You happen upon some letters in a permissive waste paper handbasket in a mysterious apartment…

That was it: no instructions, no steer button, and no online walk around-finished if I'd even bothered to look. All I had was a website with some flavor text, a title for the puzzle – "Dear Lecturer" – and a series of letter fragments, all dated and written in a script fount. For instance, dated March 6th: "Bring fort, I regret to inform you that I have got just committed a homicide. I discharged my pistol into his skull, & the wound was most fatal; I am really young, but now I fear my future seems bleak so."

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"They'Ra songs," my Quaker explained as I joined him in an online chat room. A bunch of my college buddies were booked in some kind of weekend-long puzzle-solving competition at MIT, but I was stuck in Philadelphia for body of work at the prison term. I was curious about what my friends were equal to, and all the puzzles were posted on the Web, so I logged on, hoping to help out remotely. As for the clue, my friend pointed out that the segment paraphrased Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody": "Mama, just killed a piece / Put a ordnance against his head / Pulled my trigger, now he's dead." That's where my friends were stuck.

Scanning through my friends' notes in progress online, I mentioned that there seemed to be a flock more songs past "Weird Atomic number 13" Yankovic than by some other performer, and even the songs that he hadn't written included some he'd covered. A elongate pause followed, as I thirstily awaited the next hint. My friend typed back, "Solved it. VICECHANCELLOR."

What the heck did VICECHANCELLOR have in mind? I asked, but got no reply. My friend was already haste headlong into some other conundrum without me. Somehow, the solution was still more perplexing than the puzzle itself. Information technology was an apt introduction to the MIT Mystery Hunt.

The Mystery Hunt began in 1980, initiated by former grad student Brad Schaefer. As one of the oldest and known "puzzlehunts," it attracts upwards of a thousand participants each year, drawn from both the campus population and unaffiliated problem-solvers the world over. The goal is to solve fla upon Wave of puzzles, each without explicit instructions, each somehow yielding a text string As a solution, and apiece providing a clew toward an even larger "metapuzzle." The Mystery Hunting process is a mix of the technological and the personal, with puzzles delivered on a password-protected site, a link on each puzzle's pageboy indicating when the team has a surmisal for a solution, and organizers calling and falling by personally to check on solutions and progress.

A clever squad doesn't need to solve every puzzle and metapuzzle to win; subsequently a certain point, one can fill in the blanks between solved puzzles, deducing a full solution passably suchlike the moment before Vanna turns the final letters on Wheel of Fortune. Over the course of a weekend, completely these solutions finally allow a team to deduce the location of a "coin" hidden somewhere on campus. The team that finds the coin first wins, earning the dubious observ of preparing hundreds of puzzles and serving as organizers for the following twelvemonth's Hunt.

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That's the way IT works in theory, at least. About Hunts run longer than a weekend; or s shorter. The organizers sometimes have to interrupt everyone by email to toss some hints, and teams that are lagging often get puzzles unlocked for them before solving the earlier rounds. After complete, whatsoever of these puzzles are pretty darn hard. At least the VICECHANCELLOR one had words, rather than expecting readers to piece conjointly encrypted Braille, or recognize Xbox 360 Accomplishment icons past sight.

After the utterly unsatisfying experience of helping to solve a puzzle that only unlocked an even more cryptic puzzle, I mentation I'd bound off puzzle hunting. Eventually, though, I definite to give the Hunt club another find. Perhaps the experience is different in person, I reasoned. Atomic number 3 it turns out, it is so other, but IT trustworthy isn't any easier.

My fresh team up was an offshoot from a larger team. This isn't uncommon, as some teams reach be pretty big and unwieldy after the first 50 or 100 members or and so. My new team was relatively small at 20 or 30 members, and our name said it all: The Grand Unified Theory of Love was formed for gaming, geekery, and good-natured fun. We really had no prayer of winning. We were just there to lick some puzzles.

We collected in the classroom the Hunt's organizers had assigned to us as our headquarters. One table was dedicated to snacks and sodas, only the rest of the room was optimized for puzzler-resolution versatility: a laptop at nearly all seat, scrap composition and pencils disconnected about, chalkboards featuring come on on metapuzzles, and an command overhead projector displaying messages from our remote puzzle-solvers. (We hoped that last bit of equipment would discourage our long-distance friends from skulking off in discouragement corresponding I had a couple years in front.) Before we got into the stupid of things, our audacious leader reminded us to continually edit the team wiki with our progress to avoid redundant work on any puzzle. We hovered at the laptops, continually refreshing Network browsers as we waited for the puzzles to appear.

When the golf links on the site finally went live, we broke into groups and hit the ground running. One radical assembled Lego tableaus to satisfy the requirements of a magpie hunt. Other group left campus entirely for a puzzle, driving off to Harvard University to pursue finished on a lead someway related to maps and architecture. Most of us launched into any one of a total of puzzles delivered via the Web. I struggled with one that involved analyzing several hours of prison house precaution logs and diagrams of prisoners' movement crossways multiple floors, laying out all the information in a serial of composite plant images in Photoshop. I wouldn't know until the solutions were released weeks later, but I got pretty close before I gave up in frustration. (If only I'd shrunk the lower floors to assume visual view, those petty dots representing prisoners would've spelled tabu an answer.)

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Or else, I wandered over to a teammate who was cragfast happening her own teaser, titled "Cluesome." She'd already made some progress with others on the squad, who had wandered off in frustration much like I fair-and-square had. Their puzzle offered a series of text strings, like "WYVMLZZVYWSBTYVVMAVWWPHUV." My teammates had made about progress, at least, determining that each string was a cryptogram encoded with a simple Caesar cypher. Shift each varsity letter of the above gibberish seven letters down the alphabet, and you land up with "PROFESSOR PLUM," "ROOFTOP," and "Pianoforte." Information technology seemed be a clear a reference to Cue, simply that's about as far as anyone got. All bowed stringed instrument was like that: shifted some number of letters down the alphabet, but referring to unfamiliar murder scenes and weapons.

Something struck me atomic number 3 familiar about that modus operandi, though, and inspiration affected. Wasn't that how Christopher Lloyd killed somebody in WHO Framed Roger Lapin? I started screeching quotes from the movie, and some other mate, engaged in some other puzzler, looked up to cry: "He played Professor Plum in the moving-picture show version of Clue!"

Suddenly we were hindmost to work. Some research online disclosed that each decoded string described a bump off in a motion-picture show starring someone WHO had also starred in Clew. We tracked mastered each movie and counted into their titles past the total of letters they'd been shifted to come indefinite letter from each. The result spelled a word: EMOTIVE.

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We clicked a push button online, and the team running the Hunt titled us on our designated headquarters' cell phone. The room fell dumb American Samoa my teammate answered.

"Hi, we'd like to call in a solution for 'Cluesome.' EMOTIVE. E, M, O, T, I, V, E." She paused – and smiled. We started to cheer even as she was wrapping ascending the phone call. We updated the wiki and wrote the solution connected the chalkboard for those working on the metapuzzle.

Emotional! We had no idea what it meant, and o'er the naturally of the weekend, we never solved enough puzzles to see proscribed. I only helped complete two puzzles completely weekend myself.

For me, the real closed book of the Whodunit Hunt may be why I would go back for more – and not just once, to try IT in somebody, but year after year, on the same losing team. We never get ahead, or even have any chance of winning. This ISN't a Bad News Bears underdog comeback story waiting to pass off. In fact, I don't think we even lack the gist of fight, of trying so hard that we fall back sight of the pure joy of playing a really hard game, let lone the burden of preparing an entire hunt the following year.

As a longtime gamer, there's something electric about facing puzzles you force out't look up on GameFAQs, quests that pull off you to leave the animation room, and challenges that turn a bunch of nerdy strangers into a team. There's something magical about those moments when the combined pop culture knowledge and analytic thought process skill of a room sperm-filled of mass fits together to unlock some cautiously premeditated mystery story. Though the MIT Mystery William Holman Hunt technically predates any videogame I've ever played, to me, it feels equivalent the bran-new "Hard Mode" in gaming. When you do finally (if only on occasion) succeed, it's so much more comforting for beingness so unreasonably challenging. And, for my team, it's a gainsay that you can't vindicatory face alone along the sofa.

When Mystery Holman Hunt weekend rolls around again in January, I amply expect to resent the odd sleeping hours, the junk food dieting, and, most of all, the puzzles we never figured out how to solve. And I amply expect to be back for many a year later.

Jason Tocci is an academic, a writer, a designer, and gentle of a huge nerd. He blogs about his research on gaming and geek cultures at Geek Studies.