Getting to "Done"

[rhu]

I'm finally getting around to Patrick Berry's delightful Adventures in Puzzling, and I'm finding an interesting fact about myself.

Normally, when I sit down to solve a puzzle, I'm not satisfied until I've completely solved it. That's not to say that I never give up; but as long as there's still an unsolved "light" in the puzzle, I don't feel done.

But Patrick's new book is made up of a bunch of mini-extravaganzas. That is, each group of puzzles has a metapuzzle, and so each puzzle yields an answer word or phrase for the meta. Now, maybe it's my MIT Mystery Hunt experience, but once I have enough of a puzzle solved to extract the answer word, I lose interest in the puzzle.

I think it's because when a puzzle stands alone, the criterion for "success" is "every clue solved." But in a meta, there's an explicitly different criterion for "success", and that's "the answer to this puzzle is in hand."

Which is a shame. I love Patrick's "Some Assembly Required" puzzles, but in the first group in the book, I had already solved the group's meta before even starting the SAR in the group. So it felt more like an obligation ("Well, I paid for this puzzle...") and then once I got its answer word I still had to talk myself into continuing. ("Well, I enjoy SARs, it would be a shame to leave this one incomplete.")

Somehow that neurotransmitter rush happens earlier with puzzles that yield an explicit "answer" instead of a "solution", and the end of the solving process turns into a letdown instead of a thrill. Pity.

Comments

[qaqaq.livejournal.com]

For this very reason, I didn't even glance at the metas before starting the individual puzzles (and I treat the Puzzability op-eds the same way). I wanted to "need" to solve every puzzle.

That also meant my brain wasn't in "extract the answer word and stop" mode; even once I recognized what that answer word would be, I was still treating it as a stand-alone puzzle and had the desire to finish it.

[jeffurrynpl.livejournal.com]

I picked this book from the prize table at the Boston Crossword Tournament at toonhead_npl's recommendation. I really enjoyed it and I did find myself solving some puzzles early in the book that I normally wouldn't be tempted to try, but there were a few in the end that I didn't know how to start and since I got the metas, I looked at the answers. I still don't know how to start them.

By the way, I was pleasantly surprised to see your head in my e-mail. Then again, I'm always surprised to see e-mail from MIT Hillel because I was never a member.