Qualifying statements
A few weeks ago, Team Snout staged qualifying for their upcoming WarTron game. Held in Portland at the beginning of August, WarTron is another overnight puzzle hunt, or, as it's simply known around Stanford, The Game. Previous incarnations have included WHO, Ghost Patrol, and Doctor When. Though I playtested that last one, I didn't get to play any of these in earnest for various reasons, so I was eager to get a chance here. My usual team decided not to do this one, but I was fortunate enough to be asked to join Do Not Bounce, a team based in Portland and Seattle. We all were at the ready at noon on May 20th, hoping to tear through the qualifying puzzles and gain a spot in the game.
Things were going very well for a while. I got a nice charge out of discovering a message hidden in a quiz using Braille. We were feeling confident as we progressed to a simple WarGames-like interface. We probed around the system, trying to interpret the responses to our various commands. Then disaster struck.
Suddenly, the system was responding very slowly to our input, and then not at all. Game Control had suffered a massive server crash as a result of all the demand. It wasn't as simple as a quick restart; the website was down for hours. GC had no choice but to revert to an alternative system that was far less efficient: answering teams' input through email. This was frustrating, to say the least. We'd been told that qualification should last about three hours; it was now going to be much longer. This was a problem for me in particular, as I had plans at 4 PM. I wasn't willing to be a bad friend by breaking those plans, so I had to abandon my team.
By the time I got back (a bus breakdown delayed me further; thanks, SF Muni!), a scant few of the twenty spots remained. I wasn't clear on what my team was doing, but I got fed a cryptogram, which I solved virtually immediately by plugging a promising-looking word into a grep search and using my Excel/VBA-based cryptogram editing tool to finish it quickly. From that, we learned we had to use an application to read hidden text in some pictures. Since I didn't know what was going on, I waited anxiously while my teammates performed the last task.
We were too late. We finished 22nd. I was, er, not happy. I truly felt we'd been hosed. Yes, the server situation affected everyone similarly, but how many teams were a man short as a result of the lengthened event? I could have saved my team a half-hour if that cryptogram had come up when it should have. Plus, the non-automated email system certainly led to some unpredictability in terms of when teams got their replies and were able to proceed, and we didn't miss the top twenty by much. I wasn't mad at GC; though they perhaps should have tested their system with far more rigor, they did their best in a tough situation. I just found it hard not to be extremely annoyed at our misfortune.
Thankfully, the story has a happy ending, at least for our team. Because the limiting factor in WarTron attendance is number of people and not number of teams, Team Snout was able to admit the first few groups off the waiting list. I do feel for the remaining teams even though their times were a few hours behind the rest of us; I don't know what would have happened if there hadn't been technical frustrations.
It got me thinking about the best way to admit teams to The Game. Even ignoring the technical issues, is a live, timed puzzle hunt the best way to decide who gets in? I can think of a couple flaws. For one, teams who are free on the weekend of the real game but unavailable on the day of the qualification might feel slighted. For another, rewarding only puzzle-solving ability leads to the strongest squads getting in at the expense of less experienced ones, creating a sort of "the rich get richer" situation. Then again, admitting the best puzzle solvers gives you more license to make your game more innovative and difficult.
An alternative, which was used for Ghost Patrol, is a creative challenge that teams must submit by a certain date, and the owners of the best entries are invited to play. This removes the pressure of having to be present for a live qualifying event, but has its own problems. Chief among these is the subjectivity involved; it can be hard or impossible to elucidate why one submission was judged to be more worthy than another. A rejected team might disagree with Game Control's assessment and feel they were excluded for personal reasons, be they game-related or otherwise. That's not a very healthy situation.
Then, there's simply opening sign-ups at a certain time, and players get in on a first-come-first-served basis. In a game with high demand, though, this has an even more extreme version of the problem with the live qualifying. Plus, it's not a satisfying experience for either GC or the players; there's no whetting of the appetite.
Personally, I favor a hybrid. Give teams a short "pre-game" that's puzzle-based and can be completed at any time before the due date. While the bulk of this would have a defined final answer, there could also be a creative challenge used as a sort of tiebreaker. If a team running the game doesn't want that subjectivity, maybe they could include an optimization puzzle, which has many solutions along with a scoring mechanism that makes some answers better than others.
All of these plans, though, make an assumption: Why should the number of teams be limited? Can't a game's organizers resolve to accommodate all the teams who wish to play? It's very easy to feel this way, particularly while feeling the sting of being excluded from a game. It's certainly how I felt when my team wasn't chosen for Ghost Patrol. In an ideal world, of course, every group running a game would welcome everyone. But in a long game with high production values, not putting a cap on the number of participants is asking for trouble. Having to run the game multiple times would likely force sacrifices in it.
What do you think? What's the best way to decide who gets to play in a game with limited room?
Hello world!
Buy my book!
May 30th, 2012 - 07:18
My belief, and I am aware that it is in the minority, is that a Game Control should structure a hunt so that it can admit everyone who wants to play.
August 13th, 2012 - 23:20
If I understand your comment correctly, Mike, that means you think the criterion of “admit everyone who wants to play” supersedes ANY other considerations, including (for example) the overall format of the event or specific, space-limited locations that a GC might want to use. Is that correct?
May 30th, 2012 - 08:07
I have to say that if you really want to play in a game, you *make time* to jump through GC’s hoops. There are no teams that “are available the day of the hunt but not the day of the qualification”- there are only teams that want to play badly enough and teams that don’t. The people on the Burninators who needed to qualify for the real hunt had nothing else planned for the day. W-H even joined in from Beijing at like 3am local time in the middle of BIST.
That said, I like the application process much better, since it does give a team more flexibility in timing and is more creative. However, you do need that creative component- if you simply give a puzzle and a week to solve it, every team is going to be able to do so (unless your puzzle is broken).
I believe that it is *nice* for Game Control to structure a hunt so that everyone who wants to play can, but I also believe that it’s legitimate for GC to throw up hoops to figure out how badly people want to play.
May 30th, 2012 - 08:52
Assuming you want to introduce new people into the community (who may then run good games in the future) filtering contestants primarily by how badly they want to play seems problematic.
I was invited fairly last-minute to participate in an application for Ghost Patrol. We were rejected, and while we likely didn’t invest as much time into our video as other teams who made the cut, if we had it would have introduced several nationally regarded puzzlers to the Game. I tend to think that in ongoing puzzle events, having more voices involved as time goes on, from both a solving and a constructing perspective, is almost always a plus.
I’m not trying to be bitter about the fact that we weren’t accepted, as that ship sailed long ago and I completely understand there was limited space. However, Melinda’s comment above makes me feel like our rejection is considered a feature and not a bug, and the Game community wants to discourage the participation of people who are curious and not yet hardcore. Whether intended or not, that kind of elitism leaves me a lot less interested in being involved.
May 30th, 2012 - 09:15
The major thing we prioritized when we developed our application process for Genome was including teams that had run Games before and/or stated in their application that they were running Games in the future. With substantially more demand than supply, anything that we can do as a community to encourage more people to run events is IMHO crucial. As a community, again IMHO, we DON’T need to encourage new people to join the community, with the possible exception of college-age students, and only because they’re the folks who might have both new ideas and the time to put them together. We DO need, as Curtis says, to “run more Games!”.
That being said, I’m a strong believer that GC gets to pick how they want to admit people to their game, and they ought to be able to do it any way they want without complaints. They’re the ones putting in hundreds and hundreds of hours, and they have their own goals. Snout has consistently had a first-come, first-admitted policy for their events (“don’t like it? run your own!”). I too was frustrated with the technical issues and the longer time than expected, but GC certainly went the extra mile to try to admit the teams who might have otherwise been close-but-no-cigar.
When I was a student I’d think nothing of spending a weekend to do a creative challenge for getting admitted to a Game, but boy, it’s a lot harder to do that now, so I definitely prefer time-limited, simple admission processes at this point. I do think there should be *some* hoop, though; IMHO GC wants people who are willing to put in some effort to play to avoid teams that are just not that into it.
May 30th, 2012 - 10:29
Dan: It is most assuredly not considered a feature by me. It is specifically considered a reflection of arrogance and exclusiveness on the part of the community. I despise this aspect of Games, and it’s why I don’t play in as many of them as I would otherwise.
The “run more Games!” idea only works if all the people who want to play only are allowed to play only some of the Games. Otherwise it’s just the same group of people, all the time, keeping everybody else out.
May 30th, 2012 - 12:11
I apologize for wording my previous comment poorly (and I appreciate the Facebook commenters who brought this to my attention). I am not representing the community well if the impression people are getting is that we (or I) do not welcome new members. What I said above reflects my beliefs poorly. Let me try again: I think as a community we have a supply-and-demand problem. We all were sad having two full years between Ghost Patrol and WHO. It is great to get new blood with new ideas from all interested folks. But as a community, if we’re going to increase the number of people who want to play, we definitely also have to think about increasing the number of opportunities to play at least at the same rate. I greatly admire the GCs who have run their events on multiple weekends to make that possible for more people! As we bring new people into the community, how can we get them to run more events as well? How can we scale our current events to allow more opportunities? I noted college students because historically, a large proportion of the events we’ve run as a community have been from people who were introduced to the Game during their university experience. But I don’t mean, in any way, that those are the only appropriate people for us to recruit, and I apologize to those who got that impression from my poorly worded post above.
May 30th, 2012 - 15:25
My first experience with a full-length Game was with a group of people who made a half-hearted effort for the application process. We were admitted anyway, but we shouldn’t have been. It was too difficult for us, we were consistently several puzzles behind everyone else, and we ended up dropping out midway without finishing the event. It really wasn’t fun, for either us or GC. GC told me later that they should have seen that coming, based on our application.
BANGs and such, I feel, are more appropriate for introducing people to puzzle hunts. They’re short and cheap, so you’ve not out a lot of wasted money and effort if you didn’t enjoy the experience. My current team has run several BANGs that have run multiple weekends and admitted basically everyone who wanted to play, to the point where we couldn’t find enough playtesters for our last one because everyone got in.
Lately, in my professional life, many students have come up to me to ask me to give them an A despite missing class and not doing well on exams. I’m OK with people working and receiving an A, and I’m actually OK with people not doing as much work and getting a B or C. But if you want something, you need to put in the time to get it.
May 30th, 2012 - 15:26
I don’t thInk there is any real best answer here. Selection criteria can query interest in a variety of ways – financial, intellectual, creative, past/future service, or a mix of these. I prefer team GC experience simply because I’ve built up a lot of this and it doesn’t cost me more time to get into a game where I value time more than money or other inputs. Solving puzzles is more interesting to me than random creative tasks of the tIme consuming activities. I know taste will differ here and GCs should have flexibility in these amateur exercises to experiment their own way. But whatever the criteria someone will be disappointed if you don’t follow Mike’s thinking which I’ve come to subscribe to too that GCs should find ways to get everyone who wants to play a spot. This may limit the structure of your game, as heavily site focused or non paper puzzles may not scale well, and it may not even encourage the overnight format. I’m much more likely to run a day long BANG or conference game than any van Game, but I’ll get all teams into any event I organize. And probably just with a webform submission with team details, as I’d rather focus my time on the event than a complicated pregame that will leave some disappointed if it is being used to say no to anyone for any reason.
May 30th, 2012 - 19:08
I’m curious to hear what other people think is the best way to handle admissions assuming that there are more teams wanting to play than is realistically possible. Granted the answer might be “Not run an event in which this happens,” but given the fact that people will on some level want to run smaller events (20-30 teams), how would you like to see this handled?
(I, for one, am interested in seeing this community grow and expand into new cities. DASH is a great step in this direction, and if more Games start springing up in new areas, then some of the supply/demand problem may be alleviated.)
May 30th, 2012 - 19:21
Melinda: As a teacher myself, I think the comparison between (a) being required to do schoolwork in order to earn a grade which specifically represents how effectively you did schoolwork, and (b) being required to show how much you “want it” in order to earn admission into a weekend puzzle event is extremely strained.
I’m not saying some sort of application process isn’t reasonable for a limited-entry event. But I am saying that if the standard response from people who have been accepted into the community to people who haven’t is, “If you really wanted to play, you would have jumped through our hoops,” then don’t expect to grow the community. (And as noted, if you don’t want to grow the community, that’s not a problem, but I think community growth is usually a positive.) I’m also not looking to tell anybody how to run their events, just give a sense of how things look/feel to those on the margins.
May 30th, 2012 - 22:14
The next time we run a Game, we’ll try to admit as many people as we can. But, well, there is a place for artistically run games that can only take 20-30 teams at a time. There are very, very nice puzzles that only *work* with fewer people physically present at a time. Should no one ever get to play those puzzles? What Mike is saying is that because the French Laundry can only seat a small number of the people who want to eat there on any given day, we should all get takeout at McDonald’s instead.
Most of the people I’ve talked to really prioritize admitting “people who have run Games,” which is FAR more insular than “jump through this hoop, which I’ve accurately described in advance and that anyone with enough interest could do.” I mean, there are still people who want to go back to the Captain’s List. Weekend games are really, really tough- they literally break up friendships- and I think it’s reasonable to require people to demonstrate that they have some sort of commitment before taking a team (and excluding some other team that does have that commitment). If your favorite pop star routinely sells out concerts, and she only visits your city once a year, you’re going to make sure you’re there right when the tickets go on sale to get your hands on one. Rearranging your life so you can get tickets is also a hoop, but no one thinks it’s an unfair one.
Personally, I think that a good hoop would be a mix of hard puzzles and of some creative activity. (Disclaimer: I enjoy making the creative challenge part of applications.) I guess the puzzles should be around the same quality and difficulty of the actual game puzzles, to prevent what happened to my underqualified team in my first Game. If “expanding the community” were an explicit goal, you could reserve one or two places for newbie teams, or judge them in a separate category. (I thought Ghost Patrol did the former?) The Wartron application may have been too high and unfair of a hoop, although Tyler has no excuse- his post here really does remind me of the students who go away for a week and then complain that they got a C on the exam.
May 30th, 2012 - 22:28
I’m a little insulted by that, honestly. I was fully prepared to spend the time GC said it would take. Sorry, but I’m not going to clear seven hours of my Sunday for something that’s supposed to take three, and I don’t think that’s indicative of an insufficient desire to play the game. A more accurate comparison would be a student being assigned a five-page paper, doing quality work, and then getting a C because he didn’t make it ten. You can’t just move the goalposts like that.
May 30th, 2012 - 23:20
They said they *thought* it would take “about” 3 hours. Also, they made it clear that they would give teams as long as 24 hours, which means that they expected some teams to need that time. If you had plans at 4pm that you needed to take *Muni* for, that means you only planned for 3.5hrs of playtime at the most?
You’re not a noob- you know people tend to underestimate the time it takes for people to solve their puzzles. And, yes, 7 hours is excessive (and there’s no reason in this age for the massive tech fails that they had), but 4 or 5 hours is totally “about 3″ hours, especially if you knew that you were one of the stronger people on the team. Also, you knew the Wartron application date way in advance. Unless this was some friend flying in from out of town or something, you could have scheduled your social life around this date.
I think a fairer analogy would be scaling mountain cliffs without a climbing rope. Hopefully, you won’t need to use the rope, but it’s not going to end well if you need the rope and it’s not there.
May 31st, 2012 - 10:38
Then why even have a time estimate at all? What purpose does it serve other than to allow people to plan their day? If you have a meeting at work at 5 PM and you’re told it will be one hour long, are you going to hesitate to make dinner reservations for 7:30?
And you’re making some faulty assumptions. My prior obligation was just that: prior. And it was a scheduled event. Are you actually suggesting I blow that off? What exactly would you have me do here?
Even if it was something I could conceivably have rescheduled, it feels like I’m being a crappy friend to say “Oh, sorry; my afternoon of sitting in my apartment solving puzzles over Skype is running long.” My priorities are what they are, and I’m pretty sure I have them right, at least in this case. If you want to interpret that as lacking the requisite desire/effort to play in the game, I guess that’s your prerogative as GC, but you have to accept how that judgment comes across.
June 1st, 2012 - 12:12
Your priorities are your priorities. You don’t get to complain if you fulfill a higher priority at the expense of a lower one.
And yes, there are certain people who I know that if they schedule a “one-hour meeting” at 5pm, it’s going to take more like 1.5-2hrs, and I shouldn’t schedule a dinner at 7:30pm (or I should tell my companions that I will almost certainly be late). That’s because I know these people. I’d feel bad for you if this were your first hunt, but you’ve been in the community long enough to know or to know who to ask.
June 1st, 2012 - 12:41
Another bad assumption. This is my first qualifying process of this kind that I can remember.
Even if that weren’t the case, don’t you think it’s a little messed up to have to assume that GC’s time estimate is worthless? I shouldn’t have to ask about it at all; if it’s there, I should be able to act based on that. If people ask for one hour of your time and then take two, how is that your fault? I ask the question again: What’s the point of the time estimate if it’s so consistently inaccurate?
Getting back to the core issue, why should people be disqualified for not being available on the given date? Isn’t asking them to free up the date(s) of the game itself enough in this regard? I won’t hold the rest of my life hostage to a mere precursor to a puzzle event, and I can’t believe I’d be in the minority in this regard.
I have to say, the longer this discussion goes on, the more broken I find the entire concept of game qualification, and the more I find myself solidly in Mike’s camp.
May 31st, 2012 - 00:33
At last count, my favorite pop star didn’t buy up all the tickets to her show and give them to her friends. The French Laundry doesn’t reserve all its seats for people who are friends of the chef. But that’s what happens with Games. There’s a little dog and pony show at the front that deludes some people into thinking there’s a meritocracy in place, but somehow, magically, the same people get to play all the time. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the people who are making the challenges are evaluating the people they know, who are good at the things the creators like doing, because they’ve all done them before.
Melinda, I regrettably have to tell that you are coming across as the embodiment of the arrogance and elitism I’ve accused this system of encouraging. I’m sure that’s not your intent, so you may want to look closer at the effect of your words.
For me, I’ll continue to think the system should change to not be arrogant and elitist. If I style myself as not being that, maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and run one with my preferred style of admission, where everybody plays. Of course, I can’t commit to that alone, but I expect I wouldn’t have to.
May 31st, 2012 - 02:13
My personal ideal system is something like this: automatically let in a handful of teams who have run a Game within the last X years (because yes, I feel that they deserve it after having contributed to the community), and then fill in the other slots based on performance on a set of puzzles that take maybe 1-3 hours to solve, maybe with a looseish meta so that nobody gets locked out by being bottlenecked on any one thing. (Of course, allowing parallelization favors larger teams, so maybe teams would have to be on the honor system to limit their size.) Perhaps this could be repeated on two separate days, with two separate sets of puzzles, to mitigate the problem of locking out people with weddings and such. It makes sense to me to select teams that demonstrate that they can solve your style of puzzle, and although it always sucks to miss the cut, it sucks less if you only have to spend a couple hours on the application and you get to solve fun puzzles.
I think it’s up to each Game Control to fashion the admission process in its own image. I like to write lots of puzzles, and I’d take the extra work of writing those two separate metas over the hassle of judging creative challenges any day, but if a GC is more into the latter, then more power to them. I think the “make a wacky video / presentation / whatever” model is a decent one that produces some amusing content, but I personally balk at pouring time into that stuff (it’s nowhere near as much fun for me as solving puzzles), and I’d hate to be a team that got rejected after hours or even days of creative work. It seems to me that everyone who didn’t get into Ghost Patrol is still bitter about that, and honestly, I would be too. It’s hard not to take a turndown of creative, personal work as a personal rejection.
I agree that it’s great when a Game can be made available to everyone who wants to play. (The Dr. When GC went to a lot of trouble to pull that off.) However, I’ll admit that the extra constraint of “…and people might expect us to do this on 2 weekends for 50 teams” dissuades me from wanting to run a public overnight Game. I’ve heard the arguments that it’s not that much harder to do it all over again an extra time or two, but I still believe that it should be up to each GC, and that it’s not incumbent on any GC to rerun until everyone is satisfied. (Writing puzzles is lots of fun for me; dealing with most of the other logistics of planning a Game is not. So it’s harder for me to get excited about the idea of reusing the same puzzles while adding new logistical hassles.)
I think it’s easy to forget that Game organizers are fundamentally throwing a sort of party, and it should be fun for them and they shouldn’t have to worry excessively about what everyone else might think. I’d say it’s even fair game for GC to let some of their friends in if they want to, or run an invitation-only event (as long as GC is up front about it and doesn’t portray it as a pure meritocracy if it isn’t, or just doesn’t publicize the event at all).
I’m a bit surprised at the sentiments that the Game community is closed and elitist. I can understand the reasons behind those sentiments, but I just haven’t personally had the same experience. I knew nobody in this community when I joined, I started contributing to it, and now I’m part of it. Granted, it might have been easier for a totally new team to get into a Game in 2004, but I think a sufficiently motivated new team should eventually be able to solve fast enough, creatively wow the judges enough, or do whatever else is necessary to get that first Game slot… especially after getting their feet wet via BANGs, DASHes, and other public events that generally do accommodate everyone who wants to play.
Since I’m sure I’ve come off as elitist in spite of my intentions: these are just my opinions. I’m hardly one of the best people to speak for the overnight Game as such. It’s far from my favorite style of puzzle event; I just can’t stay up for 30 hours, and as soon as the sun comes up on Sunday, I’m invariably miserable and I swear to myself that I’ll never put myself through one of these things again. Give me a 12 or 18 hour event, or one with a nice campout in the middle, any day…
May 31st, 2012 - 02:51
A couple more comments:
I can see how letting in only the most motivated teams is a form of elitism, but all other things being equal, I’d rather have the more motivated players as future contributors to the Game. (I think it really starts to feel like the ugly sort of elitism when there are many hoops to jump through and “motivation” is defined as “being willing to impress/please/bribe us”, which is why I favor the short and more objective application process I outlined above.) That said — and I know this is anecdotal — it’s my sense that the GCs that have recently run subjective application processes have made a point of letting in some totally new and perhaps more casual teams, precisely in order to foster the sort of diversity of voices Dan mentioned.
(and my Ghost Patrol comment above wasn’t directed at Dan, but I remember a lot of (sometimes public) bitterness from other teams. That GC — and I’ll speak as an outside observer despite having been involved with the event toward the end of the planning process — got many more applications than expected, and clearly had to made the best of a very difficult situation in which many teams who had invested significant time and effort would have to be turned away. That event was logistically constrained enough that I don’t believe it would have been possible for them to add an additional weekend on short notice. Could they have rerun the whole thing six months later? Sure, but my opinion is that they shouldn’t have to, and shouldn’t feel any undue pressure to do so, because damn, running these things is exhausting and people have to get back to their everyday lives at some point. I think we massively undervalue sweat equity in the puzzle community in general, and expect people to pour in months of time and then only charge for the raw cost of materials and site reservations and so on. But that’s another topic…)
May 31st, 2012 - 06:55
I don’t think you’ve come across as elitist, Ian. You weren’t talking down to anyone.
The “GC doesn’t have to tell anyone about their party” concept is fine if you just want the same people at your party that you had at the last one. And as I’ve said elsewhere, the community would have to want that to change to get that to change. It doesn’t generally seem to want that. New people are viewed as a hassle. They don’t know the system, might not do as well, might not be willing to jump through all the hoops, might make the Game harder to run.
I was new once. I was on a team that was dysfunctional enough that in our first Game, we missed several puzzle stops. We didn’t do everything right. My team is pretty darn good now, but it took time to get there.
The system as currently constructed isn’t very good at letting people get good at Games. It seems intended to perpetuate a gap that exists between teams like mine and teams that might want to be. If we reward puzzle solving speed, then the Game teams best at solving Game puzzles will get in. If we reward creativity, then the Game teams best at knowing what Game Control likes will get in. If we reward Game Control experience, then the teams that run Games will get in. Most of the top 15 teams are at least two out of those three.
There’s no room at the inn. There are two solutions when your hotel is too popular to accept new guests: the first is to charge more, and the second is build a bigger hotel. Or you can just accept that you’ve turned into a condo.
May 31st, 2012 - 09:31
I’ve never felt that the system is intended to perpetuate that gap, but I agree that it does. I think it’s partly up to new teams to close that gap for themselves, and I’m glad there are enough public events out there (at least in some places) that are good practice for Games, but I agree that our application systems could be more welcoming to new and still-improving teams. I’ll have to think about how exclusionary my “objective” puzzle-based application process might really be, and again, I wouldn’t want to see all applications go in that direction.
May 31st, 2012 - 07:55
Let’s make a distinction between unfair advantage and fair advantage. Being someone’s friend is an unfair advantage. Being better at puzzles and better at, well, following directions- and you’re awfully close to complaining about being bad at the latter- is a fair advantage.
Most GCs *explicitly* reward running and playing in previous Games when considering admission. My husband even said to me, “Why shouldn’t we just invite the teams we like? We’re running a party for our friends.” I don’t think that’s fair at all, and I don’t know why you’re calling me elitist when I’m against that and people like Ian and John explicitly say that they’re for rewarding previous Game experience.
When I first started in the Game community in 2005 or 2006ish, I personally sucked and was on a team that was mediocre. I got better not by doing Games but by doing the shorter events that do generally accommodate everyone who wants to play. In the Bay area there’s a shorter event almost every month in the spring and summer, and many have excellent puzzles that are very Game-like. Then I got good enough to play in real Games, joined a better team, and actually had fun playing in Games.
It’s true that people who are practiced at solving puzzles will be better at puzzles. But GC doesn’t admit them because they’ve played lots of games- they admit then due to being better at solving puzzles. Also, I’m not sure that people who know GC will be better at creative challenges- many of my favorite Dr. Who videos came from people I didn’t recognize. But let’s just say that’s true. GC still isn’t admitting them because they’re friends; they’re admitting them because they like the videos better. So we’ve got a situation that analogous to college admissions. People who are rich and well-connected can buy SAT prep books and know that they need to take practice tests; they also know that they have to participate in certain extracurricular activities that appeal to colleges. So, they are way more likely to get into the Ivy League than people who don’t know they have to practice for the SAT and do extracurriculars.
In effect, what you’re saying is we need some kind of affirmative action for new teams. (The alternative is only opening community colleges. Community colleges are great places, but they fulfill a different purpose than Harvard.) That’s fine; I could get behind an affirmative action initiative. But, really, there’s no selection mechanism in the world that people who are passionate about and good at puzzles won’t do better at than complete noobs. Calling that “elitist” doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
June 1st, 2012 - 22:12
Melinda, I have not disagreed that there’s no system of exclusion that doesn’t include all the top 15 teams every time. What we disagree over is whether that’s a problem.
May 31st, 2012 - 08:35
My experience was that it wasn’t particularly difficult to break into the game community. I stopped going to Games because it turns out I don’t like the Game (I do not like to go 36 hours without seeing a bed, no matter how much I like the activities I’m given during that time). But within a couple years, me and a few MH friends in the bay area played in two separate games. Have things gotten significantly harder in the last few years? (I do remember that BANG crowding increased a lot right around when I left, so it’s plausible to me that it’s way harder now.)
I think part of what’s going on here is that it’s really hard for people outside of the small core to get into *a particular game* and this is annoying for people who either don’t live on the west coast or have more constrained schedules. If Tyler had applied for all 3 games he mentioned, he surely would have gotten into at least one of them. If Dan lived in the bay area he’d have no trouble getting into a game. It would be nice if there was some way to mitigate this particular point.
May 31st, 2012 - 08:56
If I were in charge I’d actually go for something explicitly based on putting time into running other events. Run two BANGs or one Game and your team gets automatic entry into one Game of your choice, with the remaining slots handed out by lottery among qualified teams. That way you know what you have to do, and you’re making people pay for GC’s sweat with their own sweat.
May 31st, 2012 - 08:58
I feel Todd’s question deserves an answer from me, since I dodged the first question by saying I wouldn’t fall into this kind of trap. This is the system I would use if there are always >2x the possible number of teams. If it is smaller than that, I think accommodations in most cases can be made.
My “fair” solution looks a lot like what some high field size running events, like the Boston and the NYC Marathon, use. To overly simplify, there is a qualification hurdle and then a random lottery. (This is not exactly true of Boston, and is not exactly true of the NYC Marathon, but bear with me.)
I’d release a handful of game-level puzzles and teams would have an open block of time to solve them (Maybe do something like online logic puzzle tests do these days where you start your team’s clock on a server when your team is ready anytime over say 1-2 weeks, but then you have a limit of time after you actually start).
These puzzles are the qualifying standard to show your group would be able to complete the race you are presenting them. Boston is (functionally) never your first race. Reading back through the comments I can see Melinda’s wisdom that for a 30 hour event you must be sure teams are prepared for everyone’s benefit. But this doesn’t mean you just let in super fast teams. ANY team that clears that hurdle will be treated equally and then randomly chosen to fill spots. This is certainly fair, if unlucky for various groups.
The interesting part about NYC Marathon qualifying is after you lose the lottery X times (I think it is now twice) you automatically get in the X+1-st time. Unfortunately GCs are different groups, and the game community cannot enforce this kind of rule in the same way a continuing organization can, but this is what I’d view as a way in.
Now, marathons in reality have other ways in. For Boston, elite runners automatically get invites (or preferred spots to avoid a lottery). And you can circumvent even having proven marathon running experience if you raise thousands of dollars for a charity and take a limited number of pre-alloted spots. I bet even in the ideal case a GC will reserve 20% of spots as now for this kind of situation. But if 80% of spots are randomly assigned to all teams over a puzzle hurdle, that would be the “fair” system I would use. It would be bad luck that kept a team out. Not being judged creatively lacking after putting in a lot of time. Yes, I bear game application scars.
May 31st, 2012 - 09:02
And I see in typing my long response that an unrelated Snyder has posted the same answer a couple minutes sooner. His short post is what my TL;DR summary would look like.
May 31st, 2012 - 09:43
The general vibe I seem to be seeing is that BANGs are the regular season and the Games are the playoffs. IOW, you can’t/shouldn’t just be able to walk in off the street and play a Game. That would be easilly defensible if they were relatively rare in comparison to BANGs (I am way over here, so I have no idea what the actual relative proportions are, but that’s not really the impression that I get).
One possibility: I knew that this WarTron thing was coming up (probably from this blog), I knew there was some sort of qualifying that was going to have to happen. I considered being there for the qualifying (even though there was No Chance of me playing the actual Game) just to do the event, but didn’t. If I had done perhaps a bit more research and found out that it was only going to be puzzles (ie no weird make-a-video bits) and not too long (and that I wouldn’t annoy the organizers by doing the puzzles despite not intending to play the Game), I might well have been there, *just to do the puzzles*. Why not sell the qualification event as a puzzle event in its own right, with qualification to the main Game as a “prize”? IMO this would encourage participation (even, or especially, among those of us far away and/or unavailable on the date), give potential Game attendees a taste of what they’re in for, and provide the community with more open-access events, all at once. I wouldn’t expect a huge event (esp. for free), but the few hours that was planned for sounds pretty reasonable to me.
May 31st, 2012 - 09:53
I appear to have edited a bit out and then not put it back in: the last paragraph was supposed to start with something like: “I think the more open an event is, the better. But I don’t have any reason to believe that groups are being restrictive just for the sake of being restrictive (I’ve never attended, and certainly never run, a Game, so I’ve got no reason to doubt them).”
Also, an open question to the WarTron people (should they be reading): did anyone do the puzzles just for the puzzles, knowing they couldn’t play the Game? Would it have been weird/annoying for someone to have done so?
May 31st, 2012 - 12:49
First of all, I’m coming to this as a relatively new Game player (Ghost Patrol was my first game), so I’m very gracious that I was able to get in as a new team. And FWIW, it seems like the past four Games have tried to break ground in letting new teams in. I know that Ghost Patrol stated they wanted several brand new teams, WHO and WHEN (sounds like Black letter) doubled their capacity, and WarTron allowed any team (new or old) an equal chance of getting in.
With regards to WarTron, I do realize that a newer team is at a disadvantage for any sort of puzzle solving contest, but I also know that there are many brilliant teams from non-Gamer cities that could have easily made it in (one look at the DASH results tells you that the Game Community doesn’t have a monopoly on great solving teams).
I don’t want to be blind to the fact that the Game community is much more insular than it could and perhaps should be. But it also seems like things have advanced well beyond the “invite-only secret email list.” So, I do think it’s easier for a new team to get into a Game than it used to be. And that’s good.
As far as the community being un-welcome to newcomers, I have experienced the opposite. Rachel, and the ladies from XX-Rated let me playtest their event remotely, allowing me my first taste of the Game. Jan from Coed Astronomy sent our team all the puzzles from Iron Puzzler BANG and offered to be available for hints over the phone whenever we wanted. Alexandra from Mystic Fish snail-mailed me an ENTIRE playable set of Pirates BATH in giant box, complete with stuffed puzzle envelopes for each of 20+ locations, instructions, coins, and even customized scratch off hints with our team name on the tops of all the pages. John from Team Advil let me play on his team having never met me (including staying at his house). And Brent from Shinteki is always thrilled to see non West Coast teams in his events (rumor is they will be running their Disneyland event for yet a third time at some point in the future). In almost every encounter I’ve had I’ve found people to be excited and eager to let others in on the fun whenever logistically possible.
I don’t mean to be naive and say that there isn’t elitism in the community, and there are likely some people who want to keep it that way. But I feel it’s worth mentioning that I have seen much of the exact opposite.
June 1st, 2012 - 22:14
I am only talking about whether the *entry system* for teams is elitist. I am not talking about anyone being elitist in person. We’re all friends here.
June 1st, 2012 - 18:03
tabstop asked, “did anyone do the puzzles just for the puzzles, knowing they couldn’t play the Game? Would it have been weird/annoying for someone to have done so?” Team Catherwood signed up to playtest precisely because we were in it just for the puzzles, with no intention of playing The Game, and didn’t want to interfere with the real qualifiers. We had fun and provided (possibly helpful) feedback to GC. It was a shame that they couldn’t arrange a proper stress test of the servers, and I pity those teams that didn’t get to experience BIGMAC the way we did. My team solved everything in just under 3 hours, and we are only a loose collection of remote friends who like puzzles. I have had a variety of experiences as an outsider volunteering on the periphery of several Game events, because I have encountered a variety of GC. They’re not all clones, you know.
June 3rd, 2012 - 12:33
And there’s the meta-problem. As illustrated, folks don’t 100% agree on what the qualifications are for teams, let alone the best way to measure those qualifications. How do you meld all that into a system that everyone in GC can agree on?