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
- recognize
- nerds
- gruskin
- adventure
- 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
- adventure
- catan
- easiest
- east
- exploring
- format
- friend
- game
- gruskin
- hidden
- information
- items
- layer
- mapping
- matt
- nerds
- north
- order
- part
- picking
- place
- puzzle
- recognize
- show
- solved
- south
- takes
- text
- west
- yeah