ep 5 – Puzzles (& Crypto)

Transcript

welcome to web3 with a6 and z a show about the next internet from the team at asics and z crypto that includes me your host zonal this show is for anyone whether developer artist community leader or other builder seeking to understand and go deeper on all things crypto and web three you can catch episodes one through three in which we cover everything from the methods to the madness when it comes to thinking about the markets and the longer arc of innovation to the foundations and deeper meanings and arcs of blockchains crypto and web 3 to specifics on auction design and mechanism design for web3 and beyond but this episode is a special bonus holiday

episode to titus over until we resume with our regular programming after a brief holiday vacation it's based on a fun hallway style riff we did linking two seemingly unrelated things puzzle design and crypto and beyond the surface analogies and comparisons discussed in here we'll go deeper into specific product design and ui best practices in future episodes but here our experts riff on all things puzzle design with deep passion as members of the community also commenting within on themes that generally connect to crypto we have scott commoners asics and z crypto research partner and professor at harvard business school who specializes in market and incentive design but who also wrote bloomberg's puzzle column for

a couple of years has designed several puzzle experiences in collaboration with different nft communities and whose team also won the mit mystery hunt several years ago that's an internationally renowned and one of the long-standing puzzle hunts in the world that takes place annually on the massachusetts institute of technology campus we also have as our special guest matthew stein whose team won the 2021 mit mystery hunt he's a former software engineer at google and for the last few years a full-time puzzle designer who specializes in narrative puzzle hunts as well as in designing alternate reality games for nft communities movies and musicians speaking of matthew is also a violinist violist and composer

which connects to his puzzle design aesthetic matthew also designs puzzles for art of play's art journal and is a reviewer for room escape artist the largest escape room website in north america where he also writes about various topics in immersive gaming oh and since this is a vacation bonus episode be sure to check out the transcript at asicscrypto.com for a mini puzzle that you can play within as a reminder we'll resume our regular programming in mid-july and another reminder that none of the following is investment business tax or legal advice please see asics.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments and with that the first voice you'll hear is scots followed by mats enjoy

let me give you the 20-second spiel and like why i think of this as being intuitively related to crypto i think of structuring and designing a puzzle very much the structuring and designing an incentive scheme building a protocol that's going to be intuitive and makes sense to people and that they can explore and discover and build out you know an experience sort of over time is very much like being a puzzle architect like designing the experience of a puzzle and the associated unlocks and that second bit even copies over to nft communities and how they think about gradually building up the components of what they do it's very much allowing the experience to periodically evolve sometimes through the user interactions and sometimes through new discoveries so

puzzling and problem solving is like formulating an incentive design often has the same mixture of elegance and precision figuring out how to make a crypto design actually work together totally agree and puzzle design is not just about designing the medium it's about designing the full experience yes so when you're designing a puzzle it's not just i made a crossword here solve it it's everything contextually around how that puzzle is presented because the puzzle is the experience that the solver has i think this is often overlooked in puzzle contests in any format where incentivization structure the price structure is part of the puzzle whether you like it or not like in an escape

room also the fact that there is a time limit is part of the puzzle it's not separate from the puzzles that totally dictates how you engage with the puzzles whether you're taking your time whether you're solving as quickly as possible just to get to the answer and then moving on or fully solving and appreciating each of the intermediate ahas of the puzzle for me a big part of the style of puzzle design i do and enjoy solving is about puzzles as a type of personal expression and encouraging research rabbit holes and sharing deep areas of knowledge and hobbies and identities and such yeah so like i have a background as a software engineer i'm also a violinist i do some visual art stuff when i design puzzles it brings in all these different perspectives and the

aha moments i create in puzzles are whether from existing hobbies or new areas of research rabbit holes that i enjoy leading people down and in particular i think this contrasts with how people often view a specific type of puzzle solving as influenced by the times crossword specifically it's you can't look things up it's how much you know already if there's a way to figure it out if there's a way to sort of piece stuff together there certainly is more puzzly trivia but trivia on its own isn't necessarily a puzzle and i don't necessarily view trivia in and of itself as a type of puzzle solving simply because it's you know it or you don't if anything it's the exact opposite i'm designing the puzzle around

getting you to look things up and then keep going deeper and be four hours into researching asteroid naming conventions and suddenly you have this discovery exactly discover this entirely new world that the puzzle introduces you to and hilariously this is how i got into nfts originally oh say more so for a couple of years of starting early in the pandemic bloomberg had me write a mostly weekly puzzle column and you know we tied the columns when we could things that were in the news that were kind of puzzly and potentially of interest to bloomberg readers and crypto is of course highly of interest to bloomberg readers and so we actually did two puzzles around nfts one right after the people sale nfts feel really puzzly right like you know you've got this art

that's in the open but it's cryptographically secured and there's a bunch of puzzles that are about solving different sorts of codes or crypto systems and so i did a puzzle the story was this new art is in the open but the address is hidden can you locate it it was one of the best puzzles we ran in the entire series i think got lots of solvers lots of attention and then you know a couple months later these profile picture projects i know pfp doesn't stand for profile picture project but hey it's not just the acronym you know these pfps really became popular and around the time i was reading the new yorker article about the board aviod club and i was like oh wow these feel really puzzly too and i went to my editor i was like look we do a second one on nfts

around these characters like everyone's playing these characters and he sort of said our readers are interested in crypto do you think there's a puzzle here so i did a second one that was built around the pfps the imagined setup was you had all of these new nfts have been released that we bloomberg conundrums and the puzzle group had been collecting them surreptitiously for months and now we've hidden them but you needed to figure out again something about decoding and understanding the addresses and i mentioned in that column i referenced the board api club and crypto punks and sup ducks and the subjects community reached out and said look i think you would like this why did you join our discord and check it out supdux is a 10 000 pfp collection from the mind of frankie nines based on an earlier nft he'd created called sup duck

and a related one called king frog i don't know it's a series of ducks it's a great group of people who you know boost and cheer each other up by saying self a lot um and then there's you know exactly and no seriously i mean like the process of getting your first nft is very complicated one of my friends who was already really deep in crypto far helped me navigate this but when i got my first duck i had hundreds of people within minutes posting like sup stops up with their ducks it was totally magical a lot of other nft projects have emerged out of this initial community and that was my first entry into an nft community i'd have written this puzzle about nfts that appealed enough to the nft community and that they could tell that i you know had

the personality type would find this stuff fun and so i joined the sub ducks pawn and i haven't looked back puzzling is like a metaphor for crypto but the other thing is that lots of crypto people like puzzles and like we've been doing puzzles with a variety of different crypto projects so it fits in with their experience of game design and stuff like that we've built it with projects community engagement activities sometimes collaborative puzzles sometimes competitive ones there's some board ape community run hunt going on right now there's sort of a lot of puzzling in the nft communities yeah i have an article coming out soon about the pilgrim bar puzzle hunt and it was a six week long puzzle hunt that a collaborator sandy weiss and i designed for elenia this michelin star restaurant in chicago early pandemic like june 2020

and it started off easy to moderate difficulty and got into like three four hour long puzzle solves by the end and what was exciting about the project was it was a group of many thousands of people solving really deep puzzle hunt puzzles who hadn't really heard of or solved puzzle hunts before so for me it was really sort of proof of concept of just how many people there are out there who would really deeply enjoy this medium of puzzle solving that goes much deeper than the like 30 second puzzles you see on social media or even like the two to five minute type puzzles that you see in escape rooms and is much more

uniquely architected than like the new york times crossword to find friends family significant others strangers on the internet even to solve these puzzles with and it formed so many incredible connections and micro sub communities and things of people worked on solving these puzzles together for the record i want to state that using standard crosswords and sudokus as examples of what we don't do we don't mean to be on those puzzles i write crosswords also i love standard crosswords i love cryptic crosswords quite a bit more it's more that those are fun somewhat more static mediums whereas the world of puzzle hunts is vastly more open

and less constrained and more open to unique types of architecture of both the experiences well that's a perfect segue to go into types of puzzle design actually i like to do this in all of my episodes where we map out the terrain or like the taxonomy so what's the broader landscape of puzzle types just so people have that as context and then we can dig into more of the specifics of puzzle hunt mediums design philosophies incentive design mindsets let's actually talk more now about the categories of puzzle types yeah absolutely so when i tell people i'm a professional puzzle designer oftentimes i get the response what is that like jigsaws and it's sort of hard

to describe because it's such a vast and deep world in so many different directions so briefly there are a few different categories of puzzles in terms of specific puzzle types there are many different types of word puzzles so of course we have crosswords many variants on crosswords cryptic crosswords that are more wordplay dependent other types of wordplay then we have the whole realm of logic puzzles from sudoku to many different types of japanese logic puzzles then we have puzzles that are sort of puzzle hunt style where they don't obviously fit into a specific category or there are various niche categories but for now i'll just describe them as puzzles where the puzzle is figuring out what to do

that's a great definition thank you then of course we have the realm of physical puzzles of mechanical puzzles i'm an avid puzzle box collector myself so there are puzzle boxes there are sequential discovery puzzles where you discover items along the way that serve as tools helping you with later steps disentanglement puzzles packing puzzles where you're fitting pieces together into some form then we have sort of types of puzzle presentations puzzle huds which are sort of puzzle games where each puzzle solves to a word or phrase as an answer and then they're meta puzzles that use the answers to each of those feeder puzzles altogether then there are sort of sandboxed immersive puzzle experiences

which is a fancy way of saying escape rooms typically so escape rooms i describe escape rooms as typically in person there's been quite the renaissance of virtual escape room options also but escape rooms are essentially a form of immersive in-person gaming where typically you're in a self-contained environment versus treasure hunting args etc are more broadly just site-specific gaming out in the real world instead of contained within a controlled space but escape rooms are so much more than escaping or even just about rooms these days they're really incredible types of immersive gaming experiences that are typically puzzle driven sorry what does arg stand for again alternate

reality game oh okay keep going yeah then we also have types of pervasive puzzle experiences pulling from the great book pervasive games which uses that term to describe games that exist out in the real world so this takes a few different forms most notably alternate reality games which are sort of narrative driven oftentimes also puzzle driven games juxtaposed on the real world where anything and everything in the world can be part of a puzzle there also are more contained but also site-specific types of puzzling this includes treasure hunts letterboxing geocaching

various types of engagement with in-person sites where you're solving puzzles out in the real world urban treasure hunts as well did i miss anything scott oh and then tabletop games they're narrative puzzle games enthusiastic narrative categories big yes yes which is an emerging genre they're also like novels that are puzzled novels choose your own adventure or what do you guys mean by the narrative examples so imagine a tabletop game except it's almost like an escape room in a box and that term was used early on but i don't think necessarily fits it now one of my favorite designers in this realm rita orlov of post curious has been using the term puzzle tale which i really like puzzle telling where you're telling a

story through puzzles where you have a box or maybe some other form filled with objects and you're interacting with them solving puzzles discovering some story from your home and then of course the genre of video game puzzles is best and then you have various other subcultures so you have standard crosswords and deep cultures around that crossword competitions twitter communities of people who design crosswords you have the national puzzlers league around other types of wordplay especially focusing on cryptic crosswords you have the mit mystery hunt and other puzzle hunt communities yep and it just goes on and on great overview matthew by the way the full title of the book that you referenced

this is just the listeners pervasive games theory and design by marcus montola jacko stenrose and anika buern that's spelled w-a-e-r-n just so listeners can find it i'll put it in the show notes as well as always all right now that we have a high level lay of the land of puzzle types i'd love to go even deeper into the puzzle mediums or i guess what you just called matthew the puzzle presentation aspect especially when it comes to puzzle hunts which you both one and mention a lot certainly so it's sort of hard to describe does one thing but they have a few general properties typically each puzzle solves two a word or phrase as a final answer so in contrast to maybe a new york times crossword where a

correctly filled in grid is the answer to the puzzle in a puzzle hunt if you had a crossword it would go one step further and that might be reading every square that has a prime number in it or something got it to be a clue that led you to realize that the prime numbers mattered or something exactly which gets to in a crossword you sort of know what you're doing when you're presented with a puzzle you know that you have some clues and you need to answer the clues and fold them into a grid in a puzzle hunt oftentimes the puzzle is figuring out what to do you're presented with some information some piece of data some object and puzzle hunt puzzles will oftentimes have what's called flavor

text accompanying them which gives some keywords that you need to pay special attention to keying in on what might be going on in the puzzle but typically it requires pattern observation paying attention to small details noticing what might be a miss applying common techniques have some clues figure out what the answers might be maybe some of the clues are a little bit too ambiguous to figure out the answer at first but you fill in the ones that you know for sure and then maybe you notice that this is just going to be an example of a very generic puzzle hunt style puzzle maybe you notice that the left column of answers the answers are in alphabetical order

but the right column the answers seem to be in some particular order and then you notice that the left column maybe are anagrams of one of the answers in the right column plus a letter that type of wordplay is called a transedition so you match one from the left column one to the right column since the left column alphabetized ones already has a strict ordering you know that probably the ordering of the right column answers matters and then maybe the extra letters spell out a clue phrase which then clues some final word as the final answer that might be the flow for a really generic style of this puzzle so there are things to figure out along the way you don't necessarily know what the later steps are but there are layers

that reveal themselves as you progress through the puzzle and somehow you can get a final answer another property of puzzle hunts is meta puzzles at the end of the round the meta puzzle which in some way uses the answers to all the individual puzzles in that round which are called the feeder puzzle answers again this can take so so many different forms yeah i'm not even going to try and get into examples of that now there are sort of two categories of metapuzzles shell meta puzzles or shellless metapuzzles shell metapuzzles means that you're presented with some extra information for the metapuzzle whereas shell-less means that the metapuzzle is elegantly contained just within the answers themselves

one is not necessarily better than the other but it certainly can be a level more elegant if you can make a chalice metapuzzle where there's that extra layer of hidden meaning contained within the answers staring you in the face the entire time that then once you've solved all these individual puzzles that individually are cohesive satisfying experiences you then reveal another entirely new layer of meaning and the structure can continue on from there there can be meta-metapuzzles that combine all the metapuzzles metapuzzle structures can get really creative so they can use more than just even the answers to the feeder puzzles they can also use some version of the mechanics to the feeder puzzles

they can use answers to feeder puzzles from previous rounds sort of a waterfall cascade structure one of my favorite mit mystery hunt puzzle rounds the world's biggest annual puzzle hunt which happens at mit annually in january it involves thousands of participants hundreds of puzzles it's all out battle royale of puzzles with pulling out all the stops in terms of difficulty and depth and such one of my all-time favorite metapuzzle structures i've seen was in the 2020 mystery hunt designed by galactic trendsetters the official team name is like whoosh galactic trendsetters scree right there you go yes nice sound effects scott

the sound effects are part of their name i love it mispronounced it but they had this one round the nano round i don't know if you remember this scott well yeah that was epic yeah where normally you have a bunch of theater puzzles and then there's a meta puzzle at the end in this round you were presented with the answer to the metapuzzle at the start and then a bunch of feeder puzzles except one of the constituent feeder puzzles wasn't solvable on its own and you had to realize that it was a reverse metapuzzle structure so you actually had to back solve that feeder puzzle answer from knowing the meta answer to the round and solving all the other puzzles to that round back solve basically means

once you know the answer to a meta puzzle by the constraints of the meta and by maybe some of the constraints of an individual puzzle you can actually figure out the answer to a theater puzzle without actually forward solving it oh fascinating so that's back solving and then contrasting partial solving means solving a puzzle without fully solving it so say there's a puzzle that has 30 lines of data and i'm getting a letter from each line if i have two thirds of those letters i can probably figure out what the words it's spelling out are and without fully solving the puzzle i can still figure out what the missing letters are and arrive at the final answer but anyhow you back solved this one answer and then solving that puzzle

unlocked a sub round for which that puzzle was the meta and then it recursively continued forward for i think three layers or so i'm getting pretty deep pretty quickly in in the sort of keep going we like the deep go ahead yeah but i think a bigger theme that i'm getting at here is puzzle design has to be for a specific audience a puzzle is not a good puzzle generally it's a good puzzle relative to who it's designed to be solved by so if i'm designing a puzzle for team building activity for a tech company for a bunch of software engineers i know i can rely on a certain type of analytical thinking and communication skills but not on knowledge of puzzle conventions right

but i will know that software engineers intuitively will know what puzzle indexing is because indexing is a key concept in programming versus if i'm designing a puzzle hunt for an audience of puzzle hunters i can't just design generic puzzles and expect them to be interesting and thought-provoking because those people will know all the conventions they'll know what to expect so when i'm designing for that sort of audience i'm intending to subvert their expectations relative to how they would expect the puzzles to unfold and similarly if i'm designing a music puzzle for an audience of musicians i can

design aha moments i can design some perception around getting those musicians to maybe see conventions of musical notation or manipulate audio files in a way that is novel to them versus if i'm designing a music puzzle for an audience of non-musicians i may pick something that's a special property of music that myself as a musician something that i want to share with those people somehow i've had about music and i'll use the structure of the puzzle to get the solvers to experience that moment on their own exactly puzzles have this really special property in contrast to other types of game and interaction design

where you're not telling people what to do you're providing them with some material some experiential framing that leads them to figure out what to do on their own and when done properly it sets them up for these really powerful moments of revelation so to pick on this education note for a moment scott just said it's like teaching and i came from the world of developmental psychology that was my grad work and one of the things that was very much in vogue was you know this idea of constructivism and how students learn it was an nsf grant natural science foundation grant that i was on about early numeracy and preschoolers and it was how you harness children's natural numeracy and skills before they even have any formal systems for learning

math and what was super fascinating about it is the philosophy of this russian cognitive psychologist vygotsky who wrote a book called mind in society and one of the key concepts that comes up is this idea of scaffolding as a way to set up the learning so the ideal teacher essentially in this context and this applies to montessori reggie amelia lots of school practices they essentially set up the scaffolding in the environment that this child or student or person then explores to construct their own learning and it's literally just kind of like what you just said and how it matches the puzzle design and it's like what you said scott about education it's like teaching that's exactly it and we should both talk about the sort of philosophies of puzzle design but for me the scaffolding component is absolutely central you want people to

be able to make discoveries right you want a discovery to feel like an accomplishment and a major aha but you also want to sort of enable them to make constant forward progress in some sense right like it's okay to get stuck sometimes it's okay to be thinking where is this puzzle taking me but it shouldn't be a way with a sense that you're stuck in that like you want to quit it's you're stuck but you're so intrigued that you have to and you want to understand and you want to enable yourself to have that level up that it continues to pull you forward even if it's by tiny little marginal bits and the other thing you have to really engage with the content of the idea or of the experience as you saw like solving a puzzle is by nature active right it's not a passive activity you're

not just like receptacle of a one-way dissemination or you're receiving it in a very deeply immersive way exactly yeah puzzle hunts and alternate reality games are especially intriguing because they are fertile ground for really densely layered puzzle architectures contrasting with other types of puzzles where you sort of know what you're supposed to do it's more figuring out how to do it then figuring out what to do and then sort of peeling back layer upon layer so what you're saying with scaffolding is absolutely spot-on and because there's more intricate architecture because there is more scaffolding to sort of implicitly contained puzzle experience

there are so many opportunities for unexpected moments along the journey you know actually just on that note like what strikes me about what you're saying there matthew is it's not just like learning but how to learn it's creating these systems in your head and it reminds me so much again of the work and when i was in grad school in developmental psychology and cognitive psychology because it's also very closely tied to this other hot topic back then which was metacognition and like awareness of your own mind and how you think and navigate a system and of course this then connects to even the interesting question of what happens when computer ai solves puzzles right like we've talked about this actually on my old podcast a6 and z podcast number of episodes on alphago and how humans can learn differently from computers the computer solving puzzles point is really

fascinating because i make a distinction in puzzle design between the solution and the answer the answer is sort of the flag at the end of the puzzle it's the answer word or phrase that means that you've solved it it's the greatest correct notification you get when you correctly solve a crossword it means that yes you've reached the intended endpoint of the puzzle whereas the solution is the intended path getting there and what really matters about the puzzle generally speaking of course there are exceptions to this is the solution not so much the answer the answer confirms that you followed the correct solution path but what really matters is it's the journey not the destination in puzzle form

so the solution path is sort of a dance between the solver and the designer it's in part architected when the puzzle is designed but in part played out uniquely by each solver yeah as they circle their way around the answer it's part of why it's fun to do in teams right it's a lot like engineering a new piece of software or something you have people with different backgrounds and experiences and intuitions and expertise that together can sort of crack even the very complicated or extremely difficult puzzles and puzzle hunts you know foot for example i have a perfect record of solving every we didn't start the fire related puzzle that has been in mystery hunt since i started competing in mystery hunts so the reason we didn't start the fire

crops up frequently is remember matthew was explaining this idea that like you need to somehow get to a word or phrase in the answer or something and he mentioned this idea of an ordering right like maybe one column everything's in alphabetical order one thing that they're not and that not an alphabetical order column might tell you which order you want to put the input data into or something with really serious puzzlers you're often looking for a way to induce an ordering that is not like something as simple as alphabetical order or periodic table order or something like a standard way of putting things in an order so it's useful to have lists of things in canonical orders where if you don't know what the list means like if you don't recognize the

list you might have to think a little bit to figure out that this is the list of objects and we didn't start the fire as like a perfect example of such a list right harry truman doris day read chennai johnny wraith south pacific walter winchel joe dimaggio goes on but so if you're like me and you memorized all the lyrics if we didn't start the fire in middle school or something and you hear someone across the room in your puzzle team saying harry truman you just sort of shout like harry truman doris day red china johnny ray like you know that's kind of the order it's we didn't start the fires anyhow it comes up a lot and scott like what's the bottom line on that because it connected you didn't close the thread though why does it matter like beyond the intricacies of puzzle designers yeah

good point so often that's a trick that gets you to the solution faster whereas if you don't know those lyrics and you start seeing hints of it you sort of have to discover your way to we didn't start the fire as well when done well the puzzle will confirm that piece of the solution as you go those sorts of like cross confirmation let you know that you've got it but the experience of solving is very different depending on what background and priors you come from and means that there's a lot of value doing as a team just like with any sort of engineering one other very quick thing that i wanted to add on to what scott said about the we didn't start the fire is puzzlers generally love structured data like with we didn't start the fire it's a list of names that are bringing

seemingly random references together in an ordering in a category there are many types of structured data that people who do puzzle hunts in particular regularly utilize and will recognize so if i see some data that can be parsed as two by three grids i know it might be braille if i see numbers in a particular range if they're in 1 through 26 i know it's going to be the alphabet if they're in the low hundreds i know it might be ascii if it's numbers in the periodic table of elements range i know it might be elements if i hear juliet and lima peru i know it might be nato letters so there are all these

categories of types of data that regularly get utilized in puzzle hunts and at that point it's less about what you do with the data it's less about the specific extraction being the puzzle as the context in which it's ideally novelly presented being a matter of recognizing the puzzle and this is the case with any sorts of ciphers it's deciphering something solving a visionaire cipher or a pig pen cipher it's not about decoding that is a puzzle it's about recognizing the cipher it's about the type of environmental pattern recognition that is the actual act of puzzling yep and the community and affinity recognizing each other in it exactly it's a language solving a puzzle is about crossing a

threshold of perception it's about seeing something one way and then through a process of frustration and observation playing around and looking for patterns and making discoveries you're led to see it a different way and you can be given the final answer that doesn't mean you have solved the puzzle in the context of a competition when something is framed as a competitive puzzle hunt and you need to call in this final answer sure it's marked as solved but solving the puzzle for me really is about experiencing that shift in perception yeah love that and this gets into another thing that scott mentioned before which is that shift in perception needs to be satisfying that it needs to be

a proportionately satisfying payoff for the solver to make them want to go through this process when you really put in the legwork feeling like you're making progress not just grinding and not getting anywhere but when you finally overcome the final hurdle it's all the more satisfying because of the work that you've put in when that work is designed in such a way so that it does feel like it's leading into the final answer instead of just sort of fizzling off at the end when done well can be this really climactic moment of revelation yeah this gets into another point which is a puzzle needs to be designed such that what it gates so gating in puzzle design or escape room design game design

generally means there's something preventing you from accessing further content so in the case of an escape room it might be a padlock that you have to put a number into that opens a chest that has a new item you need or in the case of a puzzle hunt it might be typing in your answer to a puzzle which in turn unlocks a new round of puzzles the gating needs to be conceived such that it's worth fully solving the puzzle it's worth getting a satisfying experience instead of being inclined to sidestep that so to give a simple an example from a sort of escape room type mindset if you have a padlock on a chest the aha of the puzzle aligns with the

satisfaction of the lock popping open and then you move on but say you had four separate puzzles that each gave you one digit in addition to it not being very satisfying to just get a digit from zero through nine from a puzzle it also means that when you get down to that last puzzle it's not a matter of did i fully solve this one puzzle that has a cohesive mechanic but rather do i go through the process of solving this last puzzle or do i do what's probably less effort of just spinning the last style and you're sort of gating yourself instead of the game gating you so the stakes for the aha feel less real because you're sort of breaking the immersion

it really has to be worth it for you to solve that last puzzle if that requires more effort than the other path of just brute forcing it this applies to competitive framing as well does it make sense to fully solve the puzzle are you borrowing the answer from a different team who you happen to hear the answer from what types of behavior are you incentivizing and is the path of least resistance is that the experience you want solvers to take what types of behavior at each possible point throughout the experience are you setting them up for so talking about incentive design and behavioral design and this obviously maps onto crypto given what we've talked about so far

taxonomy of puzzles some of the mechanics some of the design some of the software analogies how do you think about this in the context of crypto well first of all it's very similar to the intellectual challenge of designing an incentive scheme like how is your token going to work what is it going to do or enable your community to do what will happen as people start to engage with it how will the experience of all like these are all the same types of questions that you sort of formulate when you're constructing a puzzle like i often think of a token system as being sort of a big community puzzle environment that's set up by the project creators and enabling it to evolve and build upon itself in exactly the way that like a collaborative puzzle solving exercise

works and that means that as the designer you have to think about all of these things that matthew was just talking about in terms of puzzle design you want it to drive incentives that make people excited about engaging and exploring the boundaries of what your design can do you also want to make the thing feel intuitive even if it's new right something can be novel and yet sort of be intuitive at every step of engagement and if you're a crypto project that's trying to reach broad consumers you're facing very much the same design challenge that matthew and i face when we write puzzles for general audiences it turns out you can get people in very very general audiences to solve incredibly difficult puzzles even thinking going in that they're not going

to be able to if you design the architecture of the puzzle in a way that sort of leads them along and then the unlocks start to appear and then they gain confidence and understanding of the structure of the puzzle as they go and it can get harder similarly that's very much how a crypto project especially one that's trying to reach an audience that's not already deep in the weeds of crypto but rather that is going to engage with it and sort of use it as an exploration and a path in and then similarly at this point about audiences right the idea that the same thing will be interpreted very differently by two audiences with different experiences of different backgrounds this crops up in crypto design all the time too

even just the interfaces through which we interact with crypto right are you using a custodial wallet or a non-custodial wallet are you minting on a website or are you minting through the contract and you see nft launches that are only meant through contract and why is that the aesthetic of what the project is trying to accomplish they essentially want to limit to people who have the technical sophistication to access it in this way it's not that they're trying to be a closed community for the sake of just being insular rather that the technical complexity of joining is helping screen for the audience that they think will actually appreciate what they're doing yeah so in a puzzle hunt often the first puzzles or the first

round of puzzles are much more accessible than the others and then if you find that the environment and the ecosystem being set up by the project is one that feels right then you might start working really hard and be willing to like put much more effort in and all of that pulls back to a design problem on behalf of the creator right if you're creating this project you want to enable people to dip their toe in and then discover they want to swim you know and immerse yeah that intro round really is a welcome but it's also about building trust in the integrity of the design it's also an opportunity to level the playing field just a little bit

so when people are newer to puzzles they may not be as familiar with the conventions or even just the conventions of a particular designer or design team and those newer puzzles are opportunities to present the atomic elements of whatever puzzle world people are being presented with yeah so like in a video game where you're maybe taught some basic mechanics and then you're thrown variation after variation and hybrids of those variations similarly with puzzle mechanics you're introducing people to the general style and aesthetics and what they can do what they can't do are the puzzles going totally outside of the box and expecting you to dive into the source code and use real world

components are they all just contained within a pdf are you expected to maybe interact with other teams who have different types of data than you they're establishing the rules of the world that you're playing in which that is also a component of crypto projects every crypto project you're entering into by conceptual definition has a set of rules and ecosystem constraints and features that you have to learn as a new entrant and so when you're onboarding new people you have to sort of help them understand like what your ecosystem feels like and what its boundaries are like what it contains and how it might evolve funny this reminds me so much of the art of onboarding into any new open source

community in any community in general but particularly in open source there's a whole school of thought about how the attention you pay proactively to really having good onboarding documentation mentoring partnerships people who can kind of hold your hand guide you shepherd you and again we might be talking about a nuance and puzzles where people might actually like solving it themselves but to your guys's point they don't want to feel like they're just splitting about in something that's just really rough and raggedly designed and they have to like slog through it they want to get the intentionality to matthew's point that they're in a trusted place where someone has intentionally put things together for them so i think that's a really great analogy one quick thing the two of you are kind of dancing in a really interesting tension between both the idea of insider access and the idea of

accessibility it's almost like a bit of a paradox okay there's a little signaling to your like-minded quote community whatever it is it could be cut across whatever level a certain domain knowledge a certain specialty a certain interest it could just be puzzles in the meta or there's also this sense of well how do we also make it not too insular and inaccessible to people joining cause honestly when i hear you guys talk it feels extremely intricate and internal and frankly just to draw the analogy to crypto that also comes up quite a bit with people feeling like they're entering into crypto communities so i'd love you to kind of break down how this works in the puzzle world totally this is such a great question so i think this touches on a few things one is how to approach difficulty in puzzle design because difficult puzzles can be fun

but it's a lot harder to design an easy novel elegant puzzle than it is to design a difficult puzzle and of course it's challenging to design a difficult puzzle that is also elegant and satisfying but the easiest type of puzzle to design is a very very difficult puzzle that absolutely nobody can solve and nobody would have fun solving and we see plenty of people doing this and one of the safeguards against this is of course play testing where when you come up with a puzzle idea implement it you don't just release it to your solvers you show it to some play testers first who are a curated community of people when i'm designing a project depending on the

audience and timeline and budget i'll have anywhere from one or two playtesters to dozens across multiple rounds from people play testing sort of a stub of the initial idea to a fully implemented draft to finally proofing the sort of post-pride fully artified version of the puzzle if i'm designing a puzzle hunt for a crypto community for instance it's likely that those people aren't going to be familiar with puzzle hunts already they aren't going to know all these conventions and all the sort of in the weeds nuances that scott and i are discussing here and to some extent they don't have to but to some extent we also need to meet

them halfway we need to recognize what their behaviors are going to be what their initial perceptions are going to be how to properly engage them and really get them excited about exploring this world in the way that we hope for them to so it's important to play test with a representative sampling of the type of community who is actually going to be playing the game so i have for my own puzzle work a private discord server where i have a bunch of puzzle people who regularly play test my puzzles give me their feedback make sure the actual puzzle mechanics work but then when i'm figuring out the exact framing of the puzzle how it's going to be presented the flavor text the hints that accompany the puzzle i'm not play testing with those people still i'm finding some people who are of a similar demographic similar background

to the actual people who are going to be solving my hunt and that allows me to sort of gauge the way the puzzles are going to be received before they're actually out in the field and if things go terribly wrong then it doesn't mean that the hunt is going to be wrong it is going to be totally broken i can adjust accordingly in advance and of course this is similar to software development cycles as well we would never release a piece of software without unit testing everything and integration testing everything and making sure that it fully works at all stages we would never commit one final code changing be like oh it worked in the last stage so it probably still works we would run all of our tests again before releasing it and the same applies to experience design in

its many forms and especially its puzzle design where we are actively encouraging solvers to pay attention to every last detail to get in the mindset that anything could be part of the puzzle and in an elegant puzzle and style puzzle everything sort of is part of the puzzle we're not adding in random text that seems puzzly but actually means nothing there's a lot of attention paid to making sure that any actual noise in the puzzle couldn't be interpreted as meaningful noise right so that means if we expect the solvers to put a list of data in a new ordering

based on some property of the data we intentionally put the data initially in some ordering that's clearly not the final ordering so like i was saying previously that can be alphabetical ordering that can be a bullet point list rather than a numbered list various things to signal the type of behavior we expect so what this all translates to in terms of access to the community is not that we should design easier puzzles but rather that we should give accessible points to people and welcome them into this community where by the final puzzle the solvers are solving things that they didn't

realize they were able to they're presented with something that would have seemed utterly impenetrable at the beginning but by the end through the way in which the game has guided them to build up their abilities they realize that yes they are able to do this as well and this actually gets at one of the biggest differences between newer puzzlers and people who are familiar with these styles of puzzles or any styles of puzzles really which is simply just the willingness to try things oftentimes when i'm running puzzles of any level of difficulty for people who are new to puzzles they'll prematurely come to me or whoever is running the game for hints

and of course prior to telling them what to do we'll say what have you tried so far and oftentimes they'll make a correct observation they'll describe part of the solution and then i'll reply well did you try that and so many times i hear the response no because i wasn't sure if it would be correct and it's that willingness to just try that really it differentiates those more novice solvers from more experienced solvers who are willing to go down a rabbit hole see if it works and then embrace the fact that even when it doesn't work they perhaps learn something interesting along the way it's so fascinating because earlier when you talked about the payoff that was like a word that i use in editorial all

the time because a lot of people have these religious debates about how long a piece should be and i always say length is arbitrary to me quite frankly it's really about the payoff proportional to what you're putting in and similarly editorially when you just describe that like the designer has to put in these sort of intermediate things and things to kind of bring people along and you again reinforce this idea of trust it made me think of a very editorial concept that i use all the time when it comes to religious debates between quote dumbing things down or not because a lot of people say oh technical content oh we have to simplify it and i'm just like it's not like an either or you can actually have both as long as you have good sign posting to bring people along so this insider versus outsider piece is

very salient coming back to how you think about this from the perspective of crypto a lot of crypto communities are mostly by nature at the moment right mostly made up of people who are insiders because they've overcome tremendous technical hurdles to gain access in the first place if you have a custodial crypto wallet and you're just collecting you know nba top shot nfts or something like that you still you've learned a bunch of stuff you've signed up for a piece of software you've overcome a bunch of different steps to get in and you already have some intuition for the lingo for the lay of the land for the types of things you might be doing and for what the crypto actually is like what are these like digital assets that you're trading or like what are these

protocols you're interfacing with and one thing is the people who have all done that have a shared text right that's very much like puzzlers you have this set of shared knowledge and understanding of some basic conventions and features of what a thing might be but by the same token what's often most intriguing or exciting or reusing and remixing all of those ideas in new and powerful ways right new powerful and hopefully elegant ways and meanwhile if you're someone who is outside right you were both just saying like the signposting and the simple access points to start to understand what's going on are really really important and the more complex the eventual exercise is the

more individual signposting steps you need the more sort of components i've really connected to matthew's description the first time puzzlers often have really good instincts but are afraid to try and like crypto because you know still so much of it is is so hard to navigate you could accidentally pay a massive gas fee while trying to do a transaction that doesn't even succeed like there's lots of stuff that can go wrong there's this same sort of trepidation and so it's really important if you're building especially if you're building something that is unusual and novel and exciting in all the ways that a new type of puzzle might be it's all the more incumbent on the builder

to provide those sorts of signposting and create the trust and understanding with your user that enables them to enter and explore and gain confidence to explore further and that's an incentive design challenge right and that's exactly what you have to do when you're launching a crypto project absolutely one of the most important principles is that puzzles are experiences and we need to design them as experiences not things so looking at other experiences a restaurant for instance when you go to a nice restaurant your experience since starts not when you get served your plate of food but from the moment you go to that restaurant's website

and make a reservation and look at the menu figure out how to get in the door get seated order your conversation with the waiter how you pay for the food the entire thing is part of your dining experience and similarly a puzzle experience starts the first touch point of however you're engaging with the puzzle whether that's signing up for a puzzle hunt or getting an email about a promotional game that an nft community is putting on all of this affects your mindset your motivations going into the game and really affects how you solve the puzzle how you experience the puzzles themselves

those things in my opinion really are inseparable so you can design the most amazing crossword puzzle and if the website that checks your answers breaks while solving it that's a bad puzzle experience if halfway through the puzzle you notice a typo in it and you don't get a response from the people running the puzzle hunt for three hours that's part of the puzzle experience you can't really distinguish between the quality of what the puzzle could have been if it ran perfectly and the experience you actually had with it your feeling of when you solve the puzzle are you reveling in the victory or are you

worried that you didn't win the prize so did it matter this is exactly the experience of being part of an nft community if the community does things that don't match your expectations in one way or another they set up a story then there's a second like spin-off project and there's no sort of aesthetic sensibility one that did it really incredibly recently is chain rotors and i'm a holder i'm a very involved member of the community so like all biases to be clear and this is not financial advice of course but they did something really cool that i liked so their genesis collection was these pixelated two-dimensional characters very sci-fi cyberpunk characters and they just launched a three-dimensional metaverse ready

instantiation of these same types of characters the chain runners and for the experience of minting the chain runners xr this follow-up collection normally when you mint an nft you just go to a website or you go to the contract potentially and you press some buttons and then the nft gets added to your wallet here a big part of the story was this emergence from 2d to 3d and the minting website literally took you into a 3d world so you walked to the computer where you accessed the mint process and then once you did the mint it took you through a tunnel and like now you're in a 3d mini escape room that you could explore shout outs to nav who did most of the

development and i guess footnote disclosure i had a little bit of influence on the puzzle design for the escape room but then when you solved the escape room it gave you a code that you could bring back to the discord server and it would give you access to a special channel just for the people who sort of played the full mint experience through solving all the puzzles it was totally immersive you were immersed in almost a video game experience but then it turned out that the game was self-aware it knew the experience of being a chain writer is not just your metaverse immersion but also the experience with the community in the discord and pulls back to something that you take out of this three-dimensional world that shows the game world and the real world are one and the same that sort of

there's a semi-permeable membrane between the two somehow this actually makes me think how much puzzles apply so much to token gated communities and any other token gated events like there's so many ways to bridge the physical and digital there as well as in going to tiering to show commitment because the whole point again is skin in the game and proportional not to necessarily financial investment of things but actually your contributions your work your time your interests like that's how you know people want to be in the community right i mean people spend literally hours solving this escape room game in order to gain access to the secret discord channel and it was incredible to think of this realization the mint experience people usually pop in and pop out you're talking a minute

if you sped up the gas enough you know might be seconds whereas here it became this transformation of the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional world that then gives you something for the outside world as well and all of this fits very coherently and intuitively in the the mythos of the world the chain runners are setting up if instead like the secondary collection had been i don't know renaissance fair characters or weird like cartoon animals like nothing wrong with renaissance character nft is nothing wrong with cartoon animal nfts but they would be jarring in the experience of this cyberpunk world whereas in the cyberpunk world the discord is part of the cyberpunk world too right it all sort of comes together and forms a really coherent single piece

fantastic okay so a question i've been dying to ask you guys throughout this episode which is who designs the puzzle like who is the designer and is the puzzle architect like you know what's his name from uh hunger games i was thinking of oh my gosh i forgot his name the philip hoffman character in the movie version but he had some kind of greek name but anyway in crypto we have this unique challenge slash opportunity of it being decentralized even though there are people who have more stakes or are the original creators or have unique ip rights or various things who is the creator matthew read the analogy that this is like software design and both of you guys have said this and to me it strikes me as a very opinionated form of software design even if you have it reviewing itself in gates

and various forms it still is sort of almost pre-decided and it made me think again of this notion of like smart contracts and even formal verification like you put the thing out into the world you don't get to necessarily edit it after the fact and similarly i wondered how does and does that not play out as analogies with puzzles and crypto and are there cases of successful puzzles where they are actually modified once they've been created in real time oh gosh that is such a great analogy i've never thought of before yeah a puzzle is basically a smart contract like you design an experience that should proceed in certain ways and has boundary conditions and things can happen outside the boundaries but basically you're helping people follow a

path where all the components of the path are locked in up front and code if you get something wrong if you like leave a red herring that's really confusing that people might get lost and sort of fall off the path and you usually you don't want to be in the position of retconning of having to go back and remove a red herring or fix something ideally it all gets locked in up upfront it's a smart contract and then people explore all the affordances and possibilities of the contract as they go this leads into another distinction i like to make in puzzle design which is that between clueing and hinting for me clues represent the integral baked in information needed to solve the puzzle so a clue is something that is included

with the puzzle that you couldn't take it away and be left with a complete puzzle maybe you could still solve it by an arbitrary leap of logic but the clue structure is really what allows the puzzle to make sense that allows everything to lock in and be elegantly cohesive hinting in contrast is what allows you to dynamically adapt to a variety of solver behavior it acknowledges that different people may get stuck in a certain way of thinking or not be familiar with something the puzzle is referring to a specific video game that isn't as easily googleable as the designer thought and the hint allows people who aren't familiar with that

video game reference to make that connection to but when we design a puzzle we need to take into account both the static and dynamic guard rails for the experience signposting for the experience both how we guide people to solve puzzle on the core path and how we keep them along the intended experience if they're passing that threshold of frustration we're not here to design puzzles that no one's ever going to be able to solve right some people think their goal is actually to design puzzles that are hard and that's totally not the goal yeah this actually relates back to another extension of what i was saying previously about difficulty which is when i design a puzzle for different

types of audiences whether it's designing a custom puzzle for a specific individual for a proposal versus for teams of three to five people with 200 teams solving at once versus a 2000 person community solving an arg and all uniting together to tackle puzzles and oftentimes it's harder to test that experience because i don't have a group of 2000 people working together testing the puzzle but i approach difficulty very differently and i approach how precisely i'm going to clue something differently i don't want the puzzle to be solved within minutes of its release and at the same time i don't want the ahas to be completely arcane

and random and unsatisfying they still need to adhere to the principles of good puzzle design you know it's interesting because i know you joked earlier matthew that you don't really know games and i did actually growing up i grew up on atari games as a young child nice but one thing keeps coming up this idea of difficulty tearing i do want to reference a popular law that came out of the atari world and nolan bushnell the founder of atari which was that games should be easy to learn but difficult to master i'm just curious if you guys have any thoughts just this general principle of nolan's law and how that does and doesn't apply in this context of puzzles and or crypto design yeah i think mastery is an interesting concept when it comes to

puzzle hunts because there oftentimes isn't the same type of linear incremental mastery that you see in video game puzzles for instance once you cross the threshold of a specific puzzle of knowing how it works you know how it works there's no going back and that certainly may influence your knowledge of when approaching any future puzzles of being able to recognize oh i've seen this mechanic before but it's not necessarily about iterating through a level and finding the best way to solve it per se but there's sort of a meta mastery where you're building up your skills and skills not just in terms of recognizing

mechanics and having better honed logical abilities it's also knowing your own behavior this sort of psychological mastery of how you approach solving puzzles and this actually gets to one of the properties of really broadly impactful puzzle design that i somewhat rarely see but often happens accidentally which is some of the best puzzles stay with you outside of the experience of solving the puzzle and it can also apply to yourself it can apply to even just identifying the puzzles in the world around you

and this actually relates back to what we were saying earlier about the difference between behavior of newer puzzle solvers versus more experienced solvers so puzzles are about creating meaning from noise from chaos and through this we really are telling a narrative we are telling a cohesive story well i don't know if it applies but loot and the derivatives that the community co-created that's a case where there is like the sense of unfolding but what's really fascinating is undoing a lot of classic narrative construction because it is being created by the community and then they're creating the lore around it i think it's something we see a lot more in crypto because of the decentralized

nature of it that's really interesting you know there are memes that take on form and crypto and the exact same thing happens in the puzzle community like there's a puzzle type that was invented right somebody came up with this puzzle format and the original one i think was just called duck conundrum that's right matthew right like you just called duck conundrum yeah by dan cats i believe in a mystery hunt many years ago yeah so they introduced this puzzle called duck conundrum in which you get rules out of order you have to put them in order and then sort of step through all of them it's like getting a computer program in shards and having to figure out the unique way in which the shards make coherent sense and what's fun about it is lots of different sequences almost make sense and then you get to the last one you're

like oh wait no i can't i now can't use the last shard like the n minus one shards got me to a position that the last shard can't act upon and so you're constantly trying to reorganize this thing it's sort of like a metalogic puzzle somehow and this was so popular that people started riffing off of this format and now it's called a duck conundrum like you'll open up a puzzle and be like oh my gosh it's another duck conundrum that's kind of what happened i think with releasing bits of loot the community was like it'd come at midnight and be like oh my god what does this mean and kind of try to figure it out together you know yeah and then these things sort of establish memes within communities that then start crossing over across communities and so you can introduce a new central meme like some of dom's work

created a new way of designing an nft project that others then started building on and reformatting and remixing in different ways that's exactly what happens with puzzles as well and duck conundrums are a perfect example of this you now even see ones where there are meta references made to the duck but it's about alligators or something but somehow there's a duck that appears midway through the story and you're like wait oh i get it yeah puzzle hunts are deeply a community that constantly is riffing on their discoveries in the way that they're subverting expectations of solvers is by referencing previous things and then doing something slightly different and like we were saying before about how to welcome people to this community it's by

being self-aware of how it's so self-referential and inviting people into the community without expectations of needing to go so deeply yeah but rather distilling the key experiential architecture for people who don't know or need all the context yes exactly it's inclusion not exclusion exactly exactly well that's a great note to end on thank you both so much for joining this special bonus holiday-ish episode of web3 with asics and z we'll resume our regular programming with the next episode thank you again you guys thank you so much for having it it was an absolute pleasure no thank you so much it's always so much fun to talk with you

and it's especially fun to chat puzzles and crypto at the same time right two of my favorite topics i can't believe i didn't even know there was a connection awesome thank you so much you guys take care thank you you too bye-bye thank you for listening to web3 with a6 and z you can find show notes with links to resources books or papers discussed transcripts and more at asicsncrypto.com this episode was produced and edited by sonal choxie that's me the episode was technically edited by our audio editor justin golden credit also to moonshot design for the art and all thanks to support from asics and see crypto to follow more of our work and get updates resources from us and resources from others be sure to subscribe to our web3 weekly newsletter you can find it on our

website at asicsncrypto.com thank you for listening and for subscribing let and go [Music]