In the past ten years or so, I've participated in a LOT of puzzle events: 9 MS Puzzle Hunts, 5 Puzzle Days, 3 Puzzle Safaris, 1 Iron Puzzler, 6 full-length Games, 4 half-day Games, 1 SNAP and a couple other local walking hunts, at least 7 other treasure hunts at various places, and probably some things I'm forgetting. That body of experience has given me a certain adeptness at recognizing how a puzzle will deliver its final answer. Once upon a time, realizing that a message was in Braille or Semaphore was a deeply rewarding insight. Now it's second-nature. Any matrix with a 2x3 aspect ratio suggests Braille now, and any angular configuration screams Semaphore. Likewise with all the other standard encoding systems-- Morse, binary, ASCII, etc. It's old hat, and recognizing these schemes is second nature to most players of similar experience unless they're craftily obfuscated. Shinteki: Decathlon II had a particularly fresh encoding of 5-bit binary, mapping colors in national flags to the corresponding Olympic rings, and making that connection was satisfying. But that's the exception more than the rule these days.
This represents a big dilemma for puzzle event designers. The Game and Puzzle Hunt communities both have a core group of dedicated, experienced teams and a large field of less experienced ones. How do you create a satisfying event for both groups? How do you use the familiar language of puzzle encodings in a fresh enough way that it's challenging and satisfying for veterans while still approachable to newbies?
Innovation in puzzle design is one answer. But creating entirely new paradigms is hard, and a lot to ask of people who put together an event in their spare time. Perhaps the answer is to change what we think of as a puzzle. More physical manipulation puzzles, interactive locations, computerized challenges. Puzzles where you're given the answer in exchange for accomplishing a task. Maybe we need to shift out thinking away from the traditional paper-and-pencil puzzle mold.
Maybe there is no answer. Perhaps it's a natural life cycle and eventually veterans become so well-versed in the language of event puzzles that their interest in the entire genre dies, extinguished in a kind of puzzler's Carousel ("Renew! Renew!").
I'll be reflecting on these and other mysteries, particularly those of the ancient Maya, for the next two weeks on the sunny Yucatan peninsula.
Posted by Peter at February 20, 2007 05:54 PMYou're right. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, how so many puzzles ultimately boil down to "find the encoding mechanism". Even crosswords, which traditionally have a "fill in every answer" as the completion criteria, but in this type of event, you still ultimately have to find one single answer out of the crossword grid. Perhaps we should think about how to open up more complex answers as acceptable.
Just a random thought.
Posted by: Jesse McGatha on February 23, 2007 02:18 PMI'm surprised to hear you worry about this, because you've designed plenty of great puzzles in which the fun part had nothing to do with discovering what standard encoding mechanism was employed. Chicago Fire, Shootout at the OK Corral, US Reconstruction.... in none of those do you read any encoded information; you just read a bunch of letters in order.
It seems to me there are plenty of interesting things to do in a puzzle besides find an encoding mechanism. Indeed, my preference nowadays is for puzzles that use as straightforward an answer extraction method as possible. This way, as a solver I can spend my time on the fun and novel part and as little time as possible on the "OK, I'm done; now how do I get a word out of this?" part.
I share your feelings, for the most part. I tried to experiment with different answer delivery mechanisms in TAZ, and I rarely write a "codesheet" puzzle these days unless I can think of a really beautiful way to use one of those standard encoding schemes. I've also come to dislike puzzles that expect someone to have an insight purely on the basis of puzzle hunt intuition. For example, I didn't like the Mystery Hunt puzzle that made one tiny reference to "dash" (in a sea of text) and then expected the solver to turn plain and peanut M&Ms into dots and dashes. That puzzle all but required a veteran who would say, "Oh, maybe we should try Morse", and the Morse step felt completely out-of-place in a Mafia-themed puzzle. (I don't mean to pick on that puzzle in particular; I feel the same way about puzzles that expect solvers to use 2x3 grids as Braille, angles as semaphore, etc. with no additional cluing or with only a token reference to blindness or flags. The M&Ms-as-Morse mechanism was better than most such ideas, in that the M&Ms actually resembled dots and dashes to some extent and weren't just "short" and "long" objects.)
The Square Off puzzle in PHA, on the other hand, was one of my favorites in that hunt. DOTTED and DASH as the 1-Across and 1-Down clues were pretty clear signals that even newbies could be expected to pick up on (everyone knows *of* dots and dashes), the Morse was at the heart of the puzzle, and a codesheet scheme was used in an innovative way.
Posted by: Ian on February 26, 2007 08:39 PM