Alas, poor Games

[tahnan]

After flipping through my first issue of Games Magazine (quote from my wife: "Hey, at least you aren't paying for it"), the puzzle I was most interested in was the twelve-part seven-page suite from Gottlieb/Selinker/Woodruff. I know these people; I know they do good work. (Also: their competition in the issue included a puzzle that spelled "Alan Rickman" as "Allen Rickman", and one that I remember from the early 1980s.)

Unfortunately, the Curse of Games seems to have affected even GS&W. Of the twelve puzzles, one of them had an alternate answer (which admittedly didn't spell anything, but it was a legal answer by the constraints in the puzzle--and one of their other answers was sort of seriously non-dictionary-phrase in its nature); one of the puzzles was broken, not so seriously that I couldn't divine the answer, but nevertheless it wasn't quite right; and one of the puzzles had, IMHO, a rather serious aesthetic error. (To say nothing of the fact that it was a "find the two identical pictures" puzzle, and I spent well over a minute asking myself, "Is that a mole on her face, or just a random printing-error dot?")

But I made it through all twelve. Unfortunately, that left me with kind of an unconstrained set of words to make into rules. And one of their rules turned out to be much less restrictive than their examples would lead you to believe.

Mark, Mike, Teeuwynn? I still love you guys. But stop letting Games drag you down.

---

Addendum: I decided to make absolutely sure that Alan Rickman's name was spelled "Alan" and not "Allen". Well...yes and no. The puzzle asks you to find the movie title consisting of three repeated words matching the clue "Allen Rickman in 1987". All I could think of was "Truly Madly Deeply", which isn't three repeated words (and is, it turns out, 1991).

Well. It turns out that they really did mean Allen Rickman. Star of Shock! Shock! Shock! You can see from its IMDb entry what a quality movie it must be. And from Allen Rickman's entry, what a quality actor he must be.

Sad, gentlemen. Very, very sad.

Comments

[colorwheel.livejournal.com]

well, you know those people who spell their name "allen." they're kind of sleazy.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Oh, heck, of that, there is no doubt. I mean, this guy (http://www.coco.cc.az.us/apetersen/) looks much more respectable than anyone we know, doesn't he?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Hasn't Mike Selinker been a contributing editor for Games for, like, decades? Maybe he's dragging them down!

Also, for what it's worth, the November issue of Games: World of Puzzles has a ten-page excerpt from Microsoft Puzzle Hunt 8, which also has puzzles from Selinker and Gottlieb. I haven't done it, but it looks kind of neat.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I know Mike too well to think that the problem's with him and his puzzles. And the overall quality of the issue can't possibly be his fault.

[ennienyc.livejournal.com]

Mike Selinker is a nice guy, but his puzzles are sometimes, shall we say, not user-friendly. That's where an editor like Mike Shenk can work wonders to make things smooth and nice. Oh well, Games's loss.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually mention the user-friendliness problem I had with one of the twelve puzzles (namely, that the final answer involved knowing a particular movie title, which I happened to know, and which you can find on the Internet easily, but which isn't necessarily at every solver's fingertips--better for a Hunt puzzle than a Games puzzle).

[prog.livejournal.com]

Not following you on the addendum. It seems like it could be clever misdirection to write a clue that looks like it contains a typo or some other error but is in fact correct as written. How is this not the case here?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Because "Allen Rickman" and the movie "Shock! Shock! Shock!" are incredibly obscure. We're talking about a B movie thriller from nearly 20 years ago, so bad that the IMDb doesn't even have a full listing of the cast. And "B movie" may be generous; the stills at this page (http://xoomer.virgilio.it/amasoni2002/shl/originals/shock!_shock!_shock!_(1987).htm) make it look like it was shot in someone's basement.

Is it fair in, I don't know, a Mystery Hunt Puzzle? Sure, perhaps. But in a quickie trivia thing, the point is to use movies you stand some chance of having heard of. You might not know the 1962 Elvis movie, but you can say, well, OK, Elvis movie, I could have known that. Throw in "Shock! Shock! Shock!" and you have the equivalent of the trivia question "How much change is in my pocket right now?"--you may not know the answer, but why should you?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Isn't knowing how to find the answer worth something? I can't know how much change you have but I can IMDB Mr. Rickman.

Is encouraging the solver to turn to the internets considered the hallmark of a broken clue? I actually tend not to like encountering clues like this (outside of the hunt) because I feel that Googling the answer is somehow cheating: either you know the answer, or you don't, in which case you don't get to fill anything in.

This differs from "what word am I describing" clues in that you can always revisit those later, perhaps when more letters have crossed in. But if you have no knowledge of who the 1968 fencing world champion is, then no support-cluing will ever make the answer occur to you (unless it's a crossword and you eventually get R_BERTSMI_H or something. "OK, if you say so.").

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Crosswords are, in some ways, a separate beast. You may encounter crossings where you just don't know either word and have to guess at the letter--though even there, there's (a) usually some sense of feeling that you could have known it, and (b) ideally a feeling of having learned something. (For a while, I was copyediting old Maleska-era crosswords for reprinting. One of my least favorite clue/answer pairs was "Arikara" as a clue for REE. I looked up "ree" in Merriam-Webster's Unabridged, and sure enough, the definition was "Arikara", so it's legal. But the clue might as well be in Spanish, or Martian, for all that the solver learns anything from it.

But in any case: a separate beast, because the challenge in a crossword is not just knowing the answers, but figuring them out and getting them into a grid, and because things you don't know can later become apparent.

With a straight trivia quiz, things become muddier. I happen to be very bad at recognizing celebrities; even knowing that Kate Hudson is the daughter of Goldie Hawn, I'd do miserably at a Games puzzle with pictures of celebrities where the challenge is to match parent to child. ("Is that...Gwyneth Paltrow? No, wait, that's her over there. This is...um.") But I recognize that such a puzzle is fair: while recognizing celebrities is not a skill I have, it's a genuine puzzling skill, and I wouldn't expect someone who knows celebrities but can't do crosswords to point to the latter and say, "These aren't fair puzzles."

So "I don't know this fact" is hardly a fair measure of a straight trivia puzzle. But "no one knows this fact" is a much better measure. If "Shock! Shock! Shock!" appeared in a crossword puzzle, you could get it from crossing letters, as you say; or perhaps you could look it up in the IMDb, and the point of the crossword is still there; there's still more work to do. But in a list of trivia questions, where the entire point is "can you think of this?", looking it up means that the answer is, well, no.

Which is, by and large, what you were saying, I think. But "I know how to find this" only goes so far.

[mlstrm.livejournal.com]

What's not mentioned is that this (like the Monsters puzzle printed last year) was a reprint from an extravaganza they ran for one of the major gaming/sci-fi cons (GenCon?), so it's a straight trade-over from one venue to the other. Oh wait, the Allen Rickman thing was in a different puzzle? I can't help you there. :)