jedusor | Hunt writeup

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Hunt writeup

So, Hunt is over.

I've been on a constructing team once before, Palindrome's Mystery Mystery Hunt in '08. I was sixteen when we started writing that Hunt, and I'd never constructed anything at all, so I was hesitant to put forward ideas. I ended up writing one puzzle myself, helping write another one, and answering phones all weekend, and that was pretty much all I did.

I wasn't one of the heavy lifters on this Hunt, but I can honestly say that I think it was better than it would have been without me. My contributions:

-The opening ceremony. I didn't write the script, but I organized most of it, made the signs, and came up with the .mp3 idea. (More on that below.)
-The talent show. Mike suggested the mechanism, but the concept and execution was me. Apologies, by the way, for the snafu with the music. I still have no idea what happened to those e-mails. But I think everyone got the music they needed somehow in the end.
-A Potential Problem. /dev/joe did the graphics; otherwise, all me. This was an easy puzzle, much easier than I originally wanted it to be. I had more complex plans for the image and was considering using temporal summation at one point. But in the end I'm okay with having a few easy puzzles in the Hunt; we were about due for a Hunt that ended before Sunday evening.
-Dr. Ox's Experiment. Liz wanted to do something with Dr. Horrible, so I thought up the idea of video blog posts. Mike suggested using Peter's Evil Overlord List and helped me brainstorm a few of the ideas for shenanigans. I wrote the scripts, and Wes did a beautiful job of performing them.
-Frritt-Flacc. Liz wrote two of the shorter scripts, but I did most of the work on this. I'm really proud of the House/Holmes idea, and I think it worked well in the end--several people told me that it was fun to solve rather than the slog required for many of these research-heavy puzzles, and I got three compliments on specific bits of the scripts.
-The 2005 supplementary information. I also created the logo that appears with it. For this and the other SIs I wrote, Mike (or others) thought up the mechanism and I did the writing constrained by the period letters.
-The 1983 supplementary information.
-The 1786 supplementary information.
-I did not write the 1773 supplementary information, but I did spend a lot of time researching Ben Franklin and figuring out how to make it work, and I proposed the idea of using Franklin's thirteen virtues.
-The 2010 runaround, which is not up on the website yet. Liz and I wrote this together; I had the ideas for the SAM 30/300 trick and the Holy Grail questions at the end.

I also functioned as more than just a warm body during the running of the Hunt. I wasn't one of the main organizers, but I had a decent general knowledge of how the Hunt worked and where questions should be directed, and I didn't really realize until the end of the weekend how busy I'd been the whole time. I snatched two three-hour naps between Thursday morning and Sunday morning, and paninis were fed to me periodically by Liz, but otherwise my time was dedicated to helping run the event. And man, do I feel more satisfied than I did after the '08 Hunt.

I'd like to hear more about what people thought of the new way of doing the opening ceremony. So far, the consensus seems to be "not perfect, but better than echoey amplification no one can hear, and it's good that something got done." Which is pretty much what I hoped to hear. My goal with that was mainly to get future constructing teams thinking about how to handle it--Hunt people are smart, and I'm sure someone will think of an idea that works better than mine. I've already heard a few people talking about moving the opening ceremony somewhere else, which honestly might be the best plan.

Something that I was warned about ahead of time (by no fewer than three separate past constructors) was team visits. Apparently what often happens is that constructing team members visit only the people they know, and other teams have gotten angry about this. So I tried to make sure that every team got visits, despite the very small number of people we had at HQ (eighteen total, maybe?). Wes and Liz visited every team near the beginning, and I went around to see a whole bunch of teams on Saturday. It was really fun, and I even got to watch Left as an Exercise for the Reader solve Banner Headline, which they'd been working on for a long time. They also had a dude dressed as Frank, the rabbit from Donnie Darko, for their sweded film.

Speaking of the sweded films: when it was about an hour and a half before the film festival and the team who was doing Fight Club hadn't submitted their video, Liz and I decided to swede it ourselves. They did actually submit it in time, so we didn't end up filming ours, but I decided to finish writing it anyway and we performed it at the film festival just for kicks. It was more of a parody than a swede, about the Mystery Hunt, and it went over well. We might film it and put it up on the Hunt YouTube account if we have a chance. By the way, we definitely should have picked one sweded version of each film, rather than playing them all; apologies to those of you who had to sit through that event.

Most people seem to agree that overall, this was an awesome Hunt. While a lot of that was due to sheer blind luck, and I think it's important that we remember that and keep from making the same mistakes if we put on another Hunt in the future, it's also true that as a team we rock pretty hard. I'm incredibly glad I managed to get in on this at the beginning. It sounds like we'll probably stay together and solve next year--I think Second Chance is my favorite of the possible names that have been suggested so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what Metaphysical Plant has in store for us next year.

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I only looked at Frritt-Flacc for a couple minutes during the Hunt itself before going back to metas or whatever, but later, I thought about it some more and had the "oh, of course it has to be Sherlock Holmes" aha. The scripts were very much in the spirit of the show, too; they were quite funny and well-written.

Actually, I kind of assumed that any really funny puzzles based on relatively recent pop culture (like Doctor of Thinkology, which I loved) were by you.

My teammates who worked on Dr. Ox enjoyed it a lot. That single-digits-of-a-double-digit-number indexing mechanism is brutal, though. There was a 2007 Hunt puzzle about sports uniform numbers that used it, and I reacted the same way then: it feels so alien, even for people who know indexing, that it's a good reminder of how bizarre indexing must seem to non-puzzle people. It's not unreasonable given the conventions of the Hunt, but it's the sort of mechanism that makes "normal" people say "wow, I could never solve that" instead of "oh! hey, that sounds pretty cool." Then again, just plain old indexing is enough to do that, as I learned the hard way from one of my events last year.

Actually, I kind of assumed that any really funny puzzles based on relatively recent pop culture (like Doctor of Thinkology, which I loved) were by you.

You have no idea how hard that made me grin. (Doctor of Thinkology was actually by Mike.)

We talked about the Dr. Ox indexing mechanism quite a bit--it was the only way to get the answer phrase using only characters in the show, since there aren't many, and I really liked it better that way. Eventually, I tested just the indexing mechanism on a few people, giving them everything else they would have gotten from solving the puzzle, and they each got it in a few minutes. So we decided it was fair.

(Doctor of Thinkology was actually by Mike.)

Well, that doesn't surprise me either. :)

As for Dr. Ox, I'd say it's a little dangerous to test just one part of a puzzle that way, since stuck solvers often don't disregard the earlier layers of a puzzle, even when it's fairly clear that they should. But you guys know that, and clearly it wasn't a problem in this case. I don't think our team was stuck for more than 15 minutes on that step. It just jumped out at me as an example of one of those mechanisms that takes an established convention and adds one more layer, like the GREATER PRAIRIE CHICKEN indexing-by-alphanumeric.

tigupine says, it wasn't a problem in this case; the way we solved it was I walked into the next room and said 'Hey, we've got these numbers that are too big to be indices! What should we do?' and someone who hadn't seen the puzzle said 'Use both digits to index separately!', and so we did that—and that basically mirrors your test-solving procedure pretty well. What really confused me was that the first five were all square numbers, which set up a weird red herring until we got to the last three that unambiguously weren't.

Wow. That was entirely unintentional, and I don't think anyone caught it during testsolving.

Wait, "your teammates who worked on Dr. Ox"? I thought you were the one who was working on it with me.... Was it

leech after all?

Yeah, it was Ari. I was nearby working on something else.

I'd like to hear more about what people thought of the new way of doing the opening ceremony.

I was actually somewhat disappointed. Not with the process of it, but with the fact that it was really short, and light on story. I go to the Opening so it can set the scene and tell the story of the weekend, and I felt that in this respect the Opening fell far short of previous ones.

My teammates were speculating about whether you would do anything fun with interacting with the recording, but the chorus of Happy Birthday was all there was. Trying to think of some examples, you could have done a call-and-answer with the recording, or singing a duet with it, or having someone say things aloud contradicting what was in the recording. There was so much more that could have been done and just wasn't.

Technically though, having the voices recorded was a great improvement over trying to listen to the voices echoing in Lobby 7. Kudos for trying something new.

There was definitely more we could have done with it, and if we'd made the decision earlier in the construction process, I think we would have. Of course it couldn't tell the story of the weekend, since the big reveal didn't come until the end of Round 1, but we could have done more with the 30th-anniversary celebration.

Thanks for the input. :)

Heh, good point that the Opening Ceremonies would be on a low priority and decided closer to the date of the event than most of the rest of the Hunt. I'm curious, how much of the overall structure/theme is decided before the puzzles are written?

In my experience (two Hunts), the general outline of the story happens very early on, since it's tied into the theme decision, and the specific things like scriptwriting are some of the last tasks to be completed before Hunt. That sort of bit us in the ass this time, since our actors didn't have much time to memorize their lines and (as you mention) the opening lacked detail. I don't know how other constructing teams have handled it.

I can tell you that in 2003, we started with a theme, then worked out the structure, and then wrote the metapuzzles based on that structure, and then wrote the puzzles. There were logistical decisions that weren't made until much closer to the Hunt itself (e.g., how quickly to release the training puzzles). While part of choosing the theme was knowing how the hunt would open (i.e., the assassination of the company CEO), we didn't really think very hard about the opening itself until, mm, probably January. In retrospect, that was actually a tactical mistake, because there were certain guidelines that we meant to put into the opening that we never did; quite a few of my 2003 Hunt regrets are logistical.

What I liked about the opening ceremony was that someone had a laptop in the middle of the room and was broadcasting the sound for all us poor sobs without earphones (and everyone else with earphones was deadly quiet!) So idea for next time - either record the sound beforehand and play it like that (and thus it can be spoileriffic, because it's not being sent out to everyone), or else hook people's microphones up to a speaker in the center of the audience instead of trying to broadcast from where they're actually standing?

Well, the reason that the sound was prerecorded in the first place was to avoid the echo problems in Lobby 7. The location of speakers is something that could be tweaked, I suppose.

The laptop was quiet enough to not echo... maybe several speakers playing at lower volume?

Your summary of the consensus of the opening feels about right to me; pre-recorded doesn't capture the energy of live, but there's no doubt that something ought to be done about the awful, awful acoustics.

I fear my interaction with your puzzles was primarily to send them off to other people. One of our new team members had just a few hours earlier mentioned that she teaches neuroscience, so when I saw Potential Problem, I told her that she probably wanted to come work on it. When Frritt-Flacc came out, I skimmed over it a little (I love House), hit the last line, thought for a moment, and said, "Who here knows Sherlock Holmes better than I do?" And with Dr. Ox, I tended to be sitting next to people who were solving it, but didn't do any of the actual work; which is a shame, because it's a great theme for a puzzle.

Dr. Ox's awesomeness is mostly concentrated in the videos--you didn't really miss all that much by not solving it, and you can just as easily watch them now. :)

I was very happy with the pre-recorded audio for the opening ceremony. The presentation itself was pretty anticlimactic, though. It wasn't just that it was short (much better than dragging on too long), and it certainly told us all we needed to know (i.e. the cover story and theme for round one), but I still was hoping for something more, having missed the previous two opening ceremonies and making a point to wake up early enough to get to this one. I like the idea of having some sort of puzzle embedded into the ceremony, but I'm not sure how to do this without it being totally chaotic. Maybe just more clues that become useful later somehow? On the other hand, you don't want to penalize people who can't make it to the opening. I dunno.

In the Dr. Ox's Experiment puzzle, I thought the last video had some really weird cuts, and if you take the first letter of what is being said right after each cut, you get "HINT EACAGFB". I'm guessing it is an another unintentional red herring, but to make sure, does it have some deeper meaning that I missed?

Are you serious? Yeah, completely unintentional. That same puzzle was the one with the freakishly coincidental five square numbers.

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