Greetings PuzzleNationers and puzzle fans of all sorts! We’ve got some exciting things ahead for PuzzleNation, so keep your eyes peeled for a big announcement in the coming weeks! Stay tuned for puzzle goodness!
Cleverness abounds in the puzzle community, both in those who create puzzles and those who solve them. But the advent of the Internet has truly raised the bar in what you can accomplish with a puzzly mindset and some serious ingenuity.
From Easter Eggs concealed in DVD menus (like the blooper reel hidden in the silver box DVD release of the original Star Wars trilogy) to viral marketing campaigns that conceal plot details and exclusive scenes for industrious fans (as Christopher Nolan’s Batman films frequently employed), there are delightful little entertainment nuggets secreted away in all sorts of media these days.
But only a select few of these hidden puzzles reach the level of complexity and elegance embodied by a series of puzzles lurking within the game Portal (which eventually unlocked details regarding the upcoming sequel).
Portal, itself widely regarded as a masterpiece of outside-the-box puzzle-solving wizardry and gameplay, demands a great deal from its players, so any hidden game designed for these players would have to be something special.
Adam Foster did a thorough and fascinating write-up on both the hidden puzzle game itself (known as the Portal ARG) and the process behind creating this dastardly electronic scavenger hunt, and you can read the full details here.
What’s particularly brilliant about this particular multitiered puzzle is that it incorporated rewards for both mid-level gamers — collecting all the radios in the game and locating where they received broadcasts — as well as the stunningly devoted fans who were willing to chase the puzzle farther down the rabbit hole, delving into top-tier decryption and deduction puzzle-solving.
This sort of chain-reaction puzzle-solving is becoming more and more commonplace. For a simpler example, you need go no further than PuzzleNation’s own Guessworks game. You start with a Hangman-style guessing and deduction game, which leads to clues to be solved, which then lead to a quotation to be unraveled.
As you build upon these earlier steps, you not only challenge yourself in new ways, but you develop multiple puzzle-conquering skills at once. Tackling a puzzle as wily as the Portal ARG is some serious mental exercise.
By pushing the boundaries of what form puzzles and games can take, people like Adam Foster are redefining and rejuvenating the puzzle-solving experience for a new generation of savvier solvers.
Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 29th birthday of Tetris in a blog post, and I referenced the famous MIT prank where a giant game of Tetris was played on the side of a building.
This prank is one of the most recent in a long line of “hacks”, and MIT students have performed some impressive feats of creative whimsy along the way.
From a fire hose drinking fountain in 1991 to the installation of a shower stall in a common area in 1996, from turning the dome into R2-D2 (as pictured in our opening picture) to the “discovery” of an elevator in the remains of the demolished Building 20 (purportedly leading to a secret subbasement), these are top-tier pranks executed by some of the cleverest students in the world.
The Great Dome is often the palette of choice for MIT hacks, having featured a Triforce from the Legend of Zelda video games, the TARDIS from Doctor Who (which appeared all around campus), a fire truck, the Batman symbol, and numerous other Hack endeavors.
Here, the Apollo lunar lander looks down on a statue of Athena also added by industrious students. (Apollo watching over Athena, how apropos.)
One year, board games invaded campus. Giant versions of Cranium, Mousetrap, and Settlers of Catan appeared around campus, and all of the helpful maps around campus were altered to feature Risk gameplay.
Another time, an enormous game of Scrabble appeared on the wall, complete with MIT-inspired words fluttering in the breeze.
To honor the posting of XKCD’s 1000th comic — a comic that has also made appearances on this blog — XKCD comics appeared all over campus, often spelling out “1000”.
A Newton’s Cradle with imagery inspired by the Portal video game series appeared in 2012
But the best part of MIT hacks? Wondering just how the heck they managed to pull it off without anyone seeing. Like the urban legends behind stories of cars disassembled and reassembled in a professor’s office, the technological wizardry and sneaky cunning required for these marvelous pranks makes MIT Hack enthusiasts fellow puzzlers in spirit AND practice.
PuzzleNation is just one part of a much greater puzzle community — our Diggin’ Words dog Copernicus up there is always surfing the Internet for puzzle news — so in today’s blog post, I’d like to turn the spotlight toward some of our fellow puzzlers.
First off, let’s give some hale and hearty congratulations to crossword puzzler Matt Gaffney, who recently celebrated his Weekly Crossword Contest’s five-year anniversary! (His metapuzzles are a real treat!)
In other crossword news, there are only three days left to pitch in on Peter Gordon’s kickstarter!
Infamous for the difficulty of his Fireball Crosswords, Gordon is looking to expand into a weekly series called Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords, which he promises will be timely, well-constructed, and challenging (but not demoralizingly so). Here’s hoping he meets his goal!
And finally, a magazine produced by our pals at PennyDellPuzzles made a surprising cameo in a recent Twitter post by comedian Bo Burnham. (Vine videos allow for quick loops of a few seconds, and they’re a recent addition to the arsenal of many celebrities and comedians on Twitter.)
If there’s anything puzzle-noteworthy going on in your neck of the Internet woods, please let us know so we can spread the word!
In a previous installment of Puzzles in Pop Culture, Amanda of amandalovesmovies suggested checking out a puzzle-centric episode of Parks and Recreation. Well, Amanda, your wish is our command, and by wish, I mean suggestion, and by command, I mean I finally got around to tracking down the episode in question.
Today we’ll be exploring puzzly goodness of the Season 4 episode entitled “Operation Ann.”
It’s Valentine’s Day in Pawnee, and town employee Leslie Knope has gone all out, as per usual. Not only has she organized a Valentine’s Day dance in the hopes of finding someone for her best friend Ann, but she’s cobbled together an elaborate scavenger hunt for her boyfriend Ben. (The final clue will tell him where to meet her that night.)
His first clue is a cryptex, a locked cylinder popularized by The Da Vinci Code, and the five-letter code that opens it is a word that represents their third date. Ben is totally stumped, and turns to affable dolt Andy and mustachioed he-man Ron for help. Ron smashes the cryptex open with a hammer.
Inside is a rhyming clue pointing toward several murals throughout City Hall. Ron instantly deduces that the next puzzle is an acrostic, requiring the first letter of each marked mural. The three men split up and gather the necessary letters, which Ron then solves with impressive anagramming skills.
It’s worth noting that throughout this adventure, Ron repeatedly states how much he hates riddles, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Ben is now totally reliant on Ron’s help, and as it turns out, their next clue leads directly to Ron. (Leslie has managed to hide a clue on the bottom of Ron’s shoe.)
They discover there are TWENTY-TWO more clues to go. Ron again states that he hates riddles. They decide to split up, as Ben heads for the snow globe museum, Ron to a local bar, and Andy sticks around City Hall.
Their hunt continues in the following video clip:
As Ben begins to despair that he’ll disappoint Leslie by not finishing the scavenger hunt, Ron delivers one last time, suggesting that the only thing Leslie likes more than making people happy is being right. So Ben considers anything that Leslie changed his mind on, and quickly figures out where she is. Valentine’s Day is saved!
In a hilarious episode chock full of puzzle fun — anagrams and acrostics and riddle-solving of all kinds — it’s very cool that one of the core values of puzzle-solving is what saved the day: deductive reasoning.
Every crossword clue and riddle requires a certain mindset, where you get into sync with what the riddlemaster or puzzle creator was thinking, usually in a glorious a-ha moment. Seeing Ron and Ben do the same when all other puzzle skills failed was a testament to the puzzly tenacity and deductive reasoning that makes for a truly satisfying puzzle-solving experience.
As always, it’s a real treat to see puzzles incorporated into a narrative like this. Instead of a time-killer or a mere passing interest, they become linchpins of each story. The puzzles create conflict, drive epiphanies, and bring people together.
And in that spirit, I can’t think of a more perfect way to end this entry than this video clip, featuring the episode’s last few moments:
A British reader and friend of the blog passed along this link to me this morning. It’s from the UK publication The Guardian, interviewing filmmaking Steve Simmons about his newest production, Crosswords.
The seven-minute short film takes us into the thoughts of a man puzzling out various crossword clues, even as he’s distracted by an attractive woman who shares his park bench.
Most of the clues are fairly straightforward instead of the more wordplay-based British cluing — “Not right (4)”, for example — but others could give you as much pause as the protagonist. (I admit, “The more you take, the more you leave behind (9)” had my gears turning.)
Seeing synonyms and red herrings pass before the solver’s eyes (and settling onto the screen) was a marvelous touch, reminiscent of some of the visual panache of BBC’s Sherlock.
The silent film style adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek flair and melodrama to the whole affair, making for a thoroughly enjoyable short.
Hmmm. Makes me wonder if PuzzleNation should get into the short film game. Exploring space with the intrepid crew of Starspell Command, or heading into dusty puzzle catacombs in search of treasure with the Crossword Raider…
On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it to pros like Simmons.
PuzzCulture 