Two hundred puzzles, fifty years later by CJ Q. '23

I’ve talked about Mystery Hunt at length, from the perspective of a participant, the perspective of a hunt runner, and the perspective of a community member. Here I’ll take the perspective of a critic, or perhaps a scholar. I’m going to put my CMS hat⁠01 CMS is <a href="https://cmsw.mit.edu/about">Comparative Media Studies</a>, a department under MIT’s <a href="https://shass.mit.edu/">School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences</a>. on and think about the Mystery Hunt from a media studies viewpoint, grounding some thoughts I have about the Hunt through comparison with other forms of media.

• Introduction
  • Why CMS?
  • Overview
  • Acknowledgments
• Searching for legitimacy
  • Hunt history
  • Comic book history
  • Cultural legitimacy
  • In practice
• Experience logistics
  • In the flesh
  • Holding candles
  • Creative goods
  • Feedback loops
• Fading together
  • Never seen again
  • Forgetting
  • Recorded live
  • For permanence
  • For transience
• The gift of puzzles
  • Sandbagging
  • Free as in what?
  • Gift economies
  • To buy a Hunt
• Conclusion
  • Open questions
  • tl;dr

Introduction

Why CMS?

What is the Mystery Hunt? I once described it as “the world’s oldest, largest puzzlehunt, an event where hundreds of teams, with sizes anywhere from one to a hundred, work to solve roughly a dozen rounds of roughly a dozen puzzles each, of kinds ranging from jigsaw puzzle to Sudoku variant to protein-folding crossword to submitting ridiculous dance videos.” I might refer to puzzlehunts as hunts, and the Mystery Hunt as the Hunt. That’ll suffice for now; I’ll give more context when it comes up.

What is CMS? I don’t have a snappy answer. Like media studies, CMS includes the study of all kinds of media, from TV and movies, to books and magazines, to video games and fanfiction. Central to CMS is the idea of “applied humanities”: we study media so we can apply (or avoid) what we’ve learned. My take is that CMS is about tinkering with your hobbies to understand them. Every instructor I’ve met in CMS has their own collection of interests, like comic books or live-action roleplaying or DJing or interactive fiction.

TV, movies, books, magazines, video games, fanfiction—it might not seem like these have a lot in common with the Mystery Hunt, or puzzlehunts in general. In this post, I’ll go over some similarities between Mystery Hunt and these other forms of media, putting the comparative in Comparative Media Studies. I hope to convince you that the Hunt, like all puzzlehunts, can be studied and thought of in the same way we can do for poems and short stories. Hence the “fifty years” in the post title,⁠02 Also, because this is my fourth Hunt post, and four times fifty is two hundred. because I want to think about the Hunt in a context bigger than fifty hours or fifty weeks.

Along the way, I’ll talk about my own feelings and experiences about the Hunt, and I hope this’ll help me understand these feelings and experiences better. That’s why I’ve written my previous Hunt recaps, and why this post is in the same series. Because this is a “Mystery Hunt recap”, it’ll have some spoilers for Mystery Hunt 2023, which I’ll mark as I go.

Overview

In Searching for legitimacy, we look at compare the histories of Mystery Hunt and comic books. We then look at the narrative and production aspects of this year’s Mystery Hunt, and compare it to previous Hunts.

In Experience logistics, I talk about my feelings on helping with this year’s Hunt logistics, compare it to how a movie is developed and distributed, and think about how we can improve the experience of making a Hunt.

In Fading together, we ask the question: what do we, as puzzle authors, do about the fact that our work are ephemeral? We look to how theater people and Twitch streamers answer this question for inspiration.

In The gift of puzzles, I think about what it means to contribute to the puzzlehunt community, and what expectations I have for others, using a gift economy analysis of how media fandoms work.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ceri, Lilly, and Petey for some CMS-related thoughts. Extra thanks to Mark, the CMS librarian, for the literature references.

Thanks to Lumia and Paolo for commenting on drafts. Thanks to Wayne for snarking on drafts, for context on comic book history, and for info on paid puzzlehunts.

Thanks to ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ for inspiring me to write this post in the first place, sharing thoughts and experiences on many of the topics I discuss, and for being the friends I made along the way. I love you all.

Searching for legitimacy

Hunt history

In 1981, Brad Schaefer, PhD student, wrote the I.A.P. Mystery Hunt, a single page of twelve clues. When Brad graduated in 1983, the task of writing the next Hunt was passed to its winner, Jean-Joseph Coté, and then began the tradition of the winner writing the next year’s Hunt.⁠03 We'll take a closer look at this tradition, and its merits and flaws, later in the article. It was distributed on a sheet titled Ofishal Mystery Hunt 1984 Clue Sheet.

Its early names included The Great IAP Mystery Hunt, 3-Day IAP Mystery Hunt, and The Three-Day Puzzle Hunt, which I think is the first recorded instance of “puzzle hunt”. In those days the hunts started on Monday or Saturday or whenever else. It’s early-installment weirdness.

It’s in 1992, a decade after the first Hunt, when the event first becomes more familiar. The name “Mystery Hunt” stuck. It started on a Friday, and the Hunt’s started on Friday since. It’s also in 1992 that the Hunt got its first theme: a treasure hunt on Captain Red Herring’s Mystery Island. Early Hunt stories were an excuse plot, a story serving the needs of the Hunt without getting in the way of the puzzles.

Theming stuck, and each Hunt since has had some sort of theme. Themes grew a little in scope: the 1997 Hunt was the first one with a decoy theme,⁠04 It could be called a cover theme or a fake-out theme, but many Hunts since have had one, like how the <a href="https://puzzles.mit.edu/2020/">2020 Hunt</a> started off with a wedding, when it was about an amusement park. I’d argue that the 1999 Hunt is the first one with plot points,⁠05 In early Hunts, the plot had two points: the introduction, where you're given the puzzles, and the ending, when you solve the last puzzle. This was the first Hunt with points between: you had puzzles, the dossiers, that advanced the plot before the endgame. the 2003 Hunt was the first to have many pages of story text. The complexity of the Hunt also increased: as a crude measure, the number of puzzles went from around 50 in the 1999 Hunt, to over 100 in the 2003 Hunt.

Then the Hunt became bigger in a different dimension. It became more popular, like the 2007 Hunt featuring in This American Life or the 2013 Hunt featuring in Wired. Its production value grew too, from the 2011 Hunt having an informal kickoff ceremony in Lobby 7, to the 2014 Hunt running its kickoff in the much larger Kresge Auditorium.

Several non-MIT puzzlehunt traditions started. Of the ones available online, MUMS started in 2004, Foggy Brume’s P&A Magazine and Puzzle Boat in 2005, Mark Halpin’s Labor Day Extravaganzas in 2006, CiSRA, later mezzacotta in 2007, Puzzle Hunt CMU in 2007, maybe,⁠06 Chris tells me that Puzzle Hunt CMU has its roots in the mid-2000s, before becoming its own organization in 2013. Its online archives go back to 2015, but the first listed hunt is in 2007. then SUMS in 2010. Notably, MUMS, CiSRA, and SUMS were all written by Australians, earning them the moniker of Australian-style hunts.

Cut to the 2017 Hunt. The Hunt’s notable for ending on early Saturday morning, when most Mystery Hunts ended on Sunday afternoon or evening. My Hunt team, ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈, finished early and spent the rest of the weekend writing puzzles. These were later published as the Galactic Puzzle Hunt. I’m biased,⁠07 I love everyone in Galactic so much. but I think 2017 saw another shift in puzzlehunt style, with more intricate and meta themes and mechanics. I called this the golden era of puzzlehunts, and we’re experiencing it now.

Comic book history

This IAP I took a class called CMS.S60 Watching the Watchmen: Superheros in Comics and Television. We discussed the history of comic books,⁠08 Most history information is taken from the "Comic Books" entry in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. and I noted some similarities with the history of Mystery Hunt.

The medium has its origins in newspaper comic strips. In 1938, Detective Comics, now known as DC Comics, published Superman, which was a commercial success. A 1945 article cites estimates of 90% of children, 40% of young adult men, and 30% of young adult women having read comic books. Comics were popular in the Golden Age, but this popularity declined in the 1950s due to public criticism.

Although I don’t have any good sources for comic book readership in the 1950s, comic book sale numbers show that it can’t have been more than one-fifth of the US. Newsstands stopped distributing comic books because of this drop in popularity. Specialized comic book stores began in the 1980s, and the readership shifted away from casual mainstream readers to consistent fans. It’s probably around this time that comics started being nerdy, which continued through the 90s.

Consider how comic books were printed. During the Golden Age, comic books were thin, printed on cheap newsprint then stapled together. But in the 80s, when the readership started shifting away from casual readers, publishers could afford to use more expensive printing formats. Higher-quality, glossy paper led to a wider palette of colors. Collectors started buying softbound comic compilations, called trade paperbacks. Some comic collections would even be published hardbound with original content, which we might call a graphic novel instead of a comic book.

This brings us to the 2000s and 2010s. While printed comic books never returned to their former popularity, the superheroes who originated from these comics became popular even among the general public. The old X-Men, Spiderman, and Batman movies led to merchandise sales, and these days the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the highest-grossing media franchises. Being a superhero fan isn’t seen as nerdy anymore.

Cultural legitimacy

I think that puzzlehunt history and comic book history are similar in three big ways:

1. The format and production aspects improved over time. The first Hunts were written by a single person and printed on a sheet of paper, today’s Hunts are written by dozens of people, with professional-level art, storytelling, and tech.⁠09 I don’t talk about how the Hunt’s tech has gotten better over time in this post, but only because I’ve <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/two-hundred-puzzles-2/#the-copy-to-clipboard-button">written about it before</a>. teammate’s Hunt tech is stellar; they’re the team that first introduced the copy-to-clipboard feature discussed in the post I linked. Golden Age comic books were printed on cheap paper, today’s books are bound, glossy, and colorful, even digital.
2. The narrative aspects became more complex over time. The first Hunts had a handful of puzzles, and no story, or an excuse plot. Today’s Hunts have hundreds of puzzles, a kickoff skit, and several plot points. Comic books, especially during the Silver Age, used to have flat heroes and villains with black and white morality. Today’s comics discuss more mature issues.
3. The audience and popularity grew over time. The first Hunts had dozens of participants, today’s Hunts have thousands of hunters, and some Hunts are even covered in small media outlets. While comics were popular during the Golden Age, they were seen as nerdy through the 80s and 90s. Now, comic book content is so popular to get mainstream film adaptations.

These three arcs all trend in the same direction, which I’ll describe as trying to become fine art. Much like the question “are video games art?” we can ask “are comic books art?” or “are puzzlehunts art?” I’d call Mystery Hunt, as it is today, a work of art. But I’m not sure I’d call the 1981, single sheet of paper, I.A.P. Mystery Hunt, a work of art.

Comic theorist Thierry Groenstein once published an essay⁠10 I couldn't find a link, but it's a popular essay in comic book theory. called “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” Groenstein argues that art is something that’s recognized by so-called legitimizing authorities, like universities, museums, or the media.

Perhaps comic books weren’t as recognized in 2000, when the essay was published, but the situation’s improved since. I read an essay called The Lack of Cultural Legitimization of Comic Books, written in 2014, arguing against Groenstein’s point with recent examples. One example, Spiegelman’s Maus,⁠11 It also won a Pulitzer! Although it's not clear which category it should've won. shows how the narrative aspects give it literary merit, one that art scholars have begun to look at. Lots of museums feature comic books, and I mentioned a university class I took about them.

Puzzlehunts may not have gotten recognition from legitimatizing authorities yet, and I think it’ll be a while before a Hunt makes it to a museum. Its audience might yet be too niche to appear in mainstream media. But hey, this is a scholarly analysis of puzzlehunts, right? Mark Gottlieb wrote his thesis on the Mystery Hunt, so it’s not the first in a line of critical work. My hope is that one day, there’ll be more critical analyses of puzzlehunts.

In practice

Enough theory! Let’s examine how cultural legitimacy affects how Mystery Hunts look in practice. It also wouldn’t be a Mystery Hunt recap if I didn’t talk about this year’s Hunt. Full spoilers for the story and mechanics of Mystery Hunts 2021 and 2023⁠12 Sorry to Palindrome, the writers of the 2022 Hunt, but I'm more familiar with the 2021 and 2023 story goals because of the wrap-up slides. follow.

One arm of trying to become fine art is a developed narrative. In both the 2021 Hunt Wrap-Up and the 2023 Hunt Wrap-Up, there’s a slide dedicated to so-called “story goals”. Both of these slides touch on similar questions, but answer them differently:

• What is the conflict? The 2015 Hunt was about retrieving an object from the ocean, a conflict against nature. The 2020 Hunt was about publicizing an amusement park, a conflict against society. Looking down the list of past Hunts, I think that most of them are either conflicts against nature or against society.
  • In contrast, the 2021 Hunt and the 2023 Hunt had character-based conflicts. While the 2021 Hunt had a goal of having “no true ‘villain’ ” in the story, the conflicts are still between characters, either because of their mistakes or misunderstandings. The 2023 Hunt casts teammate⁠13 The team that wrote this year's Mystery Hunt. Yes, it's lowercase. as the antagonist, against the solvers themselves. It’s interesting to me how both Hunts have character-based conflict without having a conventional villain.
• Why are there puzzles? Without a good reason, solving puzzles leads to what TV Tropes calls Solve the Soup Cans: “you’ve got to solve the puzzle because the puzzle is there, and that’s what puzzles are for, and the fact that you end up closer to your goal is, at least for the storyline, more or less coincidental.” This is one place where early Hunt stories tend to differ from modern Hunts. For example, consider the first round of the 2018 Hunt. Puzzles were damaged, scrambled memories, and solving them represents fixing them.
  • For the 2021 Hunt, there’s a goal of making the puzzles diegetic. That means that the puzzles themselves exist in the story world, rather than representing something else in the story world. In the 2021 story, puzzles are scientific data⁠14 Why does the data appear as a puzzle? This is the handwavy part; it's caused by flawed measurement devices. that the solvers need to make sense of. While the 2023 Hunt’s goal is listed only as making the story “closely integrated” with solving, many puzzles in this Hunt are diegetic in a meta sense. The Hunt is itself about a puzzlehunt, so puzzles represent puzzles.
• What drives story progress? It’s a given that solving puzzles leads to seeing more of the story. My question is about what happens in the story itself, and the answer is often linked to who the solvers are in the story. In the 2020 Hunt, solvers are presumably amusement park employees; in the 2015 Hunt, solvers are underwater adventurers. The story’s goal is directly linked to the solver.
  • For 2021, one goal was to “make the entire plot available to all participants.” That meant that solvers’ progress couldn’t be the plot driver; the story had to be driven forward by external characters. While the solvers represent conference attendees, the story is progressed through the actions of Yew Labs researchers, with the solvers only aiding them. Contrast 2023, where the goal was to “make solvers the drivers of important events”. This is done rather directly: the solvers represent themselves, participants in a Mystery Hunt written by teammate.

Looking at these answers, I can’t help but feel that the 2023 Hunt is a narrative culmination for puzzlehunts. teammate created a narrative that, through ontological metalepsis,⁠15 Look, I'm using fancy words in my essay! I'm gonna get published now! gives a satisfying answer to each question. The story sidesteps the “why are you solving puzzles?” question with “because you’re doing a puzzlehunt,” which is a strong enough narrative to stand on its own now!

On a writing team level, the Hunt also feels like a culmination of teammate’s approach to writing puzzlehunts. Consider their three published puzzlehunts, the 2020 and 2021 teammate hunts, and now the 2023 Mystery Hunt.⁠16 Which, incidentally, <a href="https://interestingthings.museum/" class="broken_link">was about a museum</a>. Legitimizing authorities, am I right? All three teammate-written puzzlehunts have stellar visual design, excellent use of technology, and a tight puzzle-story integration. The fact that a writing team has made this their puzzlehunt signature, and the fact that this is something the community recognizes, is part of a shift. Puzzles are still important, but the production aspects, literary value, and intended audience, are now considerations in writing a puzzlehunt too.

A final note: I use the word considerations deliberately. I don’t want to say that production is a requirement of a good puzzlehunt, even the Mystery Hunt. I want to applaud the people who put in the time to improve the experience for the solver, but I think expecting this from every Hunt would be unreasonable, as I’ll talk about in The gift of puzzles.

Experience logistics

In the flesh

In my 2021 Hunt recap, I talk about a puzzlehunt’s production: theme selection, story writing, art and tech, puzzle writing, testsolving, etc. One thing I didn’t talk much about was logistics, which is, briefly, everything else.

The digital parts of an in-person⁠17 Important adjective. Zoom is a painful application to use and juggle people around, but it doesn't need to be used as much in an in-person Hunt. Hunt don’t have as much logistics. If you can put the thing on a website, you’re done.⁠18 Assuming you're not putting anything weird on your website. If you read my 2021 recap, I talk a lot about our tech issues. It’s the physical parts that are harder. This year, the Mystery Hunt was in-person for the first time since 2020, and as a Puzzle Club⁠19 The student group that helps run the Mystery Hunt, working with the writing team. officer, I helped with some logistics.

The big one is getting rooms: Kresge for kickoff, classrooms for team spaces and wrap-up, Student Center spaces for events, the Bush Room for the writing team’s HQ. Each room needs to be reserved. Spaces like Kresge or the Student Center are managed by the CAC, and the CAC also handles setup and electrical needs. Most classrooms are handled by Schedules, other classrooms we ask from individual departments. We get the Bush Room from Events and Information Center. Each reservation confirmation needs to be collected for event registration.

After reservations, there’s the complicated matter of building access. Some events need lighting services, which we get from E33 Productions, some need audiovisual services, which we get from MIT AV, some need recording services, which we get from FVP.⁠20 Formerly known as Student Cable, but I think everyone I know still calls it Student Cable. Because it’s on a holiday weekend, we put a service request with Facilities.

Also, did I mention that event registration goes through the Campus Police, whom we request a police detail from, sometimes EHS if there are safety issues, which might involve writing a safety plan, then SOLE, who sometimes needs to talk to OGC or RMCS for legal matters, like having minors or MIT-branded merchandise? Speaking of safety plans, we also distribute first-aid kits to every team, and teams are all given HQ’s contact number. And right! HQ has a contact number because the Bush Room has phones set up. Between Hunts, we need a place to store all the first-aid kits and phones we own too, and in the past we’ve gotten assigned from the ASA.

If it sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.

To be clear, this isn’t a complaint. All this is justified. Large events have lots of needs, and event running would be harder without these offices or processes. It’s incredible how MIT supports all this in the first place, and I can’t express my gratitude to everyone enough.

Holding candles

On good days, I remember all the things I love about Hunt: the story, the art, the puzzles, the people. On bad days, the Hunt is nothing more than checklists to go through, emails to reply to, forms to fill out. My work for Mystery Hunt 2023 had more bad days than good.

The work became so rough that I burned myself out the day before the Hunt started. I woke up so demotivated that I didn’t watch kickoff in-person, in Kresge, even though it’d be my last chance to watch a Hunt kickoff before I graduate. I was so overwhelmed those first few hours of the Hunt that I had to take a break, and step out of the Hunt for a few hours. And it felt so bad that I put in lots of work making the Hunt run, yet I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it.

Then I felt guilty feeling tired. I’m not the person who’s done the most work for this Hunt, I’m not even close to that person. I probably spent no more than an hour a week⁠21 Averaged over a year. I spent way more time the weeks leading up to the Hunt, not as much the first half of 2022. doing things for Hunt. I couldn’t hold a candle to what other people have done. The vicious spiral swallowed me, and soon I was feeling bad for feeling bad about feeling bad due to feeling bad.

I tried consoling myself. Like, if everyone thought the same way I did, wouldn’t no one allow themselves to feel tired? Or, maybe the work I did for Hunt was the final stroke, and I was having a bad day. None of these reasons were my real worry. Hunt was happening now, and it’s the only time a year I get to see many of my friends in-person, and I’m spending that time feeling sorry for myself rather than being with them.

Woe is me, then! Why don’t you quit? I ask myself, and I answer, because someone’s gotta do it. Because if I don’t do it, who will? The people who’ve already done more work than me? Maybe it doesn’t matter how small of a candle I hold, if the best I can do is hold a candle. The structure depends on every brick placed on it. When God sings with His creations, will a turtle not be part of the choir?

Creative goods

Maybe the solution to the burnout is to remove the physical logistics entirely. Why can’t making a puzzlehunt only be about making puzzles? Here, I’ll argue that even if you removed all the logistics, puzzlehunts can never be “only about puzzles”. I’ll explain this in analogy to how movies are made.

We can divide the Hunt into production and logistics. It’s the same with media, which can be divided into development and distribution. The media I have in mind are TV series and movies: these are the ones with the largest gap between development and distribution. In the book Creative Industries, Richard Caves takes an economic perspective to the distribution of media. He identifies seven properties that make creative goods different from manufactured goods. I’ll list three relevant ones:

• Demand is uncertain. Even putting aside the economics of demand, it’s hard to predict how good a movie will be⁠22 If someone makes a prediction market or machine learning model that does this well, it'd solve a big industry issue. I think this is what Netflix does, which I discuss later. until it’s done. There’s plenty of examples of popular books with movies that flopped. You can do a test screening, but by then, it’s too late to make large changes. Caves calls this the nobody knows property, after William Goldman’s famous quote.
• Creative workers care about their product. This is Caves’s way of explaining that artists have a conflict of interest between what the audience wants and what the artist wants. Think of indie movies acclaimed by critics that never become popular. There’s the conflict between making a product to sell and make money, and making art for art’s sake. Again, putting economics aside, this is a conflict I experience as a writer: I want to write blog posts, but I also only want to write when inspiration strikes me.
• Some creative products require diverse skills. This is something that separates TV series and movies from novels or paintings. Not only does movie creation need lots of different skills, but they defy the economics of input substitution. If you’re making a cookie, the kind of butter you use doesn’t matter too much; it’s butter no matter where you buy it from. If you’re hiring robots to bake cookies, the only thing that matters is if the robot can follow the recipe. This isn’t the case with movies, where the factors multiply, and you need a motley crew of people. Apparently this is related to production functions and the O-ring theory of economic development, but I refuse to talk about economics⁠23 We already have <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/author/padajar/">an economics blogger</a>. too much.

I think these three properties—nobody knows, art for art’s sake, motley crew—are the most important ones.⁠24 The other four are called <em>infinite variety</em>, <em>A list/B list</em>, <em>time flies</em>, and <em>ars longa</em>. Can I say how awesome these names are? Note two things. First, these properties matter even if you put the economics aside. If you care about making something people will like, then nobody knows will hit you. If you have care about deadlines, then art for art’s sake will hit you. If you’re working with others and care about the work they produce, then motley crew will hit you. Second, these are all matters of distribution, rather than development. If you only cared about making art for fun, without caring about its quality, none of these properties matter.

Feedback loops

If you want to distribute a good puzzlehunt to others, you have to deal with distribution problems, like nobody knows or art for art’s sake. If you want to run a Hunt in-person, you have to deal with logistics, like getting space and event registration. Either way, you need to reconcile writing puzzles with everything that isn’t writing puzzles.

This is a problem for movies too. Jeff Ulin discusses this in Chapter 2 of The Business of Media Distribution. He notes that movies have several stages of who knows the most about the project, going from the executive producer, to the writer, to the director, and that distribution and marketing⁠25 The trope is called <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExecutiveMeddling">executive meddling</a>, not distribution meddling. It’s meddling associated with studio heads rather than marketers. rarely have a say earlier in the process. One way to change this would be to make marketing decisions earlier. A famous example is Netflix’s House of Cards, where the decision was made through market research. Puzzlehunts aren’t big enough events to have “big data” about what the audience likes, though.

Another way would be to cut the stages, and to vest all creative control with one person. This is what Pixar does, where executives greenlight people, not projects. The director is the link from the beginning of development to the end of distribution. This is like how Galactic writes puzzlehunts, where we have benevolent dictators who have the final say in everything. From my experience, most writing teams also have one or two people in this role, which we’ll call directors. This solves part of the problem. But writing a Hunt involves so many decisions that it’s impossible for the director to know everything.

Sometimes it’s impossible to put all decisions with one person. Consider how we divide Puzzle Club officers between spoiled and unspoiled students. Most of us want to take part in the Hunt after it’s written, and so have to remain unaware of or unspoiled on its specifics. Spoiled students know more about puzzles and events, while unspoiled students know more about locations and logistics. In theory, we could have unspoiled members of Puzzle Club not help with running the Hunt at all. In practice, the logistics are too large for only the spoiled students to handle everything. A Hunt director has to be aware of this, and coordinate between spoiled and unspoiled students.

Ulin argues that a good director closes the feedback loop between development and distribution. He gives the example of pitching Higglytown Heroes to Disney, whose merchandising division asked if it could lead to successful toys. He doesn’t discuss this further, but I like to imagine this is the reason that the show’s characters are Russian nesting dolls. If you’ve watched Higglytown Heroes, you’d remember the iconic theme song, with the characters all hopping out of each other. In my headcanon, this is an example where “executive meddling” went well.⁠26 My instinct is that "executive meddling" gets a bad rap due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias">survivorship bias</a>. When it goes badly, it’s on the news; when it goes well, how would we know? Ulin argues that constructive input can never be bad, as the director can balance possibly-conflicting interests and make a final decision.

How does any of this apply to Mystery Hunt? If Netflix collects data on what its viewers want, then hunt writers can too. teammate did a great job of proactively requesting puzzle feedback this year, with a little chatbot in the corner asking for puzzle comments after each solve. The constraints of distribution can breed creativity, like how the 2021 Hunt used running remotely to its advantage.

Maybe the simplest way is to close the feedback loop between production and logistics. It meant a lot to me when teammate⁠27 Shoutout to Moor and Sophie, the people on teammate who directly worked with Puzzle Club the most. sought for Puzzle Club’s input when making decisions and sending emails. I know I could’ve done a better job thanking people on teammate for all their work myself. Words like “thanks” remind me of the reason I’m doing this in the first place—they prevent me from losing the plot.

Fading together

Never seen again

After the Hunt ended, Nathan opened a conversation about how ephemeral puzzles are. I talked about Nathan in my 2021 Hunt post. He usually hunts with Galactic, but this year he helped teammate write the Hunt. He said that when a puzzlehunt ends, its puzzles are “filed away[…] and basically never seen again.” I think this statement is a bit harsh; there are plenty of people who work a hunt’s puzzles even after it ends.⁠28 Once, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/mysteryhunt/comments/angxvy/the_minnesota_afterthefact_mystery_hunt_solvers/">two people started the 2019 Hunt</a> and finished <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/mysteryhunt/comments/c2pell/twoman_mystery_hunt_doomsday_town_unlocked_update/">six months later</a>. It’s an extreme example, but it shows that people work on archived puzzles. But it’s also true that way more people solve puzzles than those who postsolve⁠29 To <em>postsolve</em> is to solve a puzzle after its puzzlehunt has ended. puzzles.

It’s especially brutal for this year’s Hunt, as there are many puzzles that were solved by only one team, sometimes even no teams. These puzzles had people who spent hours writing it, testsolving it, rewriting it, postprodding it, and factchecking it, only for no one to look at it during the Hunt, maybe not even after the Hunt. This raises two questions. Why are puzzles so ephemeral in the first place, in the sense that few people postsolve them? And what do we, as puzzle writers, do about this fact?

Nathan pointed out that these are questions all artists face. He quoted a segment from Matthewmatosis’s Meta Microvideos:

Over time, the past gets more and more compressed, until only the most important points remain. You can think of every classic as a peak on a mountain; the tide keeps rising, drowning out all the lower peaks. As the water gets higher, the average distance between peaks just keeps getting wider. To the casual music listener, most of Mozart’s contemporaries, like Salieri, have drowned, and someday, he might, too.

Maybe it’s inevitable that puzzles are ephemeral, because the human condition is ephemeral, and everything we do will disappear. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” comes to mind. We can take a top-down approach, and find our answers from philosophy. If we can become comfortable with our own mortality, that’s one step closer to becoming comfortable with the impermanence of what we create. But I don’t think coming to terms with your own mortality is easy.⁠30 Certainly not as easy as <a href="https://guzey.com/x/">playing a game</a>. It might even be easier to use art to come to terms with mortality, like Buddhist sand mandalas.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that your work is ephemeral, because you’re doing it for yourself. I’m reminded of Twitch streamers, some of whom stream to no one, but they do it because they’re gonna be playing anyway. I think the extent to which this is true depends on the person and the puzzle. Alan, who hunts with Galactic, said that “any appreciation by others is a bonus, a way of validating that feeling and making it real.” I haven’t written many puzzles myself, but I can relate to the feeling of looking at something cool and going, “there should be a puzzle about that.” That’s how Board Games with Shrek was written. It wasn’t as well-received as I’d hoped, but I still enjoyed writing the puzzle overall.

For me, though, this isn’t strong enough of a reason to write puzzles. I relate to Anderson, also in Galactic, who said in another conversation that “all I want is for solvers to have fun, and that’s what still sustains me.” I felt so happy when I watched Central Services solve my puzzle from the 2021 Hunt. When someone solves your puzzle, that means they’ve put in the work to connect with your thought process. And as DD said,⁠31 I give up introducing everyone. Assume when I mention someone's name without explanation, then they're someone who hunts with Galactic. “if someone connected with you […] through your art, that might make it feel worth it.” All great when someone solves your puzzle. But what if no one does?

Forgetting

All performing arts are ephemeral. Of these, I think the most like puzzlehunts is the theater. More so than music or dance, theater needs a motley crew of writers, directors, actors, designers, technicians, and managers. Theater is even more temporary than puzzlehunts, as it’s typically unrecorded. Being ephemeral is apparently so fundamental that Annie Dorsen called it one of theater’s three “initial axioms”. How do theater people deal with this ephemerality? Thinking about this might help with the question on how we, as puzzle writers, deal with ephemerality.

I’ve read several takes on this. Playwright Christopher Shinn once did an interview calling ephemerality “special” and “super-sacred”. He likens it to face-to-face social interactions, that only remain in memories once it’s done. I personally can’t empathize with this. My memory is verbal; if I don’t write things down, I’ll forget them. Not that I would take notes during a play. But sometimes I take (private) notes after deep conversations, because they’re so important I don’t want to forget them.

Here’s another answer to the ephemerality question: theater professor Emma Smith argued that forgetting is good, actually. Her main reason is that forgetting gives “creative potential”, that archiving threatens our creativity by anchoring us to the past. I’m not sure I buy this either. I like the mindset Austin Kleon puts forward in Steal Like an Artist, that because nothing new under the sun, all art is made of stolen pieces from other art. As Ira Glass once said, you do creative work because you have good taste, and isn’t consuming art part of developing that good taste?

Maybe the answer to “how do theater people deal with ephemerality” is that they don’t. I read an essay by Eric Martin, On Forgetting and Theater’s Impermanence, raising the same question. It’s such a good essay that I’ll quote it wholesale:

We tell our parents, our friends, the guy we chatted with on Grindr, Theatre is ephemeral, see, that’s one of its values, that’s why it’s fine only twelve people will come to see my one-night workshop in Brooklyn of a show that may never have a future life. […] The truth is I would love to create a live a performance that lasts forever, that is etched into cultural memory. […] I distrust anyone who says they make theatre because it is ephemeral. I suspect none of us really know why we make theatre.

“It’s completely illogical if you sit down and think about it,” Nathan said, recalling what Jakob once said to him. “But you just kind of… have to not think about it.”

Recorded live

Of Dorsen’s three axioms of theater, the second is ephemerality, the third is consciousness through language, but the first is embodiment. It’s what’s meant by talking about an actor’s presence. If ephemerality is only possible by being in the same time, or being contemporary, embodiment is only possible by being in the same space, being copresent. While embodiment also includes how an actor uses their body,⁠32 Which distinguishes theater from, say, a conversation or a lecture. I want to focus on copresence as it relates to puzzlehunts. I think this partly answers the question “why are puzzlehunts so ephemeral?” as if you want to share space, you need to share time.

Copresence is clear when you’re in-person, but can it happen digitally? In the introduction to Digital Theatre: The Making and Meaning of Live Mediated Performance, Nadja Masura argues not. A TV show that is “recorded live” can’t said to be “live” if it’s edited before distribution. She says that even a real-time webcast has no copresence, as they “do not generate feedback influencing the ‘live’ performances.” While audiences may not give feedback through words, they clap and cheer and sob, exchanging energy between themselves and the performers.

Consider another try at digital copresence: Zoom. Your internet connection is unstable, am I right? Turns out there’s this excellent article by Carla Neuss on Zoom and copresence, which points to a study giving a theoretical framework for Zoom fatigue. Your brain works harder to socialize with less nonverbal information. Maybe that’s why I haven’t experienced Zoom fatigue, because I don’t process nonverbal cues unless I’m doing it intentionally.⁠33 All those times my parents told me to make eye contact, ugh.

I think these arguments work for their respective media. But I think copresence is possible digitally, and a good example is Twitch. Why would Just Chatting be such a popular Twitch category? The point of watching someone stream a game on Twitch, compared to watching a video posted on YouTube later, is that you can interact with the streamer. I think Twitch achieves digital copresence by not trying to imitate physical presence, but by focusing on the feedback between viewer and streamer. Twitch emotes, chat hype, subscriber shoutouts—all ways to offer digital feedback.

More than the feedback between viewer and streamer, there’s interaction among viewers themselves. I read an essay by Michael Beverley that cites this as something Twitch streams have that theater doesn’t. It’s true that you can watch a play with your friends, then discuss it over dinner. But when you’re watching a Twitch stream, you join a Greek choir under the mask of your display name, singing praise or woe to the streamer as they act. It’s like watching a movie next to your friends and commenting on scenes as they come up, combined with the copresence of a play’s performers exchanging energy with the audience.

For permanence

During our conversation, Nathan said that puzzles might be more ephemeral than theater. “At least with theater, you have time to digest it and like discuss it over dinner,” he said. “With puzzles, I feel like it’s often ‘Well, on to the next one! Three more to go ’til the meta!’ ” Alan pointed out that this only happens because puzzles are done in the context of a puzzlehunt, and I agree. Most puzzles are exactly the same before and after the puzzlehunt ends, so why don’t more people postsolve?

The answer has to lie in the difference between solving and postsolving. Indeed, Anderson mentioned the reward of unlocking more puzzles or progressing through a leaderboard. Mark mentioned that “you get to swap between, skip, and backsolve⁠34 To backsolve is to find a puzzle's answer by working on another puzzle. puzzles, all within constraints carefully tuned by the writing team to deliver an enjoyable solving experience.”

These are structural differences. I gave an overview of puzzlehunt structure in my first Hunt recap, but the gist is that there are feeder puzzles, and there are meta puzzles. A team needs to solve some number of feeders to solve the meta, but it’s typically only the metas that advance a puzzlehunt’s story. Amon argued that this structure could change: “we’ve kind of offloaded this responsibility to ‘metas’ to free up the puzzlewriters to do whatever they like. Instead, I want every puzzle to be important, to be thematic, to be worth engaging in, to be part of the structure of a hunt.” This can be one way to encourage more postsolving.

There are more direct ways to encourage postsolving too. For example, the 2015 Hunt has an online version that you can register an account for and make progress in. Compare this to the archived version, where all the puzzles are unlocked at once. Anderson said he’d “wager that the 2015 hunt has been experienced by the most people by far, just because of the post-solving functionality.” Both of these methods, while good, address only structural issues. Alan asked: “Why stop there? Why should a collection of puzzles not be worth solving on its own?”

I think there’s another difference between solving and postsolving, one not captured by the puzzlehunt’s structure. Lillian brings up that “all art, no matter how physically enduring, creates an ephemeral experience.” I think this is the key to understanding why: it’s not the puzzles or puzzlehunts that are ephemeral, it’s the experience created by solving a puzzle in a puzzlehunt that is. For example, consider what Lilly shared during our conversation:

One thing that struck me as really neat about this hunt that I hadn’t experienced before was the puzzle Some Assembly Required. We never solved it, yet unlike most puzzles, where getting stuck felt like gnashing my teeth or banging my head against the wall, I had a ton of fun puzzling things out on paper, comparing to Abby figuring things out on CAD and discussing with Seth on how to connect things together.

Can this experience happen if Lilly, Abby, and Seth were solving it alone, after the Hunt ended? Maybe. But that’s assuming the three of them can find a time to gather, in-person, to work on it. When your friends have full-time jobs and are thousands of miles apart, that’s not easy.

For transience

Rather than trying to fight this ephemerality, maybe we can embrace it. If our puzzlehunts are going to be ephemeral, we might as well make use of it by including copresence. I read a post from one of the 2014 Hunt writers, called A Mystery Hunt Design Philosophy, that has several design goals linked to copresence: encouraging solvers to explore MIT, giving teams physical puzzles, making events a space to interact with other teams.

Some of these don’t translate to an online puzzlehunt, but as we saw with the Twitch example, there’s several ways to use digital copresence in a puzzle. Alan pointed out to me that the Projection Device made for the 2021 Hunt is a perfect example of this. The Projection Device was a shared virtual world that Galactic made, where solvers got to move an avatar and show emotes to others. All of these interactions were ephemeral, but they still brought joy, even if only for a moment. It goes to show that copresence isn’t about space, or voice, or video, it’s about how you enable feedback between people.

Interaction during a puzzlehunt isn’t restricted to within teams or between teams. I’ve discussed the many ways solvers interact with the writing team, like check-ins or puzzle submissions or the traditional scavenger hunt. Aside from that, teams can ask hints or submit funny answers. (Link has spoilers for GPH 2020.) These are all reasons why puzzlehunts have to be an ephemeral event, with a defined beginning and end, or these interactions would be impossible.

Let me talk about the 2023 Hunt. teammate had a great collection of puzzle highlights during the wrap-up; I especially love the submissions for A Twisted Theory. (The wrap-up has spoilers for puzzle answers.) There’s the conventional stock of puzzles that involve walking around MIT. While these are a given for Hunt, it’s fantastic that they’re back again after two years of running the Hunt remotely, and the puzzle authors did an excellent job writing them. teammate also created a method of doing story interactions,⁠35 A small event that reveals something about the story to a team. where the team holds a conversation with an AI by voting on what to say next.

I guess none of these directly address the issue of a puzzle getting zero solves. While I don’t want to belittle this situation, I want to offer Lilly’s story as consolation, which shows that a puzzle doesn’t need to be solved for it to give a good experience. It’s unfortunate that these experiences are invisible to the authors.

The gift of puzzles

Sandbagging

For all this, I’m speaking for myself, not for Puzzle Club or ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈. This is true for the whole post. But this is a topic fraught with emotions, so I want to be clear. I’m writing this not because I want to start a flamewar, but because I love the Hunt.

Sandbagging is a term used in racing, cue sports, grappling, poker, video games, and many other sports. To sandbag is to underperform on purpose. While sandbagging can be done as a handicap against a weaker player, or to have fun in low-stakes games, it’s looked down on in competitive settings. Take, for example, a chess player who sandbags to lower their rating, so they can enter a lower-ranked tournament they can more easily win.

The prize⁠36 The usual thing to say is “Congratudolences!” for winning the Mystery Hunt is getting to write the next one. It’s a great honor writing the 2021 Hunt and having my puzzles on the world stage, and I had a lot of fun. It’s also a lot of work—for the most committed, equal to a full-time job⁠37 Voluntarily, though can come into the writing process, say you don't intend to spend that much time, then spend that much time anyway for one reason or another. To be clear, it's not necessay for <em>anyone</em> to treat writing Hunt as a full-time job for it to be written. —and expectations can be high. A team that could win the Hunt might choose to sandbag because, for one reason or another, they don’t want to write the Hunt.

I think that sandbagging in the Mystery Hunt is contentious for many reasons:

• It lessens the competitive aspect of the Hunt. The Mystery Hunt is a competition to find the coin first. A team that wins can take pride in the achievement of winning the world’s largest, oldest puzzlehunt. But if they knew another team was sandbagging, it lessens the value of that achievement.
• Some think that sandbagging is more acceptable if the team doing so has recently won a Hunt. I don’t think there’s anyone who’d disagree with this. To me, it’s reasonable to expect a team to take a break from writing the Hunt if they’ve won in the past few years or so.
• Some believe that a team that can win the Mystery Hunt has a responsibility to give back to the community by writing a Hunt. People can have stronger or weaker feelings about this. I believe in this myself, but I’m not sure how much. One of the reasons why I’m writing this section is because I want to analyze this belief, and think about what, exactly, I believe in.

Free as in what?

When I asked one of my CMS friends about this, he noted the similarity between writing a Hunt and fanwork,⁠38 The more common term is “fan labor”, but I'm going to avoid Marxist analysis. Then again, work also has Marxist connotations... in particular, the gift economy of fanwork. Fanwork is the collective term I’ll use for art produced by a fan, meant for other fans, like fanfiction, fanart, AMVs. Unlike the media we’ve seen so far, like novels or TV series or movies, most fanwork is released for free. Why?

Part of the reason is legal. For concreteness, let’s consider Twilight, a series of novels released by Stephanie Meyer. Say I wrote a fanfic of Twilight called Greylight, and start selling it. People buy it because they’ve heard of Twilight, and know Greylight is closely based on Twilight. My profit depends on Twilight’s success, and might even cut future Twilight profits if Greylight does better. Not only is this unethical, it’s a copyright violation, making it illegal. Meyer can sue me for not giving her a cut of Greylight’s profits.

Legal reasons aside, maybe the reason is that fanfic is free because it started out that way. Consider doujinshi, the Japanese term for self-published print work. While some doujinshi is based on original characters, a lot of it’s like what we’d call fanfic. But unlike fanfic, doujinshi is often sold in conventions. Suppose that, in another universe, fanfic started off as something people paid for, but everything else was the same. Would more people be selling fanwork in that universe, or is there a deeper reason why fanwork is free?

Perhaps fanwork isn’t actually free, and the artist expects something in return. When I read essays written by artists about why they create fanwork, I read things like how it’s “art for art’s sake”, or they’re “doing it for themselves.” I’ve pointed out the problems with these reasons in Creative goods, and Never seen again. If it’s art for art’s sake, why apologize for not being active? If it’s doing it for themselves, why go through the effort of, say, getting beta readers?

Let’s go back to the Greylight example. Say that Greylight was quite different from Twilight, like being set in a world where there aren’t vampires, and had a different name, like Fifty Shades of Grey. The story’s different enough from Twilight that it can be considered original, though it’s a gray area.⁠39 Pun 100% intended. The Twilight fandom had mixed feelings about Fifty Shades. Supporters approved “one of our own” making millions off their work, and how it brought mainstream attention to fanfic. Criticism centered not on its legality, but because it’s selling something that started in the fanfiction community, which some critics considered exploitative. Exploitative how?

Gift economies

This brings us to the gift economy. Much has been written about fandom’s gift economy; just look at the Further Reading section of Fanlore’s gift economy page. The simplest formulation is that people receive fanwork as gifts, and gift fanwork in return. But it’s more complicated than that, as we read from Rachael Sabotini’s The Fannish Potlatch and Tisha Turk’s Fan work. Our formulation is incomplete in at least three ways:

1. Gifting is asymmetric and circular. Most people have written less fanfic than they’ve ever read, and most fanfic will be read by more people than its authors. The “reward” for a gift doesn’t come in one piece, but is distributed over givers, over time.
2. Fanwork includes not only art, but feedback, discussion, reviews, community moderation, wiki editing, software creation, planning logistics, etc. These contributions are less visible but still important; see Holding candles.
3. Not every fan does art, and not every fan does fanwork. Lurkers take part in the economy by receiving gifts, and other “low-threshold” work like reblogs on Tumblr or kudos on AO3.

The case of Fifty Shades of Grey was that it benefitted from the gift economy, like how the community gave feedback with every chapter, and later how Twilight fans marketed the book through word-of-mouth. Yet Author E.L. James didn’t share her Fifty Shades profit with these contributors. Maybe that’s justified, because it’s hard to assign credit when there’s thousands of people leaving reviews and suggestions.

What critics consider exploitative is how James didn’t credit⁠40 I'm glad that puzzlehunts have a strong culture of assigning credit. the fandom for the creation of Fifty Shades: not in the book’s acknowledgment, not through the publisher’s descriptions, not in interviews or mainstream media. Other claim that James owns her writing, and that the community’s contribution was too small to deserve credit. Either way, the publication of Fifty Shades widened a divide that existed in many fandoms.

I think the puzzlehunt community also works as a gift economy. People don’t get paid to write for Hunt, and puzzlehunts with registration fees are the exception, not the norm. I think both solvers and authors view puzzlehunts as a gift to the community; for example, in the wrapup for Huntinality 2021, Cardinality wrote that “it was about time we gave back to the community!” This gift economy explains why I expect people who do lots of puzzles to contribute to the community, one way or another. The community’s contract is to pay it forward, not pay it back.

To buy a Hunt

Some costs of running a Mystery Hunt can be covered by money. Space, physical puzzles, props, costumes, supplies, art commissions, servers. The Hunt asks for donations and sponsors to cover this cost. Some of these apply to online puzzlehunts too, most of which also accept donations. Payment is a reciprocal transaction: if I pay you money, I expect something in return. If I paid you $50 and got something I think’s worth $10, I’d feel cheated.

Some costs of running puzzlehunts can’t covered by money. Time is the big one. Knowledge, either brought in from other fields, or learned from others in the community. This learning can happen through other puzzlehunts, through articles, through discussion. I consider these gifts, and I don’t subject them to the same expectations. If you give me a puzzlehunt, I might enjoy it or I might not. Either way, it’s a gift. I won’t feel like I’ve been cheated, because I didn’t pay you anything.⁠41 Amon points out another difference. Puzzlehunts, unlike, say, crowdfunded projects, usually don't promise anything beyond having a certain number of puzzles.

I’d feel cheated if the Hunt authors spent thousands of dollars irresponsibly. I wouldn’t feel cheated if the Hunt authors spent hundreds of hours making a Hunt I didn’t like.

I want the Mystery Hunt community, and the puzzlehunt community in general, to be a gift economy that values all kinds of work. I don’t want people to feel pressured to contribute, because I don’t want our community to have a barrier to entry. To receive the gift of puzzles is to work on them, to spend time with them, and to share this experience with friends. This, too, is participation, and this, too, is valuable.

To the ones who wish to do more, I hope that you find contributions you enjoy doing. Whether it’s through writing puzzlehunts, running puzzlehunts, running events that aren’t puzzlehunts, giving feedback,⁠42 There’s much to be said about giving feedback, but here’s two quick points. First, <a href="https://synecdochic.livejournal.com/239518.html">“Cult of nice” vs. “cult of mean”, round 2847, fight</a>. Second, I think puzzlehunt runners are underappreciated; we should remember that many hunts are given to us for free. making tools, supporting community spaces, updating wikis, recording podcasts, writing blog posts, organizing advocacy, doing outreach. Your contribution doesn’t have to be big or great or high-effort or important or popular or time-consuming for it to be a contribution.

A team that can win the Mystery Hunt is a team that has, in many, many ways, benefited from the community. If that team never wants to write a Hunt, I hope that they contribute some other way, but I wouldn’t feel cheated if they didn’t.

Conclusion

Open questions

The Mystery Hunt is difficult to analyze because there’s nothing quite like it. A large, central, yearly event, where most of the organizers change from year to year, with a community of thousands inspired to create similar events, most of which are freely available. It’s been an interesting task to look at the Hunt and the community from a zoomed out view, and it made me realize how special puzzlehunts are.

One thing that surprised me about writing this post was how technical it all felt. In the same way I’d think about a math problem in the shower or while walking outside or before going to bed, I was thinking about these questions even when I wasn’t writing this post. I had all these notes on books and essays and blog posts, all these thoughts and ideas and questions gathered from conversations with friends, and it was up to me to put these pieces together.

There are issues I wanted to talk about that I couldn’t find a way to analyze. Like, how does the Hunt remain similar year-to-year, despite so many people changing? Why is the Hunt so central to the puzzlehunt community, and can we expect it to remain like this? Why are the institutions supporting the Hunt so loose, is this a bad thing, and if so, how do we fix it? Will the puzzlehunt community continue to grow, and what happens when it gets bigger? Is it possible to pay puzzlehunt writers without compromising the community’s values?

I don’t know. I wish I knew, I wish I understood! I don’t even fully understand the “answers” I offered in this post. It’s lowkey frustrating that I don’t even know how to approach these questions, like I would a question about math or code. I now more deeply respect for people working to answer similar questions.

I know I don’t have any pictures in this post yet, so I’ll end with this Slack message that I sent in August 2020:

tl;dr

I liked this year’s Hunt, we should have more.