On the Psychology of Metapuzzles and Short-circuiting

While solving puzzles is satisfying, nothing quite tops the adrenaline of cracking a metapuzzle. You’ve put all this work into gleaning these seemingly random words from these puzzles. You’ve solved the mystery of this set of images, this variety crossword, and yet other puzzles that defy classification. Any aha moment is a great feeling, but getting that metapuzzle that relies on all that other work you’ve put into the feeder puzzles it just that much better than anything else.

So if metapuzzles are so great, why am I so bad at them? Or rather, why do I lack the confidence and constantly feel intimidated by them? I know that metapuzzles are *usually* written with an expectation that you don’t need all the answers. I know that I’m a relatively capable solver, and I could solve it. All I need is the aha moment. But time and time again, in hunt and hunt again, I’ve done poorly at this. I’m not sure how unique this experience is to me, but knowing that I’ve been on teams of various sizes for all of these hunts, it at least means this experience is shared by some of my teammates.

Let’s consider this example from my team in the 2020 Mystery Hunt. Friday we had solved 4/6 of the puzzles from The Grand Castle, failing to solve Penny Park Guide and Snow Job. The former of which was a large puzzle requiring many ahas that we were very poor at finding, and the latter of which required a classification of words into groups that we are also surprisingly poor at. Regardless, this was definitely enough to solve the meta. And I did make progress, finding that all the answers had county names, and another teammate found the Six Flags part, and at this point, we were only missing the aha about the number of counties in the panhandle. And yet, we couldn’t grok that part of it.

At this point our team was faced with an implicit decision that we know other teams time and time again have faced: should we push through the two puzzles that we were unable to solve, already having spent hours on each? Or should we move on, occasionally stopping to look back at it and bang your head against it. In retrospect, and on paper, the latter option is definitely better. I wouldn’t stop anyone who wanted to from working on the puzzles, but this was a question of actively sinking my time and others into these puzzles. There was no need to solve the meta then. We could have waited, asked hints on it, and solved it at the end of Sunday and it still would have counted. Sure it’d be nice to finish up the round for unlocking, but as a team around 30th place, we were not lacking for open puzzles.

And yet on Saturday I pushed an effort to solve Penny Park Guide with multiple other people, spending more than 5 hours on it, and I think using at least three hints on the puzzle. Eventually we got it. And others did the same with Snow Job, and they both got solved within about an hour of each other. And then 24 minutes after the last puzzle was solved, we finally got the aha and solved the meta.

This makes no sense to me. While it’s somewhat true that getting the final two answers ruled out some silly theories, like that the counties were forming a line or an arrow or something, these final two answers provided no insight into the meta. And yet an aha that we couldn’t get for more than 12 hours came just shortly after getting those final answers. I can’t help but feel that this is some deep confidence issue preventing me and others from putting our full brainpower into the meta without all the answers. Nothing was gained from getting the extra answers besides a rebuttal of any excuse that we just don’t have enough answers. That maybe there’s some cretin in my brain telling me that I can’t short-circuit the meta, and if I just got another answer, it would change everything. This almost never happens when you have 2/3 of the answers, like we had. We could have gotten the aha with or without those last two answers, and yet we didn’t, we couldn’t.

Similar things happened to us in the Spaceopolis and Balloon Vendor rounds, though not on nearly as dramatic a scale. We had plenty of answers and yet rather than really trying our best on the meta, we just dug for more answers. And outside of the Mystery Hunt, this has happened to me on other puzzlehunts.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Common advice for intermediate puzzlers looking to get farther in the Hunt is “start metas earlier!” and I really do try to heed that advice and take it to heart. And yet it seems like I have a hard time putting 100% into the metas before I get almost all of the metas. For certain, I have had the wonderful ahas and have been able to crack metas with a reasonable subset of the answers, but it definitely seems like this doesn’t happen as often as it should, or as it happens to other people. Perhaps when I solve more and more metas, this subconscious confidence solidifies over time. Maybe I just need to git gud.