Yesterday's post explained
Feb. 16th, 2012 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuMy post yesterday was an experiment to see how subtle a puzzle can be while still being detectable as a puzzle. ("Step 1: Solvers notice that there's something odd and deduce that there may be a puzzle lurking here....")
Several of you noticed that the language was a little stilted, and commented on that fact, wondering if there was a puzzle hiding in there. (All comments were screened initially). Anyone who got that far got a private message from me confirming that, indeed, there was a puzzle.
A few people then noticed that there are 26 words in the message, and their initial letters are
A B Q D E U G H I O T L M / N O / P E R S T U V P O Y E
which looks almost like the alphabet. The next step is to look at the "wrong" letters:
QUOTEPOE
The idea was that you were supposed to reply to the post, working in a Poe quote as a signal to me and to others who'd solved it that you'd twigged to the puzzle without tipping off people who were just reading the surface.
My intent was to leave this up for 24 hours, but after 6 hours I panicked because (1) no one had solved it, and (2) I got feedback from someone that the post sounded a little pompous and self-serving, and I really didn't want to alienate anyone. So I admitted that there was a puzzle in the subsequent post, ruining the experiment but, perhaps, allowing more people a chance to solve it.
The lessons I'm taking away from this are these: (1) Being maximally subtle means that the constructor will leave out many people who would enjoy solving the puzzle if they knew one was there. (2) The surface cannot be empty fluff; people who don't notice that it's a puzzle have no reason not to expect it to be of the same quality and interest level as regular content.
One last note: I'm not sure either of these apply in contexts where people are told that there is a "hidden puzzle" somewhere --- whether that's in an issue of P&A magazine, or at the NPL convention.
Several of you noticed that the language was a little stilted, and commented on that fact, wondering if there was a puzzle hiding in there. (All comments were screened initially). Anyone who got that far got a private message from me confirming that, indeed, there was a puzzle.
A few people then noticed that there are 26 words in the message, and their initial letters are
A B Q D E U G H I O T L M / N O / P E R S T U V P O Y E
which looks almost like the alphabet. The next step is to look at the "wrong" letters:
QUOTEPOE
The idea was that you were supposed to reply to the post, working in a Poe quote as a signal to me and to others who'd solved it that you'd twigged to the puzzle without tipping off people who were just reading the surface.
My intent was to leave this up for 24 hours, but after 6 hours I panicked because (1) no one had solved it, and (2) I got feedback from someone that the post sounded a little pompous and self-serving, and I really didn't want to alienate anyone. So I admitted that there was a puzzle in the subsequent post, ruining the experiment but, perhaps, allowing more people a chance to solve it.
The lessons I'm taking away from this are these: (1) Being maximally subtle means that the constructor will leave out many people who would enjoy solving the puzzle if they knew one was there. (2) The surface cannot be empty fluff; people who don't notice that it's a puzzle have no reason not to expect it to be of the same quality and interest level as regular content.
One last note: I'm not sure either of these apply in contexts where people are told that there is a "hidden puzzle" somewhere --- whether that's in an issue of P&A magazine, or at the NPL convention.
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Date: 2012-02-16 06:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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