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Unread 07-12-2011, 15:19
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FRC #0116 (Epsilon Delta)
 
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Re: Why do we care about the game hints?

Having looked at this from the other side, here are a few fun things to think about.

The people on the Game Design Committee have almost as much fun thinking up the hint(s) each year as they do creating the game. Like everything else about FRC games, a good balance between multiple constraints must be reached. The hint can't be so obvious that it instantly reveals too much about the game. But it also cannot be so obscure that it truly can never be connected to the game.

Virtually every year someone successfully deciphers the hint, draws the correct conclusion, and posts it here on CD. So every year, the answer is given to the whole community. The problem is determining which post is right, and which of the several hundred wrong interpretations to ignore.

Once the game hint is revealed, the GDC does look in on these discussion threads to see how teams are interpreting the hint. Yes, there is more than just one evil cackling laugh that sneaks out as they read some of the posts. But in general, I remember discussions that go something like this:

"OK, it is high noon. Dead on at 12:00, so it is time to post the hint. Here goes..."

"It is 12:01 and . . . holy crap! There are already 3880 posts in the discussion thread about the hint!"

"These people take this stuff way too seriously! Don't they EVER sleep?"

"If they are going to put this much effort into decoding the hint, maybe next year we should think about it a little bit more? I feel sort of guilty about just using the fortune we got in the cookie at Chen Yang Li last night."

"Hey, nobody else could come up with something better. Besides, what is wrong with "you may be hungry soon, order takeout now" as a hint?"

"Well, to begin with, it still has some of Kate's kung pao chicken on it..."

"Quiet! I am trying to read the discussions!"

"Oh wow! They are getting really close! How are they able to figure this out in just the first four minutes?!??!?! I thought it would be a lot harder to break down the hint."

"I still think it is because of Kate's kung pao sauce."

"Shut up!"

"Besides, it is not like they will ever be able to make a connection between the fortune cookie phrase and the real ga..."

"You mean, like they just did?"

"No way!!! Ok, there is absolutely no logical way they could have figured that out. To do that, you would have had to know that the fortune cookie we found was printed in Avondale, New Mexico, by an Armenian refugee with psoriasis named Adbal that just missed his third payment on his truck loan. That would have to get connected to the last line of the second stanza of “Desperado” – but the Johnny Cash cover version with the alternative phrasing, not the original. But even that is only useful if you know that the English invented soccer by kicking the heads of dead Danish invaders and as a result, the Queen owns all the swans in England. And you really expect me to believe that they figured out how to put all of that together, and then knew that they had to divide the result by Perry Mason’s office phone number, to get the number of garstuckles that would be used in each match this year."

"Welcome to the age of the interwebthingys."

"Crap. What do we do now? "

"Let’s issue a second hint that . . . "

"No way we are doing a second hint! The first one already told them too much!"

"Look, it doesn’t matter! It is all taking care of itself! Yeah, so they figured out that we are using garstuckles this year. But that was 980 posts ago, and no one has gone back and realized that they were right."

"Huh? How in the world did they miss that??? They were right on target! How did they get diverted?"

"Andy Baker posted about the new Hoverboards from AndyMark, and they were off to the races."

"Hmmm. I wonder if you can eat kung pao chicken while riding a Hoverboard?"

"Shut up!"




-dave


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