Mystery hunt.

The MIT Mystery Hunt, the 2005 incarnation of which ended yesterday evening, is always a good time, though the amount of goodness varies widely for me based on who else is hunting, how long the Hunt has dragged on, whether there's food and drink to be had, &c. The Hunt is a puzzle competition in which teams (some of which have 100+ members, now) tease out the location of a coin (somewhere on campus) by using puzzle solutions to solve metapuzzles, which themselves constitute a puzzle (or puzzles)...it amounts to an outpouring of thousands and thousands of man-hours over two or three sometimes-sleepless days. And the prizes? First prize: you get to write next year's Hunt. Second prize is nothing at all.

It's basically an astonishing waste of time in several regards, particularly if you're not on a team that's in the running for the coin. My team, Project Electric Mayhem, seems to have been in the running this year - our best shot at winning so far. I'm told that we had 116 registered members, though more likely we had about 60 people competing under the Mayhem banner. Consider: 60 MIT students, each of whom spent, say, 20 hours hunting over the course of three days (many people simply stayed awake from noon Friday until Sunday evening, working with presumably decreasing effectiveness, about which more below). It's inspiring in the sense that it's MIT kids hanging out and having fun in a large group. It's a little depressing if you're trying to find other ways to get an equal number of MIT students to demonstrate anything like solidarity or sociability.

One illusion people have about the Hunt - and part of the reason it draws such big numbers, I think - is the notion that it rewards braininess-in-the-abstract. Of course what the Mystery Hunt rewards, along with knowledge of trivia, is skill at solving Mystery Hunt puzzles; take a look at Team ACME's 'Have you tried...?' list from 2003, which lists common starting points. Many puzzles reach a point where you (the puzzler, hapless but not alone) are faced with a list of numbers or letters, and you have to do something 'clever' to it to get out something more sensible. Lots of numbers from 1-26? Try letter substitution. Alphabetized list? You're going to have to reorder it. Words and numbers? Index into the words, reorder the resulting letter stew. Generally the solutions are logical, though sometimes the 'logic' is tenuous at best. I spent a while banging my head against this puzzle this year; we never solved it. In order to do so, you were required to notice that each film costarred an actor who'd played a villain on the old Batman TV show. Presumably the title of the puzzle, 'Evil Empire,' was supposed to be a clue. Though vague titles are the norm in the Hunt, this particular title was uselessly vague - it doesn't point to anything helpful.

So success at the Hunt, I think, has three parts: fresh eyes with good pattern-matching skills, a knack for solving certain common puzzle types, and a collaborative atmosphere in which expertise can flow around. It's helpful to have programmers on the team to automate certain tasks (indeed, this seems to be assumed by the Hunt organizers - which is totally reasonable at an MIT event); for that matter, it's helpful to have some kind of organizational system and communication infrastructure to optimize resource allocation. Team Mayhem utilized a custom-built Wiki with integrated chat and lots of puzzle-oriented templates this year (thanks Death/Kraken/et al.!); chalkboards just aren't sufficient for organizing, especially when they're bound to be used for group puzzle solving at some point.

My dream for the Hunt - which will hopefully be made real if Mayhem wins sometime in the next five years, while the current team organizers are still enthusiastic and around - is something less strictly regimented than the current competition. As things stand now, the solutions to all the puzzles in a given round constitute a metapuzzle, often interacting with the solutions to the puzzles from another round. The round metapuzzles yield a batch of solutions which constitute the metametapuzzle. Usually this involves some change in modality - a map puzzle, a set of puzzles with a particular consistent gimmick, &c. (The Matrix-themed Hunt a few years ago was the best one I've been a part of, for instance. There were different kinds of puzzles, depending on their location in 'the real world' or 'the Matrix', and the puzzle solutions needed to be transformed according to their locations. On top of that, the 'chrome' of the competition, the aesthetic side of the organizers' work, was top-notch. Overall, an extraordinary weekend, that. Last year's theme work was even better, though I'm told that the puzzles themselves were less rock-solid.)

It'd be interesting (and terribly difficult) to attempt a Hunt that was even more densely-connected than the last few: in which the different levels of puzzles were interacting more, with every answer doing double duty. The Hunt already takes a year of planning, though I don't know how the labour actually splits up for the winning teams; I have no idea whether a Hunt of this type is even feasible. My particular interest is in writing rich 'flavour-text' (the introduction to each puzzle), riddled with allusions which would come into play throughout the course of the Hunt (and which would require something more complicated than Google to track down). That'd do a little, I think, to shift some of the emphasis from the safecracking style of today's Hunt to something more arcane-feeling. Not that I dislike the puzzles...of course I don't! But the aestheticized-Asperger's vibe of the whole thing is a bit irksome to me. And it'd be interesting to try a Hunt with very precise flavour text and organizer/team interactions, something even more structured in its theatricality.

That's one big danger in the Hunt: it brings out some of MIT's least-socialized kids, because it's right up their alley. After forty hours in a crowded, smelly classroom, most anyone gets cranky and aggravating. Throw in a little bit of social retardation and unimaginative egotism, the mix gets ripe quickly. Add a dash of fatal humorlessness and an insistence on the inescapable logic!! of the universe and you get...well, several of the dorms at MIT. Part of my aggravation with MIT's particular strain of geek culture is nothing more than annoyance at its 'autistic chic' vibe, into which I fit uncomfortably at best. But part of it stems from disappointment: I hate that my community (one of my communities) reinforces dangerously asocial traits in people whose intelligence and particular obsessions already set them apart.

Regardless: this year's Hunt was a solid one (though, to be frank, nothing about the Hunt this year blew me away). And it was a hell of a lot of fun. Mayhem's an enjoyable team, and judging from the pictures, Mayhem West (in San Francisco and environs) was having a good time too. Maybe sometime I'll join them instead.

To close, a little bit of flashback action: something I wrote for MIT's yearbook, Technique, a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I was literary editor at the time. For the 'Activities' section of the book, I put together this short Mystery Hunt piece. Presumably I was still more in love with MIT then than now.

Somebody's standing naked on a stool in the center of the room, Rhett's running around in rainbow suspenders and briefs yelling something unintelligible, in the back room four people are clustered around a terminal chattering loudly about ancient languages and the bunch in the corner are swearing at the ceiling about some word puzzle, the phrase "canonical list of every horror writer ever" gets floated, straight-faced. There's a table covered in empty potato chip bags and boxes of melting ice cream, and a small cheer goes up when a carload of poeple enter the room and pronounce, "We have the pornography," brandishing a stack of comic books, dolls, a stuffed animal... It's my first Mystery Hunt, a collision of MIT subcultures centered around the common assertion, the absolute certainty, that We can solve puzzles faster than Them. In the last two hours I've made barely a dozen marks on the crossword puzzle sitting on the table, but there's the comforting feeling that a breakthrough might be near, that it's only a matter of getting over some hump before the answers begin to cascade in. We've been at this for 36 hours or so, I've been wearing these socks for days, and when the announcement comes, it's a sigh of both disappointment and relief: "The coin has been found" (with its addendum: "We can finally go home"). A moment of delicious self-deception: We were almost there, I coulda done this in another hour or two...the MIT experience in miniature: long periods of hard work, always tongue-in-cheek, always fully aware of the ridiculousness of this weekend of exertion, and somewhere in the back of your mind the realization that spending a weekend staring at classroom walls puzzling over cryptograms might just be, in some sick way, its own reward...

As they say in Mayhem: Next year in Jerusalem!

Comments

[Foonyor]

A perspective on writing a "different" kind of Mystery Hunt from someone who tried is at my blog.

[Wax Banks]

Nice post, btw. I happily acknowledge my own naivete on the subject - and I share your hope that this year's winners will take advantage of the last few years' experience, and put up a Well-Wrought Hunt. I didn't actually get to do last year's Hunt, regrettably - from what I've heard, the theme and chrome were outstanding.

Maybe MIT isn't the right place for what I'm thinking of. And yet...who else would possibly do such a thing?

[MRh]

I think you could probably succeed in starting a similar, if perhaps not quite so insane, version of the Mystery Hunt elsewhere.

With fewer malodorous alumni.

[The Dan]

Two things worth mentioning:

1) A discussion with most teams before and after this year's hunt implied that puzzle solvers hate flavor text, especially flavor text that is required to solve puzzles, because the clues are inevitably hard to find and/or misinterpreted. I personally disagree, but I seem to be in the minority.

2) Evil Empire originally had flavor text, but it was test solved w/o the flavor text and thus the text got removed due to (1). Half the teams seem to feel it was necessary. The other half solved it. Though the successful aha-ers seem to have skewed older. I wish I had had something about "your enemies" in it, but not much more than that.

[Erin]

Add me to the list of people who thought that Evil Empire needed a bit of flavor text. All I came up with was James Earl Jones being in one of the movies and then looking for Star Wars villains. Batman never occurred to me.

But in general, I do prefer puzzles that don't require you to decode the instructions from the flavortext. I just don't think Evil Empire was one of those puzzles.

[Wax]

Hey Dan!

Personally I'm a HUGE fan of puzzles where good flavour text puts you on the right path, though (obviously) it's good if it's not necessary, either. Having said that - obviously I didn't take a close enough look at the casts of all the films. Honestly, I don't think we were thinking enough along those lines, so fuck US. Having said that: good flavour text seems so helpful as an immersion-creating device. I personally don't get off on puzzle-solving as a hobby; I think of the Mystery Hunt as a particularly challenging augmented-reality game set at MIT, compressed in time (but you can imagine it being played over weeks, eh?). The better the flavour, the more compelling it is to my imagination (and the more likely my imagination is to kick into a higher gear and see 'through' the puzzles).

[Wax]

FWIW, it's good to hear that flavour text was intended for 'Evil Empire'. But disheartening to hear that the majority opinion swings against flavour text. I guess I forgot my empathy-with-the-autistic pill this morning, though I of course took my sympathy-for-&c. pill.