Mystery Hunt Con Report

Well, okay, I'm not sure con report is the best phrasing. But as another Mystery Hunt has drawn to a close, I wish to report back!

This was a GINORMOUS hunt. So many puzzles. So many rounds. SO MUCH PUZZLE. Honestly, I think we did very well to do as well as we did, particularly considering we were approximately twenty people smaller than last year.

I was all excited when it turned out to be book themed, because here we have headed into my subject area, and then it turned out that I did not need to actually use my subject knowledge at all and I was sad. And then I was indignant when we cured the Very Hungry Caterpillar, in the form of a Voracious Bookwyrm, by feeding it a berry. The whole problem in the book was that it was eating things like berries when it shouldn't have been; it felt better after eating one nice green leaf! I know, I know, they wanted the Newbery pun--they gave it a "New Berry".

Also there was a special guest appearance from Weird Al in one of the story videos, as the delegate from Recipeoria who was trying to sell us on a Calculated Whisk. (A whisk with a calculator attached to it to help you count the number of stirs.)

My main contribution, as in previous years, was on the not-puzzle puzzles: "Make a Eurovision pastiche video with an original song and send it in." "Be awake at 10AM to be the team's delegate to the multi-team Exquisite Corpses Discord event." "Assemble the permitted items for a Benedictine monk and then write and sing a Gregorian chant about a puzzle from a previous year's hunt and send that in." Since we're doing this from home, it becomes a game of "So how many strange objects can Kit just pull out of her closet for props?" (The Eurovision one featured my first use of a corset I bought at the last Arisia I attended that I have not gotten to wear since because the place I wore such things was... Arisia.)

I did not participate in the "make a Star Trek episode between 3 and 5 minutes" one, but the people who did came out with a hilarious video featuring a reference to classic (originating well before my time) Mystery Hunt running gag Escape From Zyzzlvaria. (Incidentally, after four years in the Hunt I am finally starting to just get the in-jokes-- things like Zyzzlvaria and the fact that you're meant to pronounce those airplane emojis and who the major names are in the puzzle construction community.)

That being said, I now have enough awareness of how puzzlehunts in general work and the basic types of puzzles that I can offer meaningful contributions occasionally. This is still novel enough that Mathfriend, also on the team, wound up receiving excited gchat messages to the effect of "I CONTRIBUTED something!" every time I made a contribution. My standard-issue Saturday night meltdown appears to be more connected to the brain work than the "being in a crowded room of other people on no sleep" aspect, since the Hunt being virtual had no effect on it; it still appeared right on schedule. I'm going to try to see if I can practice some elements of puzzling throughout the year, even if that winds up being "I do some crosswords." (I work in a library. There are a lot of things around to photocopy crosswords out of.)

I do have-- as I think a lot of people will-- some quibbles with the Hunt structure, namely the massive bottleneck at the beginning. One of the things about structuring a good hunt is that while the final meta should require a certain amount of completion, you should never have only one puzzle open unless it is the last puzzle. We lost quite a lot of time to being very, very stuck on an early meta, unable to progress further because until we unlocked it we would get no more puzzles. They went into what they were trying to accomplish with this at wrap-up, and I get what the deal was: while I've never been on a team that doesn't have "even if we don't pull off finishing we should at least see the whole thing" as a goal, smaller teams do not do this-- there were, apparently, people who never got out of the first round-- and they wanted to give them a nice intermediate goal, something achievable for them, with its own mini runaround. Which is a great idea! Except it creates this bottleneck for the larger teams. Everyone gets stuck on something, but if you happen to be the one who gets stuck on this one specific puzzle, you can't advance at all until you get unstuck... meanwhile anyone who got stuck on something else but not there has a lengthy period of time to get so far ahead you can never catch up. And depending on how thoroughly you get stuck, you might not be able to see the rest of the hunt at all.

But I'm also someone who couldn't enjoy Hunt at all without being on a large team. This is fun and awesome, but a large part of why it's fun and awesome is that with such a large team I can contribute to the things that fall into my very limited skillset without getting stuck on the things that fall outside of it... and this is also part of why I was unhappy about it, because a bunch of puzzles that looked like they fit into my limited skillset were finally unlocked right when I was going to bed, too exhausted to puzzle and needing to be up for the morning game of Exquisite Corpses, when on a hunt with a reasonable unlock mechanism I'd have gotten to do those puzzles.

Teammate won, which means they're running the next hunt. I don't know them at all but everyone seems REALLY EXCITED, so I will look forward to it! And hope that next year we're back at MIT. I am sort of doubtful about whether that will be reality, but we live in hope.