I didn’t participate in last week’s MIT Mystery Hunt, but I dropped in on my team’s Slack channel throughout the weekend to monitor my team’s progress. I also accessed the Hunt website to get a sense of this year’s puzzle structure and theme. The organizing team Death & Mayhem (rebranded as Life & Order) designed a Hunt that took place inside the head of fictional puzzle enthusiast Miss Terry Hunter, with liberal references to the Pixar film Inside Out. The puzzle rounds were themed around reigning in the five anthropomorphized emotions and then retrieving four core memories, ultimately enabling Terry to go on the final runaround. The hunt, titled Head Hunters, had an engaging story and polished puzzles and metas. I was very proud of my team completing the Hunt first in a close finish with several other talented teams.
L&O used an interesting gimmick for the core memory puzzle rounds. The memories represented four different stages of Terry’s youth and adolescence. Rather than present these rounds in a uniform order for all teams, L&O allowed individual teams to choose the order. A team becoming eligible to unlock a new core memory round received cursory information on the available options and then made a selection. The structure was innovative, but also controversial. “Choose-you-own-adventure” supporters appreciated having more agency in the Hunt experience and L&O mentioned during the wrap-up meeting that the structure allowed them early vetting of the core memory rounds. Opponents of the choice system pointed out that the core memory rounds included scavenger hunts, physical puzzles, and other specialty items that are more manageable when timed with particular solving shifts. A team discovering that the chosen round is not suited to the current contingent of awake puzzlers would likely feel screwed by poor luck of the draw.
The controversy was good food for thought in my explorations of immersion and escape room design. Immersive artists would applaud the introduction of choice, but the stakes are different when the experience is a theatrical experiment or art installation such as House of Eternal Return. The Pastore home was designed to illustrate how experience is non-commutative. Impressions depend on the order in which we perceive the data. On the other hand, Pine and Gilmore in The Experience Economy warn that too much variety can be harmful in a business context because the participants become overwhelmed with choices and consequences. Business owners should strive for customization and personalize experiences with a combination of moderate client interaction and empirical research. I suspect that the Pine and Gilmore approach would have benefited Mystery Hunt teams, but it would be a dealbreaking effort for the organizing team to customize solving trajectories for a hundred participating teams.
All current Puzzah! adventures feature a strictly linear narrative. Teams must solve puzzle A before solving puzzle B. In some cases a team making good time can unlock a bonus puzzle between two puzzles on the schedule. This is an example of customization based on automated assessment of a team’s skill level. But teams still recognize that they are being leash-led down a singular path and request having more control over their journey. I have some ideas on introducing more agency in our next room, but I must keep choices manageable and benign. At the end of the day, it’s all about providing the experience of success.
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Mystery Hunt solving team Palindrome was one of the top finishers this year. Members of Palindrome constructed a practice Hunt called Damn This Traffic Jam. The Hunt was distributed among teammates earlier this month and now is publicly available on The P&A website. I finished the Hunt yesterday and enjoyed it immensely. It contains several puzzles that are suitable for beginning solvers. Check it out!
life as a puzzle 
Interesting thoughts. Was the opposition to this structure large? For such a highly competitive puzzle hunt, I would be OK with the “luck of the draw,” it seems fair variance to insert into the event and potentially rewards more balanced skilled groups. Depending on the information provided during the selection of the team’s next round, it may also insert some skill into the event based upon players available and vague idea of what each path might entail. It sounds fun to me.
It’s hard to gauge the size of the response but it’s definitely more con than pro. The scavenger hunt was the puzzle I heard the most gripes about. It was not mentioned in the option descriptions but it was clearly to a team’s advantage to unlock it earlier than later. My team managed to make good/lucky choices, but didn’t see the CYOA element as an especially positive feature. On a smaller scale, the random chance could be a source of fun, but on this level the upsets inspired more discouragement than whimsy.
I haven’t gotten to try your escape rooms (I hope to do so some time in the future!), but my objection to linearly-structured rooms is often less that I feel leash-led and more that it makes it less likely that the entire team has something to do. In Amsterdam, Jackie and I had a room to ourselves that was very linear, and it worked out extremely well… on the other hand, if there had been two or three more people in their group, we might have had some people standing around twiddling their thumbs.
fwiw, Puzzah! private-tickets and the player minimum in almost all cases is 2. I would encourage you and Jackie to take advantage of those features when you do play a Puzzah! adventure. That said, I do want to incorporate parallel solving opportunities into our business model so larger groups can have an improved solving experience.