited in October (there was a lot of care taken here to make sure nothing in the scripts were spoilery or distracting toward any puzzle solutions), and were filmed in November, giving us about two months to get it all edited and assembled and captioned for Hunt.
I had hoped to have everything edited by Mid-December, when I disappeared to go to Worldcon, but unfortunately I fell behind because making everything work visually was more work then I'd anticipated, and we initially didn't get any volunteers to help me edit. I set a new deadline of having a draft of everything by New Year's. We almost met this, with the heroic help of Sue and Lea, who jumped on to help me edit everything. We also hired a freelancer to handle the Tock videos. Sue especially was a hero. She was originally drafted to take some of the easier videos off my plate, the ones where all one needed to do was cut them up and throw a logo at the front, but as I fell behind she also took on our Kickoff video and put a massive amount of work into making it fit together, under a tight deadline and all the while pushing the limits of her skills. But the final version she created is amazing. We had drafts of everything by January 2nd, and then spent the last two weeks tuning the details to get everything to be the best we could make it. But honestly, 'tuning the details' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The last two weeks were chaotic, with some reshoots required to get the video to acceptable standards, a lot of extremely tedious timing edits, a lot of audio editing, and a lot of time spent fixing background replacements and adjusting colors. In one video I realized way too late that the reason chroma keying wasn't working was because the polka dots on the actor's sweater exactly matched the color of the background. I finished editing the video Wednesday night, and the last edit of some of the videos was uploaded to Youtube Thursday afternoon, just a day before Hunt. Whew!
I love the characters we developed, I think they give our videos a lot of color. The characters had to be iconic in short doses, recognizable versions of tropes but not recognizable versions of particular characters. I love our hardboiled noir detective, our harried motivational speaker, our slightly shady fantasyland peddler, our slightly over-serious biographer, our needlessly specific handyman, and all the other characters of Pen Station, I spent a lot of time editing the Ministry videos and each of those characters makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I spent a chunk of time the night before Hunt making silly gifs of the Ministers to toss around on our Discord.
Dan Katz's blog post on the Hunt says that the resulting videos were too many and too skippable, and so he skipped them. Others are saying similar things in the comments. This is disappointing to hear, but I am proud of all of our video, and I know that some people watched them, anyway, and enjoyed the breaks for humor and story amid all the puzzling.
Thinking about the criticisms, I think the root of the problem is something structural we debated a lot as we developed the scripts: Mystery Hunt involves a lot of teams with a lot of levels of puzzle skill, and every team will see a different Hunt. How do you approach presenting story content to teams at these different levels? We knew from our puzzle structure plan that some slower teams might get advanced in the Hunt ahead of solving some metapuzzles, if they wanted to see more of the puzzles. But the metapuzzle answers often contained key plot points, and key plot points often therefore discussed meta spoilers. We made the decision that all of our story videos would only contain spoilers for the specific meta they were following and no other metas. None of the Round 3 videos were allowed to contain any reference to the things solvers learned when they solved the Round 2 metameta. I think this inherently makes them skippable and inessential, and solvers picked up on that and skipped them. But I don't necessarily have a better solution when running an online Hunt. When staging a Hunt live, the actors can adjust their lines to the particular team they're visiting, but we quickly decided that making multiple versions of the videos to juggle spoilers was largely an impossible task, and we also rejected doing too many live Zoom interactions because we had nearly 400 teams signed up and we barely had the manpower for making the post-Round 2 interaction live. I don't know. I guess having metapuzzle answers that don't contain story spoilers is also an option, but not a very attractive one. We made the decisions we made and overall I think they were fine, if imperfect. But it's something to keep brainstorming about, maybe there is a better solution than the one we chose.
People might be interested in some of the technical details of putting together the video, but feel free to skip.
The most complicated video for me to assemble was the Ministry Introduction. This was a key introduction for most solvers to the main story concepts of the Hunt- Bookspace and its whole metaphysics, and the types of characters solvers would meet along the way. We originally thought we might just record it in a Zoom chat, but I rejected that idea for a mixture of technical and artistic reasons. I wanted the power to be able to work with individual pieces of video for each minister and assemble them myself, and I was worried that Zoom video would limit me too much. I also worried that if people had internet issues it would screw with the video, especially since our minister actors are scattered all around the world from Boston to Australia. I think in the end I was right to insist, but it made an awful lot of extra work for me. But because I was assembling our own video chat from separately recorded videos, we got to call it Spacebook Messenger and completely decorate it and theme it with our own artwork and sounds, and I think that made it feel more like an otherworldly thing. It also let me maximize the sizes of everyone's faces on the video, enabled some nice visual gags (a giant mute symbol over Hayden's face instead of the usual little icon from Zoom), and allowed the green screening to be a lot better looking. Alexi Lewis, for example, had an amazing costume whose colors were not green screen friendly at all. If he'd just used zoom backgrounds, large parts of his chest would have been invisible or fading in and out, but because I was working in Da Vinci Resolve, I could mask out his chest to mostly preserve all the colors. So there were lots of benefits, but it was an exhausting process.
The ministers recorded a take of the whole scene together on zoom, which they then used as a click track/ reference take to record their lines individually. They also recorded some extra takes of just their line deliveries for me to use. This mostly worked out great, but the timings of some of the recordings drifted over time in spite of the click track, so I had to slip in some stealth or not so stealth cuts to get the timing back into synch.
I made a set of masks in Glimpse for each of the video layouts, so that I had exact guides for positioning the video. Every time another character joined, I repositioned the clips into a new mask. The minister actors worked out blocking so they knew where they would be displaying relative to each other, and could 'look at' each other as they talked.
Here's a look at the timeline, you can see vertically each blue row represents one of the ministers and all of the cuts show places where I was adjusting clip position or timing. And the video editing process was complicated enough that every time I had to do a render it took an hour to render 6 minutes of video.
Other videos that offered challenges included the Quest Coast (fantasy) video, which I really wanted to have some fantastic background scenery, so I repositioned the actor and did some masking to make it seem like he was behind an alchemist's desk, and the Lake Eerie (horror) video, which called for some eerie graveyard scenes.
If you look closely you can see all the glitchy places in the videos, but on the whole I think it tells the stories we wanted to tell in a fun, funny way. And if we ever do this again (ha!) I will be much more prepared.
We had an overall team goal toward making the most accessible Hunt we could, but captioning videos was particularly important to me both because it meant that the videos I edited would be more visible to more people, and because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
speckled_llama looked me in the eye a few months before Hunt and said "You're captioning the videos, right?" I was pleased that I could reassure her that it was already part of the plan.
Additionally, captioning was great because we had some people on Palindrome who hadn't done much in the way of writing puzzles, and this was a relatively simple thing that they could do to contribute to making the Hunt better. I ran two or three training sessions to teach people how to use Aegisub for making captions, and managed the process of assigning people to captioning different videos, and I ended up captioning a few videos myself, but mostly other people stepped up and did awesome work with this. I'm sure I'm forgetting people, but Joe and Adam and Amy and Rachel did great work. And Jenny had a lot of fun especially being creative with the captions for instrumental sections- we got a lot of compliments on that work. Renee also stepped up to do a checking and proofreading pass of all of the captions in the last few days before Hunt.
I am not an artist AT ALL, but I am a reasonably competent computer drafter, and I sort of know my way around some image editing software. My goal in the art department was to do what i could to lighten the load of the more talented artists on the team. I made the grids for my puzzle Royal Steeds myself, using Inkscape. I laid out the back sides of the pages for What's in the Box?! in Glimpse, with royalty free artwork from Irasutoya. And as mentioned above, I taught myself just enough PostScript to draw the shapes for that puzzle's extraction.
I also did the artwork for one other puzzle, How To Collide Particles. It looked like the kind of diagram you could draw in TikZ/LaTeX, so I did some poking around in the manual and relearned just enough TikZ to draw the diagrams. I then converted the output to SVG with a command line pdf2svg tool so that I could do a final alignment cleanup in Inkscape before exporting to png. It felt like the kind of puzzle where the LaTeX aesthetic was appropriate, I'm proud of how the collision diagrams look. I am horrified by how the code looks. There's probably a better way to write it, but it works.
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It is hilarious to me that I made art assets for this Hunt in PostScript and in LaTeX. I might be a nerd.
Meanwhile if you want to see what the real artists on the team were doing, our Art Director Justin's post on his work is almost too thorough. (Ferret says, deep into a Hunt writeup that took months to assemble)
During Hunt, I was assigned the overnight Saturday into Sunday shift on the message queue, because of Shabbos. I got a nice long nap over Shabbos and then logged in. My job was to keep an eye on messages coming in and deal with them, whatever that meant. A lot of the messages were about potential errors in the puzzle- I had to then check the puzzle and solution and see if I agreed that there was an error, and then check with the puzzle writers and tech team to see about fixing the mistake, or if it wasn't a mistake, answer the team in a way that was clear without spoiling anything further about the puzzle. Most of the time this was the case- the reason something seemed to be an error was that the solvers hadn't figured out some key idea about how a puzzle worked. My stock answer was "The puzzle seems to be correct as it is." You don't want to say "There's definitely no mistakes" because what if we missed something, but you don't even necessarily want to go so far as to say "Yes, that misspelling is there for a reason" because that might constitute a hint.
My favorite puzzle error was a message from a British solver telling us that a construction shutdown of a Tube station had broken one of our puzzles. There wasn't much we could do about that- a British teammate sent them a message acknowledging the issue, bitching about the construction delays, and telling them to imagine time traveling to last week. In another case, we discovered a number was wrong in an image created for a puzzle. It was 3 in the morning and none of the creators of the puzzle or art team people were awake, so I volunteered go in and edit the correct number into the photo. It was a simple image manipulation, but using image editing software at 3AM was still kind of terrifying. I feel like that's the kind of thing you ought to get a license before you're allowed to do. There was also a fun question about whether we had meant Manet or Monet in a puzzle that I could not for the life of me figure out if we'd made a mistake- had to get the puzzle author to check.
We also got a lot of email because of the puzzle Tech Support, hilariously. Solvers misunderstanding where to send the fake help request messages for that puzzle frequently emailed HQ by mistake. We got questions about the event schedule, we got questions about real tech glitches on the site, we got questions from people who just wanted to say hi, and people who just wanted to grumble about puzzles.
Things were a bit hectic late Saturday evening but as it moved into early Sunday morning things calmed down. The three people on email queue duty were me, an Aussie, and a Brit and as we kibitzed to pass the time, I was struck by the weirdnesses of time zones and how the joy of puzzling had brought us together from around the world. At calmer moments I tried to step in and help with our hinting as well- we didn't make hints available to the first teams to solve a puzzle, but once it had been solved a number of times, we were free with hints to teams that were trailing, because we wanted everyone to be having fun and making progress.
I also volunteered to help with running the only event that wasn't on Shabbos, a cross between Taboo and Pictionary we called Picaboo. People were given a list of words to draw, and a list of related things they weren't allowed to draw, and the rest of their team had to guess what they were drawing. The words got progressively more abstract and harder and eventually solvers had to identify a hidden connection between all the groups of words. I didn't really do all that much, Wil and Ashley ran the event, and it was just my job to be a visible Palindrome team member for puzzlers to ask questions to, and to pop into solvers' Discord channels to follow their progress and make sure they weren't frustrated. People seemed like they were having a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, there were so many other things happening that I was keeping half an eye on in the Discord. A bunch of our team was grading scavenger hunt entries and other creative submissions from teams. Another group was doing live interactions with teams on Zoom in character as the Ministers. Our tech team was constantly working to resolve all sorts of website problems. And we were generally trying to keep our finger on the pulse of solver sentiment, and make sure teams were happy with the progression of the experience. It takes a lot of people to make Hunt happen and Palindrome was so fun to work with as game control.
It was fascinating to be behind the scenes for the Hunt as teams progressed through it. Our tech team put together a variety of tracking tools for following team progress, and they tweaked them as we moved through the Hunt to provide more of the information we wanted to have. Everyone was frantically refreshing throughout the Hunt to see who had solved what puzzle most recently. In addition to keeping an eye on the frontrunners, we were all keeping our eye on our own puzzles and how frequently they were being solved. I was also peeking at a few teams I have friends on. We also spent a bunch of time sharing funny wrong answers and other messages from the teams, keeping an eye on the more qualitative feedback we got on how teams were doing, trying to resolve anything that was making teams not have fun. Besides the puzzles, of course. Those were supposed to be frustrating.
By Saturday night the three top teams, Death and Mayhem, Left Out, and Teammate, were bunched in a tight cluster with a significant lead over the rest of the teams. Death and Mayhem had held a narrow lead since Friday but they lost that lead overnight Saturday as they seemed to get stuck on a couple of the tough later metapuzzles. The lead swung back and forth between the three teams as the night progressed, and none of us had a clear idea who was likely to win- whichever team managed to crack a couple of tough puzzles would have the edge. The leading teams had also earned the right to bypass a couple of puzzles they were stuck on, and we were keeping an eye on when they would strategically choose to use those bypasses.
Early morning Sunday, Teammate pulled ahead with the help of their free answers, solving the final metapuzzle and entering the endgame. We anxiously watched their progress while keeping an eye on their competition to see if one of them could catch up while they were stuck on the tricky final puzzle, which required teams to jump back around doing a mini-scavenger Hunt around our website. They cracked it and found the coin around 10AM Sunday in a Zoom call with most of Palindrome watching. Everyone was exhausted and it was kind of an anticlimax. I was supposed to go off shift at 8AM, but I stayed up through the coin being found, and then I went to sleep right afterward and slept most of Sunday. They day shift kept actively running the Hunt for teams through around 6PM, and another dozen or so teams managed to make it through the endgame before we closed down for good.
I don't exactly have concluding thoughts. The Hunt we wrote is full to the brim of who we are as a team, so I can't give it an objective assessment. But I think it is largely the Hunt we wanted to write, and I hope people had fun solving it. I didn't burn out, but I don't think I want to do anything like it anytime soon. But viewing writing a Hunt as a once in a lifetime opportunity, I'm so glad I go the opportunity and I'm so proud of how I used it.
I went up to MIT my first time with no idea what to expect. I liked word puzzles, and I was a nerd and an engineer, but puzzles weren't a fundamental part of how I saw the world. But I'd never seen a puzzle like a Mystery Hunt puzzle. I flailed against them for hours and any tiny progress felt like the biggest achievement in the world. Maybe more importantly, making any tiny progress felt like I was opening up a whole new world. I spent several years returning and sucking at puzzles, and gradually I got a little better. I came to see solving puzzles as a basic tool for interpreting the world around me. I've competed in twelve Hunts over the past fifteen years. It certainly made me a better engineer, hopefully it made me a better person. And it's been an immense amount of fun, and given me a lot of joy and community and friendship.
I hope that the work I did helped give that experience to new people. I hope we did a good job of continuing the tradition of paying forward the fun we have had solving Mystery Hunts.
I have scars from the experience of writing Hunt, but more importantly, I have souvenirs! We ended up with enough extra coins for the writing team to get them, so now I have two Mystery Hunt coins, one from the year we won and one from the year we wrote. I also got a New Berry lapel pin, the bonus prize we created for teams that solved the round 2 metametapuzzle. I also have a few Hunt shirts, and some wall posters featuring art from the Hunt. I also have a poster of a beached dragon I discovered while researching Royal Steeds.
The Coin!
New Berry pin
Hunt poster
But my favorite souvenir is what Ben made for me and the other co-authors of What's in the Box?- a framed collection of leftover shreds from the puzzle. It's so beautiful and so trollish and I will treasure it.
The shreds!
Lastly, if anyone has any questions, I may be able to answer.
It was kind of my whole life for at least the last six months of 2021. I put a bunch of things on hold. Sorry to the people that affected, but that was worth it. The 20 year old who went to Hunt on a lark in 2006 would have never believed that could happen, so I had to make the most of the opportunity.
A brief history of Mystery Hunt and me: The Mystery Hunt is a forty some odd year tradition at MIT, during their January Independent Activity Period, to hide a coin on campus that can only be found by solving complicated and brain-bending puzzles. It has been generally welcoming of outside solvers, so that at this point it is both a fun thing for MIT students to do on their winter break, and one of the biggest gatherings of puzzle solvers in the world to test their skills. I got dragged up to Cambridge by some friends when I was in college 15 years ago and have been returning ever since. The prize for winning Hunt is the dubious prize of getting to write the following Hunt. Initially I was on a middle of the pack team that never completed the Hunt and just tried to have as much fun together over the course of a weekend as possible.
After I missed a few years in the early 2010s, I discovered the team I'd been on had since fallen apart, and in casting about for a new team to Hunt with I ended up with Palindrome, a big open team of solvers with a wide variety of interests and skills and puzzle solving abilities. Palindrome had won the Hunt in 2007 and written the 2008 Hunt, and after that a lot of the team was reluctant to try to win again, because writing a Hunt is a lot of work. The people who still wanted to compete to win left Palindrome, and when I joined the team, it was a top ten team but not a serious contender to win. But over the next few years as new people joined and people who had written the 2008 Hunt started to change how they felt, we started pushing to win again around 2017. A string of heartbreaking second and third place finishes followed, until 2021 we actually won.
At some point a few months ago I was texting a college friend and she said "I remember you telling me that there was no chance of you ever winning Hunt, you just did it for fun anyway." How grateful I am that I was wrong, that I ended up on such a wonderful team of puzzle solvers and puzzle writers as Palindrome and somehow our fortunes aligned and we won the Hunt.
Our theme was Bookspace, an interconnected magical world where fictional characters from every book exist. Bookspace was organized around the 5 main libraries at MIT, and around different neighborhoods inspired by genres: Heartford for romance, Recipeoria for cookbooks, Sci-Ficisco for science fiction, and so on. Each of those represented a round of the Hunt with thematic puzzles. We actually kicked off things a month early with a set of somewhat easier teaser puzzles about fictional rodents called Star Rats- the intention was to get people excited, and to create a set of puzzles that can be shown to people to give them a sense of what Mystery Hunt will look like, without scaring them away. If you're one of the people reading this who has never touched a Hunt puzzle before, Star Rats is the place to start to see if you might find this kind of thing fun. At kickoff we revealed that obviously Star Rats was a stupid theme and a clear fakeout and segued into our real theme. (We had talked about making the teaser round a Hitchhiker's Guide round, since ours was the 42nd Mystery Hunt, but we decided that we wanted a fakeout theme nobody would be disappointed wasn't the real theme. Various Hitchhiker easter eggs are scattered throughout the Hunt, in any case.)
I did a lot of things for Hunt! I brainstormed and wrote puzzles, testsolved puzzles, made art assets, edited videos, and helped out in a bunch of small ways. Some discussion of each follows, in this very self-centered review of my Hunt experience. I don't know how to do differently- making a Hunt is such a big project and I was only a tiny part of it in a corner, I don't have the awareness to discuss everything we did in a properly contextualized way.
As is usual for me, there will be spoilers for things that happened in the Hunt and its puzzles. Probably less than usual, but I am a spoiler person.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming started the day after we won last year's Hunt, really, We'd spent a weekend living intensely in the world that Galactic had created and we had lots of feelings about what Galactic had done well, and what it hadn't done quite as well, and what we wanted to do, and the first week or so after Hunt we did a very freeform braindump where we collected any random thoughts we had about features we wanted to include in our Hunt. After a few weeks, some people started organizing slightly more formal 'jam' sessions where we'd get together to talk about big ideas for what we wanted Hunt to look like.
Whatever you say about the Hunt experience, when we went back and looked at those early brainstorm sessions, it was sort of surprising to us how closely we hit our targets. Most of us wanted a Hunt where the coin was found Sunday morning and a bunch more teams would finish, and we got exactly that. We wanted a focus on accessibility and on a Hunt that made people from as many backgrounds and experience levels as possible feel like it was written with them in mind. We wanted a Hunt full of cool ideas, a Hunt that kept surprising you. We wanted a Hunt that expressed our team's personality, full of puns and curiosity. It's amazing in retrospect to piece together how important articulating our team goals was. We didn't have much in the way of process to check to make sure we were living up to our goals, but I think they were always in the back of my mind as we developed the Hunt, and that was important.
From there we moved on to developing the actual Hunt structure. We had several rounds of voting to select the theme, and the theme we ended up selecting turned out to be a combination of two separate theme pitches: a Phantom Tollbooth hunt and a more general book-themed hunt. We used some of the metaphysics of the Phantom Tollboth, and made Tock a major character in our story, but otherwise freed ourselves up to play with all sorts of books and stories and types of book.
Then the best thing happened. We started brainstorming the metapuzzle answers, which we wanted to be answers that would advance the story in various ways and be figure-outable but not easily guessable. This meant that puns were often the best kind of meta answer. So we literally had pun brainstorming meetings where we sat on a call for an hour making up bad puns. I know I keep saying that if you told younger me that I'd have embarked on this adventure I wouldn't believe it, but if you'd told younger me that I would get to have productive meetings that just consisted of flinging puns back and forth, I would know that I was truly living my best life. Pun meetings were my destiny.
I helped with the meta development process by testsolving and brainstorming, and I wrote a few meta puzzle ideas that didn't get very far in testing. I do love the metas we did end up coming up with, and I feel like being involved was a great learning experience even if none of my own meta ideas got anywhere.
Puzzle writing
I co-wrote two Mystery Hunt puzzles! The moment when the first of them cleared testsolving and I knew officially that I would have a puzzle in the Hunt was such a monumental feeling of satisfaction and pride. I texted Soctt, the only person who's been with me for all of my Hunt journey since 2006, to celebrate.
What's in the Box? What's in the Box!?
"What's in the Box? What's in the Box!?" is a troll puzzle. Every once in a while I end up in a room with people whose trolling instincts match mine and amazing things happen. This puzzle came about because we were brainstorming physical puzzles we could mail to solvers, and someone said "What if we just shipped them an empty box full of packing peanuts, and that was the puzzle?" In ordinary circumstances everyone would laugh and we'd move on to better ideas, all part of the brainstorming process, but no, it happened that it was a roomful of trolls (me, Jen, Shai, and Debby) and we all thought this was the greatest idea ever. We went through many ideas but for practical and environmental reasons the puzzle evolved to use shredded paper as the packing material instead of styrofoam peanuts. So solvers open up a box only to find a bunch of shredded paper they need to reassemble to find the monsters in the box, and thereby decode the answer. The video of our testsolvers opening the test box and shouting "Why do you hate us? Why do you hate us?" gives me joy like nothing else in the world.
For added punning fun, we decided the puzzle should use PostScript (because we were using the postal service for the puzzle, geddit?), so um... then I taught myself enough PostScript to write the puzzle. Mystery Hunt has taught me so many things! As a mostly non-programmer, I didn't expect to pick it up that quickly, but I feel like PostScript was relatively easy to learn for me because I know AutoCAD. Postscript is weird, I enjoy the thought that because of this puzzle, a bunch of solvers know a lot more about how it works now.
There was a nice division of labor in the puzzle as a result of who the authors were. My co-author Debby, a graphic designer, did all the font work, and I, a CAD designer, did all the PostScript drawing stuff. Then we worked with our physical puzzle coordinator Ben to source the materials. And we got great feedback and idea contributions from Jen and Shai as the puzzle evolved.
I don't entirely know how good it is objectively, as a puzzle. Our live test-solve group had a lot of fun, but some virtual testsolvers thought the puzzle was too straightforward. The intellectual work of the puzzle is in figuring out what's going on; Once you understand how the puzzle works, there's no more solving, just execution. This is sort of against our team puzzle aesthetic, we aspire for puzzles that have both a satisfying Aha and a satisfying amount of puzzly solving work, but the overall trappings of the puzzle are such that we wanted the solving to be kind of straightforward, since reassembling the shreds promised to be a pain in the neck. It's a troll puzzle, it shouldn't be excruciatingly hard. We have other puzzles for that.
But after we testsolved the puzzle (three virtual testsolves, one in person testsolve with Boston area people), we had to make it! Physical. actual postproduction! I handled getting quotes from print shops to print all of the pages of the puzzle, and dealt with the printing. Then the plan was that I would drive all the paper up to Somerville to do an assembly line of shredding and packing, but unfortunately I got stuck working on Sunday the weekend that was supposed to happen, so I shipped the paper up to Somerville and my teammates Ben and Debby and Jen (and possibly others?) heroically shredded and packed 200 boxes to send to teams. Debby afterward: "Next time we do anything like this: two shredders." (Getting the right shredder was itself a small feat. Most modern personal shredders are cross-cut shredders, which are more effective for security but slower. 'More effective for security' means way too hard for solvers to reassemble. We needed a strip cut shredder, but most available strip cut shredders are designed for corporate bulk shredding, in places where speed trumps security, and cost thousands of dollars. Eventually we were able to track down an in-budget strip cut shredder.)
My favorite story about this puzzle is that after we made the boxes available online for ordering, a team reached out to us and told us that the people receiving the puzzle on their team were celebrating birthdays that weekend, and would we mind slipping in a birthday card for them? We then had a chat that consisted of me shouting SHRED THE CARD! SHRED THE CARD! We ultimately decided to shred the card, but put it in a separate envelope in the box so that it wouldn't risk being confused for a part of the puzzle. On the weekend of the Hunt, the solvers got the card and were very confused but eventually delighted when they understood what had happened.
Other bits of trolliness: At our in-person testsolve, Joon submitted GWYNETH PALTROW'S HEAD as the answer before he'd even started to solve, because of the puzzle title. We decided to include an easter egg that if any team called that in, we would reply with a message that they had been automatically subscribed to Goop. Sadly nobody did. Also, the very first canned hint for this puzzle said something like "Have you checked your garbage can to see if there's any puzzle in it?" I don't know if we actually sent that hint to any solvers, it was more a joke for the hinters.
Royal Steeds
"Royal Steeds" is a puzzle that exists in lieu of the puzzle I really wanted to write, which would have been a Cambridge Blue Bike bikearound- a puzzle where solvers would have to ride around Cambridge on rented bikes following instructions and solving clues. Sadly when the Hunt went remote that dream died (and ha, it might have died in an in person Hunt anyway, I'm not sure our editors would have authorized a biking activity in the winter in Boston), but I rebooted it as an idea for a puzzle about identifying photos of Blue Bike stations. Originally it was just going to be a bunch of contextless photos and a clever, puzzly extraction mechanism, but when the extraction mechanism was rejected for being too similar to that of Red Herring, we evolved the puzzle in a way that I think was much better than the original idea, by adding in Boston trivia about the area near each bike station. It became a puzzle designed to give remote solvers a little taste of the Boston experience, and hopefully introduce even Boston locals to cool stuff about the Boston area they didn't know. Boston is such a batshit city. One of the things I've always loved about runaround puzzles is the way they involve you moving around familiar spaces made newly unfamiliar and strange (the greatest runaround moment in Hunt history, IMO, is when Evil Midnight managed to make you see the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse on Mass Ave as the "RAGE WAREHOUSE"), and I was trying to achieve a similar effect here. Like, "You know that staid old historical state house building? It's secretly a unicorn stable." ... "You know that warehouse by the sea port? It's haunted by a sea monster." "You know that chic shopping district in Back Bay? There's a fairy store there." I really enjoyed doing the research for this puzzle, I learned all sorts of interesting historical stuff. I also tried to make a point of emphasis to the African-American history of the Boston area, as highlighted on the Cambridge Black History Ride, the Boston Black Heritage Trail, and the Boston Green Book Tour.
My favorite locus of all the things this puzzle was trying to be about was Kittie Knox, so let me talk at you about Kittie Knox. In the late 1800s cycling was starting to become a big thing in America, and clubs were formed to get cyclists together. Kittie Knox was super-into cycling and she joined the Boston chapter of the League of American Wheelmen, and she rode in a bunch of their races and other events and it was all fine until the national organization passed a rule in the 1890s banning black members, and there was a whole furor until they decided to grandfather her in. USA Cycling's website has this great article about her adventures on a bicycle: I loved that she gave me a fantasy theme hook, and a bicycling hook, and a Boston African American history hook; I also just loved learning about her life.
Also, I decided this was a little too macabre for the puzzle, but the tombstone of one of the judges from the Salem Witch Trials is in Cambridge, and it's super-creepy.
One of the things I most love about Mystery Hunt is that it's such an eclectic experience that it inevitably becomes a learning experience. You will inevitably end up working on a puzzle about something you know nothing about. When we did testsolving, the two most successful types of solvers were native Bostonians, and Australians. I think the Australians had the distance to approach everything completely fresh and with a willingness to learn. I hope this puzzle was educational as well as fun, I hope people learned cool things about the history and geography of Boston from this puzzle.
My co-writer Jenny, a Somervillain, took most of the photographs, but I went up to Boston one weekend to drive them around and get some of the photos that were in more mass transit inaccessible regions. This was really fun. We got to go around, stick an adorable stuffed bunny in the basket of blue bikes, and take a bunch of photos while I geeked out about Boston history. We stopped in on a couple of sites that didn't make the final puzzle, too, like the Dragon for Dorchester. Meanwhile, I can't say enough good things about the work Jenny did, adventuring all over Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville to take the photos for the puzzle. They're all excellent, with just the right amount of detail to make identifying them possible but tricky.
Our editor Katie was very helpful at helping us identify problems and working around them. She was also delightful to kibitz with during our testsolves.
We had a problem in testsolving with extraction: our final clue phrase required solvers to find a particular station from its station number. Using the blue bike map, the only way to do this is to click a bunch of stations until you find the one with the matching station number, which is an inelegant puzzle step to require. There is in fact a list of station numbers with station locations downloadable off the Blue Bike website, which would make this lookup a lot easier, but until recently it was buried in a place that I had been able to find but our testsolvers had not. Jenny solved this problem by reaching out to the marketing team for Blue Bikes and asking them to update the website to make the list more accessible. To our surprise, they were happy to help.
So let me throw out a plug: If you're in Boston and want to move around quickly and have fun, Blue Bikes are an amazing way to do so. I've used them every time I go to Boston the past couple of years, even though I usually drive up and have my car available. During in person Mystery Hunts, they're the quickest way to get from my hotel to our Hunt HQ, no worrying about parking! They were also a great way to navigate the city's Fourth of July crowds while avoiding overloaded mass transit. The bike checkout is easy, the bikes themselves are solid, reliable, and easy to ride, and there are stations everywhere! And their marketing people are great.
Other Puzzle Writing
I have an author credit on Funny Face, a delightful puzzle about mashed up actor faces, which is probably undeserved but after a testsolve session I spent an hour or two researching and suggesting some alternate people to clue, so I'm grateful that Sue thought that was useful enough to give me a credit for. I also have an almost entirely unearned credit for our Cryptic Dixit event, which I helped come up with along with Shai, designed the initial rule set for, ran one test-solve session for, and then didn't do any work to develop. It ended up being a fantastic event, though! Ashley did an amazing job of taking it to the finish line. It was inspired by a daily challenge on our discord to write cryptic clues for the Merriam Webster Word of the Day, which I didn't actually do every day but we were all having a lot of fun with it and thought that solvers might also enjoy a cryptic clue writing challenge. Our intention was to have a cryptic clue event that was fun for experienced cryptic solvers, but which was accessible and fun for less experienced solvers. So we came up with Dixit rules as a way to try to inspire clues that were reasonably tractable. Our other hope was that in between giving clues, solvers could ask for explanations of clues they didn't get. Hopefully it turned some new people onto cryptic puzzles, which have become my favorite kind of puzzle since the Pandemic gave me time and motivation to finally figure them out. Also at some point in the future I hope to try to run Cryptic Dixit at a CTY reunion.
Puzzle Writing Failures
I'm not going to talk about most of the puzzles I wrote that didn't make the Hunt, because a lot of them have germs of ideas that I or one of my co-writers might still want to use for something in the future. But I failed a lot, and I want to talk about that in at least general terms.
Some of my puzzles failed because there's a big gap between saying "This seems like an idea that could work for a puzzle" and actually working out the details, especially for a relative novice puzzle maker like me. I worked on a couple puzzles where it seemed like the overall idea could work but I couldn't find enough sub-pieces that were fun to solve. I also worked on some puzzles that I definitely could make, but I found I wasn't enjoying the work of writing and designing them. I had a puzzle idea that involved me writing thousands of words of fiction, a needle in the haystack puzzle where solvers needed to figure out what parts of the story were clueful, and I burned out on trying to write all that fiction in a way that was interesting and fun. I also had a puzzle idea with a big Jewish thematic component where the Jewish encoding part was really cool, but the other half of the puzzle didn't work at all when I sat down to figure out the details.
Some puzzles cleared that hurdle and still didn't work for structural Hunt reasons. Sandy and I got pretty far into developing one puzzle idea. We'd worked out a full draft extraction and I'd started to make proof of concept artwork, and then it got rejected by the editors because it didn't comply with some of the requirements of the metapuzzle we thought it would fit into. The same sort of objection happened with Royal Steeds, but in that case we were able to rethink the puzzle and make it work in a different way. But after some further brainstorming, Sandy and I just just gave up on this one. It's still a great puzzle idea, in my opinion, but not for this Hunt.
In one of our first brainstorming meetings, Jen gave a short speech about negative feedback: that we should expect it and listen to it and not take it personally. This is so critical to making a good Hunt. It is hard to work on something for a long time and be told it's not good enough, and it's hard to work on something for a long time and be told that it's good enough but still can't be accepted. But if you want a Hunt that is going to be fun for solvers, you have to have people who can give that feedback, and you have to have people who will listen to it and be willing to accept failure.
Testsolving
Our team tracker says I testsolved 111 puzzles. This number is not quite right, I also testsolved a few meta ideas before the tracker was fully up, and I solo test-solved a few puzzles towards the end that I didn't bother putting in the tracking system. But it's pretty close. It's also nowhere near the highest number on the team, Renee is listed at 144 testsolve sessions. Still, it's a massive number of testsolves and I feel it's one of my big contributions to the Hunt effort. For months, I'd get home from work every day and the first thing I'd do was check and see if there were any testsolves that night I could jump into.
Nearly all of our testsolves were group sessions on Discord voice chat with a google spreadsheet, which meant puzzle authors could watch us solve (and make fun of us in private chat). I think on the whole it worked really well. Authors got to see their puzzles put through the paces and really get a feel for all of the beats of the solving process- what things do solvers see first, what do they need more help finding, how do you adjust the presentation of what they need to see to solve, but not too easily? I also think the experience was incredibly educational for all of us in seeing how solvers think, in learning the differences between broken puzzles and clean puzzles, in thinking about how to make puzzles work, in figuring out how to put yourself in the solver's mind.
Every single test session I participated in, I left feeling more excited about the Hunt we were making. Even the most horribly broken and frustrating puzzles, the testsolve sessions that took 4 hours and felt like they asked us to do arbitrary and unclued solving steps or were full of typos and factual errors(*coughcough*guilty look*coughcough*), showed off the amazing ideas all of my teammates had. All of the writers I talked to were receptive to criticism. I think in general we took the approach that we wanted the most fun puzzles possible, not the most aesthetically brilliant constructions, so solver feedback was everything in the development process.
Palindrome had a reasonably consistent puzzle aesthetic. I mean, there's a lot of us and some of us like some kinds of puzzles more than others, but most of us want essentially the same kind of solving experience: Puzzles that yield to thinking, puzzles where each step has some sort of confirmation so that the solver can say "I don't know where this is going, but I know I'm on the right track" when they're on the right track. A lot of our puzzles are hard, but I think even the hardest is tractable- it has ways in that are reasonably well signposted, so that if you look at it and are flummoxed, you can at least say "I'm baffled, but at least I have an idea of what to do to start, and maybe then I'll figure out what comes next."
Some of my favorite puzzles that I testsolved, and that people should check out, include this list of puzzles. I've tried to break them out between those that might be on the easier side and those that are tougher or require domain specific knowledge, but puzzle difficulty is deeply personal and hard to judge. The range of puzzle styles on this list is amazing, my team is incredible.
Easier/More Straightforward
Three Blind Mice
Peter Pan
The Missing Piece
Your Name is a Song
Harold and the Purple Crayon
THIS IS NOW A PUZZLE
Eat Your Words
Ice Cream Roll
Albumistanumerophobia
Minor Details
49ers
Harder/More Convoluted/Domain Specific
Dancing Triangles
Midterm of Unspeakable Chaos (and its amazing predecessor that nobody got to see because it was too hard)
How To Spell With Gears and Arrows
Protein
Repetition and Variation
Sorcery for Dummies
The Colour Out of Space
The 4500 Year Itch
Beaux Taurus
Crow Facts 3000
Word Search of Babel
But I testsolved over a hundred puzzles. And all of them are amazing, even the ones that didn't make Hunt because of testsolve feedback. And also there's another hundred or so puzzles I didn't testsolve, and all of them are awesome, too. My team is the coolest, guys. You can see the rest of the puzzles right now a https://puzzles.mit.edu/2022/puzzles/ .
We also did some other testing- testsolving of events, testing of larger sections of the Hunt website and how they interacted, testsolving of the endgame in various stages of completion.
Video
I flipped back through messages and we started talking about how we were going to present the story theatrically in August, which is about two months two late in my opinion. We had our meta structure and story in place by early May, we should have been developing scripts immediately. We didn't for two reasons: One, it was partially just an oversight, nobody was put in charge of doing it and everyone figured someone else was worrying about it. But two, we were still at least theoretically planning to be able to deploy either a live Hunt and a virtual Hunt until August when we finally decided we had to go virtual. This made planning for acting hard- the scripts you write for video are different than the scripts you write for live performance. So we hit August, decide we're going virtual, and everyone suddenly realized we're going to need a lot of video and we don't have anyone working on it.
Our amazing acting captain Jenny took over and I got assigned to be in charge of video production. Which was not what I'd been really looking for. I'd volunteered to help with video editing because of my experience with fanvidding. But fanvidding and video production are not the same thing. Fanvidding involves taking footage that for the most part has been filmed and graded and assembled by professionals who mostly know what they're doing, and re-assembling it in the editor. Here we were getting raw footage of wildly varying quality and trying to make it look good and tell the story we wanted to tell. This was a lot of new stuff for me! So I'd hoped to just be able to contribute rather than leading the team. I'd hoped we would turn out to have someone who actually had experience working with a whole video production process, but nobody else stepped up so I had to. This started with writing up the guidelines for how video was shot. I tried for straightforward, easy to understand guidelines that weren't fifty pages long but gave guidance that would make my life as editor easier. I probably should have been more specific, in retrospect, and some people could have read my guidelines more carefully. There were definitely time-wasting problems with the footage that could have been avoided if we'd communicated better. But warts and all the video I received to edit was amazing. I kept laughing again and again as I edited it.
There's a difference between knowing that problems lie ahead, and actually dealing with those problems. I learned a lot in the process. I think we produced videos that are good enough for the Hunt, but not as good as I wanted them to be. My driving principle was that it's better to have bad looking video than no video at all.
What we have is significantly better than bad looking video, but most of the credit goes to the actors, who uniformly did an amazing job of inhabiting their characters and making them funny and real. All of the videos can be seen in our story archive and I highly recommend watching them. One of the most lightly edited by me was Recipeoria, which had an amazing performance by honorary Palindrome member Weird Al Yankovic.
We had a lot of video to do. We obviously needed a video kickoff, that's essentially a requirement at this point. The rest of it was open ended but we essentially wanted to tell our whole story in video so our acting captain mapped out the story beats and we farmed out writing of all of the scripts for each story beat. The scripts got written through September (I wrote the ones for Whoston, full of innuendo about petty academic feuds), edited in October (there was a lot of care taken here to make sure nothing in the scripts were spoilery or distracting toward any puzzle solutions), and were filmed in November, giving us about two months to get it all edited and assembled and captioned for Hunt.
I had hoped to have everything edited by Mid-December, when I disappeared to go to Worldcon, but unfortunately I fell behind because making everything work visually was more work then I'd anticipated, and we initially didn't get any volunteers to help me edit. I set a new deadline of having a draft of everything by New Year's. We almost met this, with the heroic help of Sue and Lea, who jumped on to help me edit everything. We also hired a freelancer to handle the Tock videos. Sue especially was a hero. She was originally drafted to take some of the easier videos off my plate, the ones where all one needed to do was cut them up and throw a logo at the front, but as I fell behind she also took on our Kickoff video and put a massive amount of work into making it fit together, under a tight deadline and all the while pushing the limits of her skills. But the final version she created is amazing. We had drafts of everything by January 2nd, and then spent the last two weeks tuning the details to get everything to be the best we could make it. But honestly, 'tuning the details' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The last two weeks were chaotic, with some reshoots required to get the video to acceptable standards, a lot of extremely tedious timing edits, a lot of audio editing, and a lot of time spent fixing background replacements and adjusting colors. In one video I realized way too late that the reason chroma keying wasn't working was because the polka dots on the actor's sweater exactly matched the color of the background. I finished editing the video Wednesday night, and the last edit of some of the videos was uploaded to Youtube Thursday afternoon, just a day before Hunt. Whew!
I love the characters we developed, I think they give our videos a lot of color. The characters had to be iconic in short doses, recognizable versions of tropes but not recognizable versions of particular characters. I love our hardboiled noir detective, our harried motivational speaker, our slightly shady fantasyland peddler, our slightly over-serious biographer, our needlessly specific handyman, and all the other characters of Pen Station, I spent a lot of time editing the Ministry videos and each of those characters makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I spent a chunk of time the night before Hunt making silly gifs of the Ministers to toss around on our Discord.
Dan Katz's blog post on the Hunt says that the resulting videos were too many and too skippable, and so he skipped them. Others are saying similar things in the comments. This is disappointing to hear, but I am proud of all of our video, and I know that some people watched them, anyway, and enjoyed the breaks for humor and story amid all the puzzling.
Thinking about the criticisms, I think the root of the problem is something structural we debated a lot as we developed the scripts: Mystery Hunt involves a lot of teams with a lot of levels of puzzle skill, and every team will see a different Hunt. How do you approach presenting story content to teams at these different levels? We knew from our puzzle structure plan that some slower teams might get advanced in the Hunt ahead of solving some metapuzzles, if they wanted to see more of the puzzles. But the metapuzzle answers often contained key plot points, and key plot points often therefore discussed meta spoilers. We made the decision that all of our story videos would only contain spoilers for the specific meta they were following and no other metas. None of the Round 3 videos were allowed to contain any reference to the things solvers learned when they solved the Round 2 metameta. I think this inherently makes them skippable and inessential, and solvers picked up on that and skipped them. But I don't necessarily have a better solution when running an online Hunt. When staging a Hunt live, the actors can adjust their lines to the particular team they're visiting, but we quickly decided that making multiple versions of the videos to juggle spoilers was largely an impossible task, and we also rejected doing too many live Zoom interactions because we had nearly 400 teams signed up and we barely had the manpower for making the post-Round 2 interaction live. I don't know. I guess having metapuzzle answers that don't contain story spoilers is also an option, but not a very attractive one. We made the decisions we made and overall I think they were fine, if imperfect. But it's something to keep brainstorming about, maybe there is a better solution than the one we chose.
The Editing Process
People might be interested in some of the technical details of putting together the video, but feel free to skip.
The most complicated video for me to assemble was the Ministry Introduction. This was a key introduction for most solvers to the main story concepts of the Hunt- Bookspace and its whole metaphysics, and the types of characters solvers would meet along the way. We originally thought we might just record it in a Zoom chat, but I rejected that idea for a mixture of technical and artistic reasons. I wanted the power to be able to work with individual pieces of video for each minister and assemble them myself, and I was worried that Zoom video would limit me too much. I also worried that if people had internet issues it would screw with the video, especially since our minister actors are scattered all around the world from Boston to Australia. I think in the end I was right to insist, but it made an awful lot of extra work for me. But because I was assembling our own video chat from separately recorded videos, we got to call it Spacebook Messenger and completely decorate it and theme it with our own artwork and sounds, and I think that made it feel more like an otherworldly thing. It also let me maximize the sizes of everyone's faces on the video, enabled some nice visual gags (a giant mute symbol over Hayden's face instead of the usual little icon from Zoom), and allowed the green screening to be a lot better looking. Alexi Lewis, for example, had an amazing costume whose colors were not green screen friendly at all. If he'd just used zoom backgrounds, large parts of his chest would have been invisible or fading in and out, but because I was working in Da Vinci Resolve, I could mask out his chest to mostly preserve all the colors. So there were lots of benefits, but it was an exhausting process.
The ministers recorded a take of the whole scene together on zoom, which they then used as a click track/ reference take to record their lines individually. They also recorded some extra takes of just their line deliveries for me to use. This mostly worked out great, but the timings of some of the recordings drifted over time in spite of the click track, so I had to slip in some stealth or not so stealth cuts to get the timing back into synch.
I made a set of masks in Glimpse for each of the video layouts, so that I had exact guides for positioning the video. Every time another character joined, I repositioned the clips into a new mask. The minister actors worked out blocking so they knew where they would be displaying relative to each other, and could 'look at' each other as they talked.
Here's a look at the timeline, you can see vertically each blue row represents one of the ministers and all of the cuts show places where I was adjusting clip position or timing. And the video editing process was complicated enough that every time I had to do a render it took an hour to render 6 minutes of video.
Other videos that offered challenges included the Quest Coast (fantasy) video, which I really wanted to have some fantastic background scenery, so I repositioned the actor and did some masking to make it seem like he was behind an alchemist's desk, and the Lake Eerie (horror) video, which called for some eerie graveyard scenes.
If you look closely you can see all the glitchy places in the videos, but on the whole I think it tells the stories we wanted to tell in a fun, funny way. And if we ever do this again (ha!) I will be much more prepared.
Captioning
We had an overall team goal toward making the most accessible Hunt we could, but captioning videos was particularly important to me both because it meant that the videos I edited would be more visible to more people, and because
speckled_llama looked me in the eye a few months before Hunt and said "You're captioning the videos, right?" I was pleased that I could reassure her that it was already part of the plan.Additionally, captioning was great because we had some people on Palindrome who hadn't done much in the way of writing puzzles, and this was a relatively simple thing that they could do to contribute to making the Hunt better. I ran two or three training sessions to teach people how to use Aegisub for making captions, and managed the process of assigning people to captioning different videos, and I ended up captioning a few videos myself, but mostly other people stepped up and did awesome work with this. I'm sure I'm forgetting people, but Joe and Adam and Amy and Rachel did great work. And Jenny had a lot of fun especially being creative with the captions for instrumental sections- we got a lot of compliments on that work. Renee also stepped up to do a checking and proofreading pass of all of the captions in the last few days before Hunt.
Art
I am not an artist AT ALL, but I am a reasonably competent computer drafter, and I sort of know my way around some image editing software. My goal in the art department was to do what i could to lighten the load of the more talented artists on the team. I made the grids for my puzzle Royal Steeds myself, using Inkscape. I laid out the back sides of the pages for What's in the Box?! in Glimpse, with royalty free artwork from Irasutoya. And as mentioned above, I taught myself just enough PostScript to draw the shapes for that puzzle's extraction.
I also did the artwork for one other puzzle, How To Collide Particles. It looked like the kind of diagram you could draw in TikZ/LaTeX, so I did some poking around in the manual and relearned just enough TikZ to draw the diagrams. I then converted the output to SVG with a command line pdf2svg tool so that I could do a final alignment cleanup in Inkscape before exporting to png. It felt like the kind of puzzle where the LaTeX aesthetic was appropriate, I'm proud of how the collision diagrams look. I am horrified by how the code looks. There's probably a better way to write it, but it works.
--> It is hilarious to me that I made art assets for this Hunt in PostScript and in LaTeX. I might be a nerd.
Meanwhile if you want to see what the real artists on the team were doing, our Art Director Justin's post on his work is almost too thorough. (Ferret says, deep into a Hunt writeup that took months to assemble)
Actual Hunt Operations
During Hunt, I was assigned the overnight Saturday into Sunday shift on the message queue, because of Shabbos. I got a nice long nap over Shabbos and then logged in. My job was to keep an eye on messages coming in and deal with them, whatever that meant. A lot of the messages were about potential errors in the puzzle- I had to then check the puzzle and solution and see if I agreed that there was an error, and then check with the puzzle writers and tech team to see about fixing the mistake, or if it wasn't a mistake, answer the team in a way that was clear without spoiling anything further about the puzzle. Most of the time this was the case- the reason something seemed to be an error was that the solvers hadn't figured out some key idea about how a puzzle worked. My stock answer was "The puzzle seems to be correct as it is." You don't want to say "There's definitely no mistakes" because what if we missed something, but you don't even necessarily want to go so far as to say "Yes, that misspelling is there for a reason" because that might constitute a hint.
My favorite puzzle error was a message from a British solver telling us that a construction shutdown of a Tube station had broken one of our puzzles. There wasn't much we could do about that- a British teammate sent them a message acknowledging the issue, bitching about the construction delays, and telling them to imagine time traveling to last week. In another case, we discovered a number was wrong in an image created for a puzzle. It was 3 in the morning and none of the creators of the puzzle or art team people were awake, so I volunteered go in and edit the correct number into the photo. It was a simple image manipulation, but using image editing software at 3AM was still kind of terrifying. I feel like that's the kind of thing you ought to get a license before you're allowed to do. There was also a fun question about whether we had meant Manet or Monet in a puzzle that I could not for the life of me figure out if we'd made a mistake- had to get the puzzle author to check.
We also got a lot of email because of the puzzle Tech Support, hilariously. Solvers misunderstanding where to send the fake help request messages for that puzzle frequently emailed HQ by mistake. We got questions about the event schedule, we got questions about real tech glitches on the site, we got questions from people who just wanted to say hi, and people who just wanted to grumble about puzzles.
Things were a bit hectic late Saturday evening but as it moved into early Sunday morning things calmed down. The three people on email queue duty were me, an Aussie, and a Brit and as we kibitzed to pass the time, I was struck by the weirdnesses of time zones and how the joy of puzzling had brought us together from around the world. At calmer moments I tried to step in and help with our hinting as well- we didn't make hints available to the first teams to solve a puzzle, but once it had been solved a number of times, we were free with hints to teams that were trailing, because we wanted everyone to be having fun and making progress.
I also volunteered to help with running the only event that wasn't on Shabbos, a cross between Taboo and Pictionary we called Picaboo. People were given a list of words to draw, and a list of related things they weren't allowed to draw, and the rest of their team had to guess what they were drawing. The words got progressively more abstract and harder and eventually solvers had to identify a hidden connection between all the groups of words. I didn't really do all that much, Wil and Ashley ran the event, and it was just my job to be a visible Palindrome team member for puzzlers to ask questions to, and to pop into solvers' Discord channels to follow their progress and make sure they weren't frustrated. People seemed like they were having a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, there were so many other things happening that I was keeping half an eye on in the Discord. A bunch of our team was grading scavenger hunt entries and other creative submissions from teams. Another group was doing live interactions with teams on Zoom in character as the Ministers. Our tech team was constantly working to resolve all sorts of website problems. And we were generally trying to keep our finger on the pulse of solver sentiment, and make sure teams were happy with the progression of the experience. It takes a lot of people to make Hunt happen and Palindrome was so fun to work with as game control.
It was fascinating to be behind the scenes for the Hunt as teams progressed through it. Our tech team put together a variety of tracking tools for following team progress, and they tweaked them as we moved through the Hunt to provide more of the information we wanted to have. Everyone was frantically refreshing throughout the Hunt to see who had solved what puzzle most recently. In addition to keeping an eye on the frontrunners, we were all keeping our eye on our own puzzles and how frequently they were being solved. I was also peeking at a few teams I have friends on. We also spent a bunch of time sharing funny wrong answers and other messages from the teams, keeping an eye on the more qualitative feedback we got on how teams were doing, trying to resolve anything that was making teams not have fun. Besides the puzzles, of course. Those were supposed to be frustrating.
By Saturday night the three top teams, Death and Mayhem, Left Out, and Teammate, were bunched in a tight cluster with a significant lead over the rest of the teams. Death and Mayhem had held a narrow lead since Friday but they lost that lead overnight Saturday as they seemed to get stuck on a couple of the tough later metapuzzles. The lead swung back and forth between the three teams as the night progressed, and none of us had a clear idea who was likely to win- whichever team managed to crack a couple of tough puzzles would have the edge. The leading teams had also earned the right to bypass a couple of puzzles they were stuck on, and we were keeping an eye on when they would strategically choose to use those bypasses.
Early morning Sunday, Teammate pulled ahead with the help of their free answers, solving the final metapuzzle and entering the endgame. We anxiously watched their progress while keeping an eye on their competition to see if one of them could catch up while they were stuck on the tricky final puzzle, which required teams to jump back around doing a mini-scavenger Hunt around our website. They cracked it and found the coin around 10AM Sunday in a Zoom call with most of Palindrome watching. Everyone was exhausted and it was kind of an anticlimax. I was supposed to go off shift at 8AM, but I stayed up through the coin being found, and then I went to sleep right afterward and slept most of Sunday. They day shift kept actively running the Hunt for teams through around 6PM, and another dozen or so teams managed to make it through the endgame before we closed down for good.
Concluding thoughts
I don't exactly have concluding thoughts. The Hunt we wrote is full to the brim of who we are as a team, so I can't give it an objective assessment. But I think it is largely the Hunt we wanted to write, and I hope people had fun solving it. I didn't burn out, but I don't think I want to do anything like it anytime soon. But viewing writing a Hunt as a once in a lifetime opportunity, I'm so glad I go the opportunity and I'm so proud of how I used it.
I went up to MIT my first time with no idea what to expect. I liked word puzzles, and I was a nerd and an engineer, but puzzles weren't a fundamental part of how I saw the world. But I'd never seen a puzzle like a Mystery Hunt puzzle. I flailed against them for hours and any tiny progress felt like the biggest achievement in the world. Maybe more importantly, making any tiny progress felt like I was opening up a whole new world. I spent several years returning and sucking at puzzles, and gradually I got a little better. I came to see solving puzzles as a basic tool for interpreting the world around me. I've competed in twelve Hunts over the past fifteen years. It certainly made me a better engineer, hopefully it made me a better person. And it's been an immense amount of fun, and given me a lot of joy and community and friendship.
I hope that the work I did helped give that experience to new people. I hope we did a good job of continuing the tradition of paying forward the fun we have had solving Mystery Hunts.
I have scars from the experience of writing Hunt, but more importantly, I have souvenirs! We ended up with enough extra coins for the writing team to get them, so now I have two Mystery Hunt coins, one from the year we won and one from the year we wrote. I also got a New Berry lapel pin, the bonus prize we created for teams that solved the round 2 metametapuzzle. I also have a few Hunt shirts, and some wall posters featuring art from the Hunt. I also have a poster of a beached dragon I discovered while researching Royal Steeds.
The Coin! New Berry pin Hunt posterBut my favorite souvenir is what Ben made for me and the other co-authors of What's in the Box?- a framed collection of leftover shreds from the puzzle. It's so beautiful and so trollish and I will treasure it.
The shreds!Lastly, if anyone has any questions, I may be able to answer.
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Date: 2022-04-12 11:58 pm (UTC)Also, I coincidentally just learned how to use TikZ, yay LaTeX nonsense.
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Date: 2022-04-13 12:26 am (UTC)And, congrats on the work, woah. That's a lot and really awesome.
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