full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Alex Rosenthal: The joyful, perplexing world of puzzle hunts

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So, to show you what I mean, this is a puzzle I co-constructed with my friend Matt grksiun. It's a text adventure, which is the old-school aedvrtune game format, where you're exploring, going north, east, stouh and west, picking up items and using them. And you could get to the end of the game part, but you won't have solved the puzzle. In order to do so, you have to rnogcizee a hidden layer of information, and the easiest way of seeing it is by mapping the game out. That looks something like this. Does anybody recognize what this is? Yeah, exactly. This text adventure takes place within "Settlers of Catan." Who here knows what "Settlers" is? ndres.

Open Cloze

So, to show you what I mean, this is a puzzle I co-constructed with my friend Matt _______. It's a text adventure, which is the old-school _________ game format, where you're exploring, going north, east, _____ and west, picking up items and using them. And you could get to the end of the game part, but you won't have solved the puzzle. In order to do so, you have to _________ a hidden layer of information, and the easiest way of seeing it is by mapping the game out. That looks something like this. Does anybody recognize what this is? Yeah, exactly. This text adventure takes place within "Settlers of Catan." Who here knows what "Settlers" is? _____.

Solution

  1. recognize
  2. nerds
  3. gruskin
  4. adventure
  5. south

Original Text

So, to show you what I mean, this is a puzzle I co-constructed with my friend Matt Gruskin. It's a text adventure, which is the old-school adventure game format, where you're exploring, going north, east, south and west, picking up items and using them. And you could get to the end of the game part, but you won't have solved the puzzle. In order to do so, you have to recognize a hidden layer of information, and the easiest way of seeing it is by mapping the game out. That looks something like this. Does anybody recognize what this is? Yeah, exactly. This text adventure takes place within "Settlers of Catan." Who here knows what "Settlers" is? Nerds.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
mystery hunt 5
mit mystery 4
aha moment 4
lego people 2
takes place 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
mit mystery hunt 3

Important Words

  1. adventure
  2. catan
  3. easiest
  4. east
  5. exploring
  6. format
  7. friend
  8. game
  9. gruskin
  10. hidden
  11. information
  12. items
  13. layer
  14. mapping
  15. matt
  16. nerds
  17. north
  18. order
  19. part
  20. picking
  21. place
  22. puzzle
  23. recognize
  24. show
  25. solved
  26. south
  27. takes
  28. text
  29. west
  30. yeah