That Mystery Hunt Thing

[tahnan]

I've been resisting writing about the 2008 Mystery Hunt because I've been waiting to see the answers to some things, as well as the overall structure. But, well, it strikes me that I don't want to wait too long, so...

I feel a little pre-empted by Qaqaq's observation that "post-mortems generally focus pretty heavily on the criticisms", because it's true, I'm probably going to end up sounding critical. So let me start by saying that by and large I enjoyed this hunt; there were a whole lot of puzzles I liked. (A few highlights: "What Incarnation...", "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith", "X2". Also "Cluesome", for being amusing, clever, and short.)

And I have to give a lot of credit to Palindrome for stepping into that much-pondered but never-attempted area of puzzles not grouped by meta. Well, "never attempted" is strong--I gather that, before my time in the '97 Hunt or so, there was something like that. The Monopoly Hunt kind of had that, except that while the puzzles weren't given to you by meta, grouping them into sets was straightforward (after either a single insight into how the dice worked, or else more or less immediately upon solving a puzzle).

And...yet. It's not that I didn't enjoy this year's Hunt; I did. But it felt a little...lackluster, somehow. Here's the thing: if your Hunt is gorgeous but the puzzles are deeply flawed (as, sorry, y'all, hate to say it, but as a number of the Time Bandits puzzles seemed to be), it'll be hard to enjoy. Good puzzles are crucial. But at the same time, solid puzzles without a strong theme are, well, kind of just a bunch of puzzles. And unlike any Hunt since (again, I hate to say it, but) 2001's Hunt of Horrors, I just didn't feel drawn in by the theme.

Part of that was a problem in graphic design. From the Hunt Overview, all you had were a bunch of checkboxes indicating puzzles, with no clue what puzzles they were. From the "little black book" pages, again, you had links to the puzzles but no idea what puzzles they were without clicking through or at least mousing over. This made it very hard to find any given puzzle: if someone said, "Can I get your help on 'Propaganda'?", finding it wasn't easy. And, conversely, when you were looking at the puzzles, you had no way of knowing where it was from--which meta, of course, but that was inherent to the structure, but also no idea which of Dr. Awkward's contacts it corresponded to. The overall effect was that it was very hard to tell where you were in the Hunt, not in terms of how your team was doing, but in a more literal (though metaphysical) sense of where on the map you were. Compare this to previous hunts: look at random puzzles from 2004, 2006, 2007, or even the rather minimalist 2005. The puzzles tell you what round they're part of; and you typically don't have to look very hard to find out, because the graphic design and, often, the thematicity of title or subject indicate it as well. This year's hunt just didn't have that.

Why does that matter? In general, I just didn't really feel very engaged in the story, and that sense of being lost on the metaphysical map of the Hunt contributed. Dr. Awkward had been killed and we had to find his murderer...well, OK, I guess, but I didn't feel emotionally invested in it. (Not like saving the Earth from an insane meteorologist, or helping Chris-Morse-in-a-dress get her inheritance.) To be honest, there was a reason that, in 2003, we picked "the boss you just met gets assassinated" as the fake theme--we wanted something that wasn't utterly boring ("corporate culture") but also something that people wouldn't be sorry to learn wasn't the real theme. But, all right, I was willing to go along with it to determine who killed the good Doctor. Except that, once we were underway, we kind of just had a bunch of puzzles. There was little or no flavortext--that's not a problem in and of itself, since puzzles in the 2007 Hunt also often lacked flavortext (though they did always have a really funny description in the "this isn't a clue" banner), as did the puzzles in 2005. But there was also no discernable plot. Take X2: were we interviewing Horst Bantak and getting a hint from him? were we investigating him? were we...I don't even know, really. We were kind of just solving a puzzle.

So that was the big thing about this year's Hunt, and why I started by saying that "I enjoyed it, and yet": I did enjoy the puzzles. I just had a really hard time connecting with the Hunt itself.

There were other, little annoyances. There were miscommunications: we were explicitly told that we should be looking "first and foremost" at contacts' names to sort them; in fact, at least two groups (Bantak/Foy/Leather/etc. and Eva S./Di Puco/Maia Lian/etc.) had huge grouping clues in their email addresses. There was the frustration that, once an address-book group's dossier had been given to teams, we didn't seem to get anything at all out of solving their metapuzzle (compare Normalville, where you still needed to know the actual power you got from the "normal" metas, or Spies, where meeting with an agent got you not only the next round but also a piece of information you'd need at the end).

That said, I also have some (small) sense of the trouble that Palindrome had bringing the Hunt together at all (and one Palindromian mentioned a few rather particular obstacles), and I'm genuinely grateful to them for running it as well as they did. Seriously, thanks, guys. Best of luck to y'all in the 2009 Evil Midnight Bomber hunt and the 2010 II&F Hunt.

Comments

[jadelennox]

2010!

awesome

[cthulhia]

I already have an apropo prop.

I suppose this means I need to learn how to solve a puzzle all by myself, and, maybe get some decent graphics software onto my laptop for the next Photoshop This! puzzle.

Re: awesome

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

You realize that "an apropos prop" already sounds like it's part of a Hunt puzzle...

Re: awesome

[cthulhia]

shhhhhhhh... >.>

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this was essentially the issue for me and most of Groovytron as well. At the end of the day, the mystery theme was cute, but the hunt was basically "a sea of puzzles". This was to such a degree that we never really managed to care much about the metas (and only solved one), and in fact for the first time in my six years of hunting my team didn't bother to backsolve a single puzzle.

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your points, and the constructive way in which you put them. I can certainly understand how one might just see this as "eh, a murder mystery, whatever".

Originally, this was going to be much more involving of the teams. There were going to be four "events" -- the cops were going to arrive with the warrant, find a bloody knife, and thus your team was on the hook for the murder! Your team was going to get thrown in jail and would have to escape! Your team was going to be put on trial! During the Great Simplification of the last two months, all that got tossed. Lengthwise, of course, that turned out to be a good thing, but it did mean that the theme became much more basic.

I don't agree that the email you mention was a miscommunication. Even in the examples you mention, the grouping comes from manipulation of the names (change a letter to get boxing classes; anagram to get taxonomic terms). As the email said, the other fields such as email and address may have big confirmatory clues, and those did, but the groupings themselves weren't in those fields. I thought that was conveyed clearly; if not, I apologize on behalf of the team.

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

Yeah. You were pretty clear about conveying "the names are the important part". The fact that my team decided you were clearly wrong, since the "obvious" groupings were things like the restaurants and the first ladies... well, that probably doesn't reflect as much on you :)

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

If I may attempt to guess what happened: the real groupings were in the names, but it was too hard during test-solving, so you added extra hints in the addresses, and it turned out that the extra hints were so nice that it was easy to miss out on the actual grouping data?

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

We always intended to have extra hints to the groupings. It'd be awfully hard to get a grouping from seven to ten names that are spread out so widely, so we knew there would have to be confirmatory information.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

You know, it's funny--I distinctly remember being told that the names were the most important part, and yet, when I read back through the emails, they clearly state that other important clues may be available in the addresses and email and such. Where did the names are the important part information come from? Was it said at the kickoff or something?

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

I don't have the emails handy, but I believe Abigail's initial communication (when you ASK ABIGAIL at the start) says that.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

(as davidglasser says below, it was actually in a followup email where the confusion begins. The original "Ask Abigail" email seems pretty accurate on this point.)

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

Email from Abigail: "2) Regarding groups in Otto's little black book, you should be looking first & foremost at people's names. There may be additional important information in other fields (address, email, etc), but the names are ALWAYS important. That's where you should be looking first, to figure out which groups belong together."

[temvald.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was looking back at the original email ("Ask Abigail") and some of the soon-after followups, but missed the one with that in it ("A few important points").

And I guess that's where the problem was. The original email was more correct than the "clarification".

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

I missed the wrap up, so could you tell me when the solutions will be up on the website? I'm dying to find out what we were missing on Blue Carr Bungle. (Right now, I'm still thinking calulated volume = volumes of Holmes, somehow.)

[(Anonymous)]

[This is Matt, a Palindromer.]

Not my puzzle, but let's see what I can remember from the wrap-up. The main aha was that these were 9 of the ten entries on the Mohs scale (missing word in "walls do not a prison make" being *stone*, plus the Holmes title), represented by their unit cells ("individual locked rooms").
Each number has an orange digit, which must be raised to get the right height for that cell. Then a step I don't remember, probably indexing, gives a message like "ONE PLURAL". 1=Talc, which is also the missing stone, pluraled is TALCS.

[antihip.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I concur with your assessment of the 2004 Hunt. (Just to be public and on-the-record about it. :-)) And, more astonishingly, so do many of the 2004 writers (the ones who have taken time to think through that debacle).

I'm still not convinced that the clues in email, etc, were useful in identifying the groups. They're definitely helpful to confirm that you have a group, but in terms of staring at a pile of data and extracting out the relevant connections? Not convinced. Sorting is hard (more comments on that forthcoming at some point).

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

I'm still not convinced that the clues in email, etc, were useful in identifying the groups. They're definitely helpful to confirm that you have a group, but in terms of staring at a pile of data and extracting out the relevant connections? Not convinced. Sorting is hard (more comments on that forthcoming at some point).

From Manic Sages' experience, this is clearly false. We were extremely happy that we had already found a couple groups before the 'clarification' was sent, because it would have derailed us on those groups otherwise. We had a group labeled 'Tibetan restaurants' and a group labeled 'Government buildings' (turned out to be boxing commissions) long before we had any insight into the significance of the names in either group.

We did get all the other groups through names first, I just went back and checked. Props on the "Greater Prairie Chicken" group. At some stupid hour of the morning, our metapuzzle-guy shouts "It's the GREATER PRAIRIE CHICKEN!!!" (which some people heard as "greater faerie chicken"), and everyone thought he had gone completely mad. :-D

[antihip.livejournal.com]

Okay -- I stand corrected. From my one actual data point (==IIF) and from discussions with a couple other teams, I had the impression that most teams did not find many groupings before the hint emails. Kudos to Manic Sages for astute solving.

[justsomesleddog.livejournal.com]

(Hi, it's Rhode.)

I don't think there's a single 2004 hunt writer who doesn't agree with your assessment. Many of us are embarrassed when we have to admit that, yes, that was the hunt we wrote. A lot of us would like a second chance to redeem ourselves, even though we know that the likelihood of our winning again is not very high. That seemed to be a lot of what frustrated at least a few of us this year -- Palindrome made many of the same mistakes puzzle-construction-wise that they made in the Hunt of Horror. The implication (confirmed by a lot of the attitude I saw from them at wrap-up) is that they didn't recognize what we saw as problems to be problems, or at least didn't feel it was their responsibility to fix them.

Which is not to say that I didn't have fun this year -- I absolutely did.

(Incidentally, I must know antihip if the implication is that we wrote a hunt together.)

[antihip.livejournal.com]

Rhode: it's Jaci. (Also: I didn't remember having that puzzle on LJ in '04.)

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

The implication (confirmed by a lot of the attitude I saw from them at wrap-up) is that they didn't recognize what we saw as problems to be problems, or at least didn't feel it was their responsibility to fix them.

Oh, we recognized the problems. For example, during test solving, once the puzzles got up on a server, we realized that finding the little suckers in the dossiers or LBB was a nightmare. Unfortunately, due to problems described elsewhere, the puzzles weren't on a server until less than eight weeks before the hunt.

I'm sorry if our attitude came across as "We didn't think that was important, and so didn't waste our time on it." What we really thought was "We didn't think that was as important as the myriad other things that should have been taken care of four months ago." We were too busy doing things like finding a server, making sure we had rooms, and most importantly debugging puzzles, to focus as much as we would have liked on solver experience. And, as noted elsewhere, a lot of the really fun stuff got tossed - either in the two months before the Hunt, when we felt we had to pare it down to something manageable in the time we had, or during the Hunt itself, when we realized we had to jettison some stuff to make sure the Hunt stayed afloat.

As a new constructor, I can definitely say that it's harder to write a moderately difficult puzzle than a very difficult puzzle. I know a lot of us wish we'd had more time to make our puzzles more accessible. I've heard a lot of suggestions on how to improve Spectral Analysis - and god knows I wanted to; it's the first puzzle I ever constructed, and I believed it could be a really fun puzzle if it didn't frustrate people. But by the time test solving showed it to be harder than I'd thought, I was already devoting 15-20 hours a week to putting out fires that had been smoldering since June. So I had little time or creativity to put into making it better. The enumerations definitely helped a lot (and I'm glad we got them in before most teams had opened it). At the post-wrap-up lunch, foggyb casually tossed off a minor change that would have made it way easier, and way more fun. Dammit, Foggy! Where were you when I needed you? Oh, right, on a different team. *sigh*

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Hey, some sled dog is commenting here!

At any rate--I recall an impression during or just after the 2004 Hunt of a certain amount of unrepentance. I may be misremembering, or time may have softened that.

To be honest, I'd also like a chance to redeem myself for 2003; I'm proud of a lot of it, but there's a lot I regret and would like to do better. That, I think, is also Eric's assessment of this year's hunt. (Though I do agree that I see, to some extent, that implied attitude you note. Apparently learning from the mistakes of '03 and '04 isn't something you can do until you've made those mistakes yourself.)

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

This sounds much like the first (and so far only) Google hunt. There was a theme based around corporate misdeeds, a shadow organization, kidnappings... but most of the time we completely forgot about all that, as it had no real relevance to the individual (mostly very good) puzzles or the overall structure. When we got to the end, I had a moment of "oh, right, we're supposed to be rescuing those people".

[rlangmit.livejournal.com]

You hit on one of our biggest complaints--it was impossible to find any puzzles on the webpage in any sort of expedient manner. That drove me crazy all weekend.

And the "lackluster" comment was also spot on...last year was just so FUN. Part of that, though, was that we solved five metas last year, and this year we solved zero--due to the difficulty of the puzzles and the availability of so many that were more fun to work on than the "needed" ones. That means we didn't really get into the story, and with the cancelled events (which would have been fun), it kind of felt like when we were a small team which solved off-campus without any real puzzler-constructor interaction.

Then again, reading some Palindrome entries, it seems like we were lucky to get a hunt at all!

OK, sorry to jump on your LJ--I've been doing this randomly the last few hunts to get comments outside my team. It would be cool if people would post to

http://mystery_hunt.livejournal.com

which was set up last year for this kind of post-mortem but never used. (The guy in the picture there reminded me of it and is suggesting that we spread it around again.)

Ryan (Up Late)

[(Anonymous)]

I can't seem to post there without registering. Can that be changed, or must I bite the bullet?

[rlangmit.livejournal.com]

If you mean without registering for LJ, then I think there's no way around that. Can you comment anonymously still?

[(Anonymous)]

Apparently yes; I was just hoping to post a new thread to provide answers to my own puzzles. -Matt

[rlangmit.livejournal.com]

Well, you could just post them to the webpage... =)

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

A lot of plot got tossed on Sunday afternoon for the sake of time. None of us were happy about that, but it had to be done. And yes, there were some unpleasant circumstances involving Hunt organization that, to be honest, render me fairly astonished that it went as well as it did. But your criticism is valid and appreciated.

(Talk to me or certain other Palindromers at con for the full gossipy low-down if you want it. :P)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I might be better off without the full gossip. (I talked for a while to Scott during the Hunt, so I know a little; and I know I felt better after we talked. Then again, that's probably true for most times I talk to him.)

[entropyspring.livejournal.com]

Ah, you know, all this highly critical post-mortem chitchat really makes me *miss* the mystery hunt, even though I only did it once, and being a newbie kinda sucked at it. But I put my heart into it and had fun and, well, you know.

It's pretty easy to get lost in the technical of why this or that piece of a big production like the Hunt didn't come off quite right, but the real measure of success is whether it was fun or not, as you alluded to in your first paragraph. Sorry I missed it!