The point of the Two Minute Mysteries is not that there might not be more than one alternative explanations for the given set of facts. That's true of a real mystery too: you see a corpse; a lot of people could have done it. At the beginning of a mystery story you could think, hey, even if Agatha Christie says the butler did it, I can come up with an equally plausible scenario in which the lover did. But as you get more and more information, the number of possibilities narrows. The point of the two minute mysteries is to try to see if you can arrive at a set of questions that narrows the possibilities to what a (yes, arbitrarily defined) truth is. In a mystery, the truth is just as arbitrary. Heck, if you were a real detective, the truth would be just as arbitrary, and you'd be progressively ruling out a set of also-plausible alternatives.
b-wo, think of the mysteries as carefully winnowing away possible worlds until we discover the one that contains the answer, and gold-hatted and high-bouncing, we declare: Possible world! I must have you!
Also, put the link to your excellent radio program in your bio here.
They bother me because the stories are so baroque. In the case of a mystery story, it's a bug if the motivations of the killers (or whatever) turn out to be inhumanly complicated and the plan would put Rube Goldberg to shame. There's also a disanology in the method. Consider the original drowned guy answer. If you were really investigating that, you would know that there had been a fire. You wouldn't have to guess, out of nowhere, that there had been one, and that a plane had picked up some water, and then dumped it on a tree. For one thing, you'd probably be able to see the burnt trees.
I don't think they're exactly analogous in all ways; I just want to point out that the objection "but, but, there wasn't really one right answer" is true of a lot of things people enjoy. Some of the mysteries are better than others, because the answer is a little bit less silly. I think the drowned man is in fact way better than the abalone, in fact, and I was quite sad to see it ruined.
Everyone who complains about how rigid the puzzles are seems to neglect that it isn't really rigid to ask your interlocutors, for the moment, to suspend disbelief and try to arrive at someone else's vision. It's not like having a variety of ideas is disparaged in the process; the person who can think of the most possibilities will be the best at the game.
In numbers-puzzle you are not able to ask further questions, and so the answer seems undetermined.
In the mystery game, however, you can ask questions. Part of the challenge is figuring out which questions eliminate entire lines of scenarios, leaving you with fewer and fewer options. To my mind, these types of puzzles promote imaginative and logical thinking both.
Methinks there is a touch of sour grapes in your gripe...
Ripped from Putnam's "Rethinking Mathematical Necessity," in Words and Life, p. 254:
"Consider a riddle. A court lady once fell into disfavor with the king. (One easily imagine how.) The king, intending to give her a command impossible of fulfillment, told her to come to the Royal Ball "neither naked nor dressed." What did she do? (Solution: she came wearing a fishnet.)
Concerning such riddles, Wittgenstein says that we are able to give the words a sense only after we know the solution; the solution bestows a sense on the riddle-question. This seems right. It is true that I could translate the sentence "She came to the Royal Ball neither naked nor dressed" into languages which are related to English, languages in which the key English words "naked" and "dressed" have long-established equivalents. But if I didn't know the solution, could I _paraphrase_ the question "How could she come to the ball neither naked nor dressed?" _even_ _in_ _English_ _itself_? I would be afraid to make _any_ change in the key words, for fear of losing exactly what the riddle might turn on."
Ben, although I may be giving you grief in this thread, I agree with you. I've never cared for these games and especially detest that they are frequently used in job interviews in my field "to see how you think" because I don't believe they are an accurate predictor of success. I'll definitely join your fight against using these games in that setting or any other one that tries to project some kind of meaning onto them. But if Tia and the others want to goof off on a Friday by playing one, I'll gladly let them have their fun. I'll just stick to another thread.
There are lots of more elaborate puzzles than that, spencer, including one where you have to come neither naked nor dressed, neither on foot nor mounted (I think by being half on, half off a horse?) and a bunch of other seemingly contradictory conditions, which I would quote if I could be bothered to look them up (I read about 'em in The White Goddess).
Robert Graves maintains that Lady Godiva's actions were in line with such strictures.
I was disappointed to learn from the Granta story that John Collier's Three Bears Cottage is inaccurate in its description of death by Amanita Phalloides.
In the case of a mystery story, it's a bug if the motivations of the killers (or whatever) turn out to be inhumanly complicated and the plan would put Rube Goldberg to shame.
Why couldn't she come to the ball in a bathrobe? Or pajamas?
Yeah!
And Becks, I didn't ruin the last game. I'm pretty sure I didn't even ruin the one to which I knew the answer. Nor did I delete the thread, which is within my power.
golly, what wasn't wrong with his day? he lived a hopeless life of suburban ennui, a postmodern drone driven by vestigial primordial genetic diktat. things will change when he sees a hot young cheerleader and a bag blowin' in the wind.
Are you (or Graves) saying that there is enough vagueness in the superficial contradictories that it is intelligible to select an object that satisfies the conditions of both while violating neither's? To me, that doesn't really explain the appeal of riddles, which I think Putnam's Wittgensteinian account does. I've never felt like riddles are supposed to be solved, per se, unless the listener recognizes a certain pattern that is repeated in other riddles (whose answers the listener knows).
unless the listener recognizes a certain pattern that is repeated in other riddles (whose answers the listener knows)
Are the solutions to all pointless riddles reducible to the solutions of other pointless riddles? If so, and if such riddles make Wolfson nonplussed, are they NP-complete?
I deny the stipulation that she has to show some skin, as it was not part of the original question and therefore can't fairly be imposed after the fact.
I deny your denial. D^2. Putnam's version of the riddle is -- riddled, as it were -- with sexual innuendo. The court lady fell out of favor and "one can easily imagine how"? And then his command involves nudity? Old man Putnam's a perve.
Ben, I suggest you expand a little bit on the very beginning of this post, for the benefit of those of us who didn't see the drowned man post before it was, apparently, deleted.
I deny the stipulation that she has to show some skin, as it was not part of the original question and therefore can't fairly be imposed after the fact.
I think that's sort of Ben's objection, isn't it? I'm not crazy about such games, either, but Becks is right: read and comment on a different thread. (Though, IME, in most of job interview questions, you're generally provided all the information, or you really don't have to arrive at the "right" answer.)
SCMT, I'll read and comment on any thread I like! Even if the point is to argue with the premises of the post to which the thread is attached. Especially if the point is to argue with the premises, in fact.
I like mystery novels, but I'm not a fan of these so-called riddles. Maybe it's because they feel like the riddler is toying with the audience, rather than presenting a knotty but potentially solvable conundrum.
I realize this is heresy to say in this crowd, but these games remind me of nothing so much as my Philosophy 101 professor trying to get the class to opine on whether a person born on a desert island and raised without human contact could be purely amoral. Yeesh. NOT, in my opinion, an interesting or engaging thought exercise.
(Can a class opine? Or only a single person? Ben, I'm looking to you for guidance.)
35: It was just like the "Drowned Man Redux" thread, but with a different answer.
36 makes it obvious: He is Forlesen, from Gene Wolfe's eponymous story, which ends "No. No. Yes. No. Yes. Maybe." (Modulo the difference between "Yes" and "No.") The question now is, to what question is this the answer?
Ben, I suggest you expand a little bit on the very beginning of this post, for the benefit of those of us who didn't see the drowned man post before it was, apparently, deleted.
There's another drowned man post to replace the deleted one—what's the problem? (Seriously: what do you want explained?)
37: But my kind of game tells you that there's a predefined story you're getting to, and that the goal is to ask questions, not just to figure it out, so it isn't changing the rules in the interim.
No one has to enjoy this kind of game, but I don't really think there's a way to reason people who do into recognizing its inferiority. I wonder, though, if the liking and disliking camps are different in any other ways. I wonder how much it would be correlated with liking fiction, or some kind of psychological measure of valuing independence versus relatedness.
If someone else wants to suggest a different interactive game, that would be fun. I thought of Botticelli, but then I thought that with access to the internet that would be too easy for the question-askers, because they could come up with first order questions too easily.
Ben, could his medical problem be fatal, if untreated?
I don't think B was suggesting a change in the rules, just that no one had mentioned that she had to show some skin. That - I guess; I don't get the answer - is still consistent with the original preconditions.
I'd be curious, too, if there was a proxy. If I had to guess, I'd bet people who enjoy the games may be the sort who enjoy writing stories or other doing expressive arts. Obviously, I'm going a lot based you. We should check with Osner.
We could ask them, too. (I was going by the last time I looked at the sidebar.) I could see Weiner being a secret painter; Cala, not so much. Andrew is too new (I think) for me to guess.
(Hey, I've never read Tristram Shandy. Should I go see the movie, or will I enjoy the book better if I read it first and see the movie later on video?)
My favorite takedown of such games is here; I'm of the disdain school. They're not like the pirates puzzle someone mentioned last time, where you can work out the solution with a pad before asking any questions.
My gut says it might have more to do with valuing independence v. relatedness. Of course, by this theory you should expect to see more women playing than men, and that hasn't been the case. Small sample, though.
I can't imagine how the movie Tristam Shandy could bear the slightest resemblance to the book Tristram Shandy unless it starts with fifty minutes of blank screen and a voice-over. So it doesn't matter.
74 - I'm a software developer. And to answer Tim's 37 - no, they don't provide you with more information. They ask the same type of riddles that Tia did and then subjectively judge whether you ask "good" questions. Meh.
(And, lest you think I object to those types of interviews because I'm bad at them, I'm not. I actually do quite well on them. They just offend me because I don't think they accurately predict job performance.)
I've never cared for these games and especially detest that they are frequently used in job interviews in my field "to see how you think"
Buck was once asked in a job interview "If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half ina day and a half, how many pancakes does it take to shingle the roof of a doghouse?" He replied "All of them," and was hired. The boss was a serious loon, though, but has been an annoying mentor figure ever sisnce.
. They just offend me because I don't think they accurately predict job performance.
I agree. But, again, they aren't looking for a specific answer. Or, if they are, they probably work for a company you should avoid. Because they're doing it wrong.
84 - True, they are evaluating the candidate's ability to think and not looking for a specific answer but I think these ridiculous scenario questions aren't the best for that. Better is the type of question Microsoft uses (like How many gas stations are there in the US? How would you figure it out?) or something relevant (I usually ask them to imagine they're designing a website that allows people to renew their driver's license online and tell me what questions they would ask the client to refine the requirements to see if they think of issues relating to security, scalability, usability, performance, etc.) I think either of those address what I really want to know (can this person hunt down ithe necessary information from Google/other information sources/the client required to do the job?) better than whether they can figure out why a guy is stuck up in a tree.
Oh, Jeebus. I thought you were talking about the, "How many gas stations are there in the US? How would you figure it out?" type of questions.
Which I suspect track something. The smartest person I know (by a lot) is unbelievable at them, though he hates them. OTOH, the most successful person I know (by a lot) is terrible at them. Which is why I said I don't trust them for job performance.
There are times, both in terms of ages and the actual situation I'm in, when I enjoy playing these games. I'm uncertain if my current age and blog commenting satisfies those conditions.
Also, do you really think Ben isn't making this up as he goes?
Also, I tried to comment on an old thread today, the comment got caught by the filter, and I don't think it's been unhooked yet.
#60: Go see the movie, b/c, honestly, even though the book is fantastic, there's no point waiting around until you read it. Plus, it's not like the movie is going to give away the plot or anything.
(Part of what I do like about these games is the strategic aspect of trying to ask questions that are specific enough to confirm/refute your own theory without clueing in the other players as to what your theory is.)
With the gas station thing, you could just go to the Census Bureau's latest economic census, then project the figures forward from the last year they have available. I have templates for plotting such growth curves, with multiple ways of handling sub-categories -- depending on whether you think that a particular sub-category is going to grow significantly out of proportion to others (for instance, convenience store gas stations as opposed to stand-alone gas stations), etc.
All you guys who are complaining about the game format should really read my proposed modificationset seq. in the other thread because I think it would make a much more interesting and complex game.
To answer the questions above -- I dig expressive art but am not much of a writer -- my pleasures are music (violin & guitar), and reading out loud to others (usually to Sylvia nowadays; a few years ago I had this wonderful set up with a friend where we would get together and smoke marihuana on a monthly or so basis, and read each other stories -- if anyone would be interested in setting up a reading-out-loud group in NYC please contact me, I'd be totally into it. Drugs optional.) And I am a computer programmer which I occasionally find manifesting itself as an expressive art. (I think a few other of the people listed above are programmers, like at least Becks; but Wolfson is too so that's not the crucial link.)
You really think asking if it was Tuesday preceded by finding out that the wrong thing effected other people didn't make it clear that you thought it was tuesday, september 11th 2001?
MAE, the answers to your questions in 116 are "no" and "no", but you might want to think about definite descriptions and your use of "the thing that went wrong".
HINT: when you say "did the thing that went wrong foo?" I am parsing that as "is it the case that one and only one thing went wrong, and that thing foo?". Now, the question as stated was "what went wrong?". Thus it is not necessarily the case that there is one decisive wrong-going event such that questions as to its location in time, for instance, can sensibly be answered.
slol, I think you would like this song. I love it (and his other work), even though I don't know any of the original songs and don't understand much of the Yiddish. Unfortunately the lyrics aren't on the web, but if you call me I can attempt to sing it to you or, probably more effectlvely, play my LP into the phone.
59: I'm no secret painter, couldn't do anything with canvas and a brush to save my life. I did used to write stories, though, and want to start again sometime. Also there's the free improvisation stuff Labs said you guys didn't make enough fun of me for (can't find the link). I like mysteries, too (though I appreciate mjh's link in 66; it's a lot like Woody Allen's "Match Wits with Inspector Ford").
The answer to 135 is yes. The first conjunct of 128 (was the wrong-going bad for him?) is hard to decide. Let's put that aside for now. The answer to the second conjunct (was the wrong-going good for others?) is "Yes".
OT, but it would be nice if the site overlords could change whatever it is that makes portions of the archives invisible to Google. Earlier today I was unable to find the original reference to my waking each morning to Debbie Gibson tunez, and now I cannot find the thread in which someone posts as "bridgeplate" simpliciter. This is cramping my style.
He didn't realize it, but he was actually dead. He was killed when an intruder broke into his house, but because his marriage was strained and for various other reasons, he did not realize that he was a ghost -- and anyway, this one kid has some kind of special powers that allow him to see ghosts, and since the man is a therapist, he thinks that the kid is one of his patients. This scenario took place on the first day he was dead, thus representing his first "mistake" (wrongness).
Alternative scenario: Raised by his aunt and uncle on the remote planet Tatooine, the man worked as a farm hand until one day he is recruited by one of the last remaining Jedi knights. Events transpire until one day (this day!) he gets in a duel with his father, who has become a freakish half-man half-machine with fearsome Jedi powers, in which his hand is cut off. Being a Jedi knight is considered his "job" in this scenario, although he does not get an official salary or health benefits. He then has to wait 8 hours in the emergency room at Cook County Hospital, destroying all hope that his hand can be reattached and requiring him to be retrofitted with an electronic replacement that (eerily!) takes him in the same direction as his father from a certain perspective.
In this case, MAE, I am an autocrat. You will not win by coming up with interesting proposals. Remember, this particular instantiation of the game-form is primarily designed to illustrate the ridiculousness of the form in general.
Boy Ben, I thought you were just chain yanking, and then I thought I would humor you when you complained about no one playing, and now I really regret it.
I continue to maintain that enjoyment or non-enjoyment of this game hinges on feelings toward relatedness and independence, because most of the people who hate it express resentment of depending on or being controlled by someone else. But it's okay to say, just temporarily, hey, I'll make it my goal to see what this other person has in mind. There is nothing autocratic about that. You assume that the person is doing it in good faith and there's something coherent, if not unsilly, at the end. You're just demonstrating that its possible not to play the game in good faith; you're not making an interesting point about its essential nature. You're like an abusing boyfriend arguing that relationships are hell.
In other words, don't hate the game, hate the player.
And I never said it was a riddle. I said it was a game.
You're playing in bad faith if you're giving me that he has a sore throat but that's irrelevant to some other thing I'm supposed to know. There has to be a finite set of things you're supposed to know and they're supposed to cohere into a story. "Irrelevant" is supposed to be one of the answers the answerer can give.
160: What I was getting at in 157 was, are the things that go wrong all related to each other (beyond just the fact that they are part of the scenario)?
I mean, is it more important for you to feel independent, autonomous, and in control, or is it more important for you to feel you have successful relationships with others? Obviously, both are important in some measure to everyone, both to some extent depend on the other, and if you put people in different contexts they'll emphasize one or the other, but it's probably fair to say (if John Doris doesn't come by to castigate me) that some people tend to emphasize one more than the other. It's frequently theorized that women are more concerned with the self-in-relation, men with the self as independent and discrete, although I think later work showed those preferences were highly context dependent and you could get men and women to exhibit the opposite preferences easily (now John Doris loves me again). I could try looking up some of that stuff if it's of interest.
You're not playing in bad faith in the sense that you have an answer; you are playing in bad faith, given that you yourself don't *care* about the answer, but only about making/proving the game annoying. It's the difference between laughing with, and laughing at.
In short, the point of this thread is that Ben is being a little bitch. But to be fair, we knew that going in.
Ok, remember how I wasn't saying whether or not things were relevant at that point? The sore throat is irrelevant to the set of things that went wrong. The members of that set are related to each other. That's what I meant.
And see, if there are distinct sets of things we're trying to figure out, you're playing in bad faith. And do not tell me about ignorance. You understand the point of this game; you're just choosing not to play it right in order to "prove" it's a bad game, when all you've proven is that you're a bad player.
No, Tia, I really thought I was restricted to yes/no answers. Henceforth I will say what's relevant and what's irrelevant. Anyway, the sore throat was preexisting, hence wasn't something that went wrong that day. (MAE asked this in 58.)
Do the wrong-doings bear some identifiable and reasonable relation to your initial description?
I'm not just talking about yes/no answers; I'm talking about what you're trying to get people to do.
If you didn't understand before, I'll explain it (that's for you, Weiner):
You give a few details of a scene. Your initial details should be both incongruent and suggestive, so as to give your fellow players ideas for questions to ask. They should not have to attempt, as I did, to create categories of all possible events and winnow from there. Your details should describe some elements of the endpoint of a coherent narrative. Your goal is to get people to tell you what happened in that narrative. There should not be discrete sets of unrelated information you try to get the players to guess. It's a story. The goal is to have the players tell you the story.
Well, that's not enough though. There must be more to it than a bare consistency with the underlying scenario, which is what your description seems to involve.
Wait, let me take that back. I can't really explain this without giving large portions of the game away. Suppose you want to eat an orange, and you think you have some at home. But when you get there, you find out that they're all moldy because they were left out in such a way that encourages mold growth, so you don't eat them. Is what went wrong related to eating?
Andrew, if it will be seen why the man behaved as he did, that is more than consistency.
I do think that it is permissible to blatantly subvert the conventions of the game by making the story so blatantly not incongruous that one does not know where to begin. cf shaggy-dog jokes.
Well, I'm multi-tasking inefficiently here. Yes, it may be more than bare consistency. But, to repeat what Tia has already pointed out, the game-form description involves some surprising and incongruous set of facts, and the challenge is to invent a story which explains how such an incongruous set of facts could come to exist. The incongruity is a self-limiting part of the game; more importantly, the incongruity is an entertaining part of the game.
Your description is entirely ordinary, and therefore does not meet the criteria required by the game-form.
Here's an incongruous set of facts: on the surface, everything appears to be just as it ordinarily is. And yet, something major has gone wrong. We stipulate that it is not a case of suburban ennui, or the like.
193: It's more about the quality of the information. The elements you choose should provoke curiosity in the game player, and there should be a limited set of possible explanations for them. There are only so many ways a drowned man can non-nonsensically get into a tree. Wolfson's story is not so limited.
194: You are arguably playing a different game, or at least you're playing a less fun version of this one.
There are only so many ways a drowned man can non-nonsensically get into a tree.
You know what actually would be entertaining? Try to come up with a whole lot of stories about how a drowned man could get in a tree. Really tax your creativity.
Eh, I think that's still too vague Ben. The puzzle must be entertaining and self-limiting, much like Jeopardy questions must be conceivably answerable, or at least subject to educated guesses, by the players involved.
202: Ben, that's what you DO in the game. You can't get to the answer unless you can come up with different scenarios. The ability to answer the question different ways is not devalued by the game.
Tia, either you or someone else said that what you do is narrow the field until you get to the RIGHT scenario. That is manifestly different from just tossing out a bunch of scenarios without bothering to calibrate them with any set of conditions held by the master of ceremonies.
195: I do think this gets at what makes me less than fond of these games. When Tia plays a game, the people who will do well (?) are people who think like Tia, and make the sorts of connections and see the same incongruities that Tia does. When Ben plays the game, we're trying to guess what Ben could be up to. We know he's trying to prove a point. So I come up with three possible answers: easy & dirty ("nothing's wrong"), irritating and pointed (something to do with a shaggy dog), or so obliquely related to the facts disclosed that you essentially have no chance of guessing it (quit and make fun of Ben from the sidelines).
It's the type of game that I think people are likely to enjoy most when run by someone who thinks much like them, I suspect. In this case, the only person who will be able to guess the answer is, obviously, Cornel West. (Batsignal!)
For instance, here's a possible scenario for how a drowned man might have gotten into a tree. He was in a forested park with a lake and was essentially a sort of silvan base-cum-bungee jumper—an outdoorsy thrillseeker. He had climbed up a tall redwood and secured his bungee cord to the tree, and then about himself, except he didn't do the hottest job. His plan was to jump out of the tree and reach his lowest point right over the placid surface of the lake. However, owing to his poor job securing the cord to the tree, when he jumped his weight caused the cord to slip down the trunk, and he actually ended up beneath the surface of the lake, where his cord got entangled in a fallen tree, trapping him. He drowns.
As time passed, the tree and his clothes both rotted away. Freed from the branches, the cord jerked back and, because his clothes were no longer really present, rendering him effectively thinner, and because he was wet and a bit slippery with watery mosses or whatever those things are, his body was flung from the cord, and he flew out over the forest, his body landing in a tree some miles away.
Ben, that's a silly "answer." if the tree rotted, the body would surely have rotted, and you wouldn't have a "man" hanging in a tree; you'd have, at best, a skeleton.
And that would be a dissatisfying solution to the game, Ben. It's simply a boring scenario. The two scenarios presented thus far have involved a swimmer being scooped out the water and drowning, and cannibalism. Also, the scenario depends upon some very fine details (the cord gets entangled and the tree rots) that are not amenable to winnowing by yes/no questions.
When Tia plays a game, the people who will do well (?) are people who think like Tia, and make the sorts of connections and see the same incongruities that Tia does.
I didn't make up either the drowned man or the abalone, and lots of diverse groups of people have gotten there. It's not about thinking like me, I don't think.
Ben, the game consists of the tossing out + winnowing. You object to the winnowing, but it helps motivate the tossing out by giving it a goal. The person who can think of lots of ways a drowned man could wind up in a tree (and who has a talent for asking pertinent questions) will do well in the game. The rightness assigned to the answer is arbitrary, but it's still a fun journey. Maybe I should revise my theory and posit that people with irrationally strong antipathies to this game are people who are really afraid of being wrong, and can't see when wrongness is just an inconsequential construct to create a goal-oriented game, rather than a brainstorming session, and don't like the idea of temporarily, artificially, and lightheartedly priveleging someone else's notion of right over their own.
210 -- And see, if we were playing with my cool new improved rules (version 2.0!), you could have jumped in to the drowned man thread with your excellent bungee-jumping story and started answering people's questions on your own. People would then have to keep track of the parallel universes that you and I were describing and bring the two stories to fruition.
That seems like a pretty baroque, and, uh, insulting theory, for which you have no evidence (I don't mind 20 questions or that game where you announce that you spy something with your diminutive peeper—I guess that's a variant of 20 questions). And I don't see why the tossing out needs external motivation. Frankly, I see the game as involving a hell of a lot more winnowing than it does tossing out. If I were thinking of a number between 1 and 400, you could winnow it down pretty fast with just a few questions. Why would you start tossing out guesses until you had a fairly constricted range? The situations here are even more complex. There's no profit in tossing out solutions until you've got a pretty good handle on what's going on. Being able to think of what might be relevant is important in knowing what to ask, granted, but it's not the same.
I will own that my proposed situation is improbable, but I would rather come up with tons of such situations and have them criticized & refined on internal consistency/plausibility grounds—that, to me, is what's enjoyable. I don't need to be spurred on to do that by the promise of getting something right.
As far as the objections to the bungee-jumping situation goes, the snopes.com site that was linked here explains that the original diver-in-tree scenario was physically impossible; but minor hitches like that seem not the point in this game. And the explanation involved the phrase "donkey dick"! And no one remarked on it! Sometimes I despair.
11: Everyone who complains about how rigid the puzzles are seems to neglect that it isn't really rigid to ask your interlocutors, for the moment, to suspend disbelief and try to arrive at someone else's vision. It's not like having a variety of ideas is disparaged in the process; the person who can think of the most possibilities will be the best at the game.
It's pretty rigid when the revelation of the specific scenario you had in mind causes you to suddenly delete the whole thread. It's pretty flexible when you open a new thread for an alternate scenario.
I don't think it's baroque, and it wasn't intended to insult. I was responding, I meant somewhat needlingly, to someone who's devoting a great deal of effort to telling me how stupid something that I and a lot of other people enjoy is. I understand that Unfogged is place where people get all in each other's shit, as the kids say, and I don't really care. (I care more about this irritating parody game) but I don't think you have cause to be sensitive now.
If you don't mind 20 questions, etc, then you've basically given up your theoretical objection here (you can certainly keep "I just don't enjoy it"). Twenty questions is just as "straitjacketing". You don't have to like to play. But I don't know why you went to all the trouble of making up a faux-variant to make fun of people who like it and actually encouraged them to play. If you were really ingenuous with this "a man went to work" scenario, then you didn't understand the rules, and you might have asked someone before you assumed you did.
Ok, I still have many, many comments to read - and I'm a slow reader - but on Agatha Christie I believe Raymond Chandler's big criticism is that in order for Christie's scenarios to work out she very often has to make it so that certain characters turn out to have acted in ways completely contrary to the ways they'd been developed throughout the story previous to the time the solution is revealed.
(On the other hand, at least one of Chandler's novels has Marlowe solve a mystery on the basis of facts not all of which have been previously revealed to the reader. (Unless I really didn't notice those facts, even after checking and double checking.).)
In the Tia question game, however, there is no prior character development to work against so they're not analogous.
(I loved these games when I was younger, by the way, but have no strong feeling either way.)
eb, I opened the thread for the purpose of playing the game. Since that purpose seemed negated, nothing else important had happened on the thread; no one had made a joke, etc. all there was at that moment was the answer to the riddle and Michael being, in my opinion, extremely unpleasant, and me responding to him, I thought I would redirect people's creative attentions elsewhere before the thread became too substantial to delete.
I'm sorry if you thought I was wrong to, I don't really feel like I can vigorously defend it, but only explain my reasoning.
it's a small thing, it's true, but it sucks to have to hear the answers early to games or riddles you would have been interested in playing or figuring out. I always regret it. Once you've heard the drowned man in a tree one, you can never play as questioner again.
(and I've enjoyed my experiences figuring them out, and would like to preserve that experience for other people. I've actually just been trying to do something nice for people by devoting time to answering questions. It's actually not surpassingly entertaining to be the answerer in blog format. But I always had fun asking, and thought other people wuld have fun answering the questions.)
230: at least one of Chandler's novels has Marlowe solve a mystery on the basis of facts not all of which have been previously revealed to the reader.
Which one? I've read them all, I think, except Playback. Also, I don't necessarily think that's wrong, at least I don't always see mysteries as puzzles that the reader ought to be able to solve in advance. More, a bargain that when we find out what happens it will have had made sense. Though if Marlowe, as the narrator, is holding back that's obnoxious. (Also Chandler is not always about the solution; I'm not convinced the solution to The Little Sister makes sense.)
Tia, I appreciate the joy you bring to people with your Friday games, even if they aren't my cup of tea. And I think you have shown extreme restraint for playing along with Ben and not posting a new game consisting of "A man goes to school one day, to all appearances just as he does every day, reads, takes his lunch break, returns from lunch, reads some more, and goes home. Why must he be a little bitch? Give an accurate and complete account.
Tia, while I don't particularly enjoy the games, I did and do appreciate the generosity you demonstrated in doing them, and the willingness to innovate--it means that the blog is continuing to grow, rathe rthan repeating the old forms.
(As I said above, I like it when all of a sudden everyone's trying to top each other in mini creative writing contests. I think it would be fun to have a weekly feature where some interlocutor assigned a topic and/or form.)
A man goes to school one day, to all appearances just as he does every day, crys, takes his lunch break, returns from lunch, crys, masturbates, crys, and goes home. Why must he be a little bitch? Give an accurate and complete account.
236: It's the The Little Sister. I don't have it with me, but Marlowe says something to the sister like "You told me X" and if you check out all conversations with her, X is never revealed. I still like the writing, though, which is the main reason I read his novels (except Playback, which I've also not read).
Okay, Ben, I certainly haven't meant to give offense to you either, and I'm sorry I did. Thanks, Chopper and Becks for the luurve. I was thinking also thinking an Unfogged advice column could be fun.
You're trying to climb on to a roof and are offered "possible solution 1" and "possible solution 2" but no amount of questioning reveals the nature of the possible solutions, only that they are solution 1 and solution 2. Finally you choose the second: why?
You assume that the possible solutions are being given to you in the order they've been attempted in the past, and reason that the first one has always failed and people have had to move on to the second.
243: Gene Wolfe does that all the time. He will say, "That is why x happened when y" and you go back and you read the passage that takes place at y and there is nary a mention of x. And while you're flipping back to check this he steals your fudgsicle. Aargh.
I swear to god, I must have a brain tumor or something. My ability to write and proofread is just slipping through my mental fists like grains of sand.
250: If by right you mean, "is your solution the one that a kid who was probably around 10 years old at the time and who liked coming up with bad puns was thinking of?" then the answer is no.
I believe I said that I "hate" them.
I believe you didn't. Unless you said that between 10:32 AM PST and the time Tia deleted the thread.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:14 PM
The point of the Two Minute Mysteries is not that there might not be more than one alternative explanations for the given set of facts. That's true of a real mystery too: you see a corpse; a lot of people could have done it. At the beginning of a mystery story you could think, hey, even if Agatha Christie says the butler did it, I can come up with an equally plausible scenario in which the lover did. But as you get more and more information, the number of possibilities narrows. The point of the two minute mysteries is to try to see if you can arrive at a set of questions that narrows the possibilities to what a (yes, arbitrarily defined) truth is. In a mystery, the truth is just as arbitrary. Heck, if you were a real detective, the truth would be just as arbitrary, and you'd be progressively ruling out a set of also-plausible alternatives.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:14 PM
What does "intranecine" mean? Serious question; I don't know what the root -necine means.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:14 PM
Perhaps they bother Ben because in his chosen field, truth is not arbitrary.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:16 PM
Becks, I said 'FOR THE RECORD: I hate these "games".'.
So, neener upon thee!
It seems that internecine would have been correct.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:17 PM
What does "intranecine" mean?
I don't know, except that it's superior to intranecet.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:18 PM
Ok. I wanted to make fun of you, but thought that you were making some sort of point with the intra- prefix.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:19 PM
b-wo, think of the mysteries as carefully winnowing away possible worlds until we discover the one that contains the answer, and gold-hatted and high-bouncing, we declare: Possible world! I must have you!
Also, put the link to your excellent radio program in your bio here.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:20 PM
They bother me because the stories are so baroque. In the case of a mystery story, it's a bug if the motivations of the killers (or whatever) turn out to be inhumanly complicated and the plan would put Rube Goldberg to shame. There's also a disanology in the method. Consider the original drowned guy answer. If you were really investigating that, you would know that there had been a fire. You wouldn't have to guess, out of nowhere, that there had been one, and that a plane had picked up some water, and then dumped it on a tree. For one thing, you'd probably be able to see the burnt trees.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:21 PM
I don't think they're exactly analogous in all ways; I just want to point out that the objection "but, but, there wasn't really one right answer" is true of a lot of things people enjoy. Some of the mysteries are better than others, because the answer is a little bit less silly. I think the drowned man is in fact way better than the abalone, in fact, and I was quite sad to see it ruined.
Everyone who complains about how rigid the puzzles are seems to neglect that it isn't really rigid to ask your interlocutors, for the moment, to suspend disbelief and try to arrive at someone else's vision. It's not like having a variety of ideas is disparaged in the process; the person who can think of the most possibilities will be the best at the game.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:29 PM
In numbers-puzzle you are not able to ask further questions, and so the answer seems undetermined.
In the mystery game, however, you can ask questions. Part of the challenge is figuring out which questions eliminate entire lines of scenarios, leaving you with fewer and fewer options. To my mind, these types of puzzles promote imaginative and logical thinking both.
Methinks there is a touch of sour grapes in your gripe...
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:29 PM
Ripped from Putnam's "Rethinking Mathematical Necessity," in Words and Life, p. 254:
"Consider a riddle. A court lady once fell into disfavor with the king. (One easily imagine how.) The king, intending to give her a command impossible of fulfillment, told her to come to the Royal Ball "neither naked nor dressed." What did she do? (Solution: she came wearing a fishnet.)
Concerning such riddles, Wittgenstein says that we are able to give the words a sense only after we know the solution; the solution bestows a sense on the riddle-question. This seems right. It is true that I could translate the sentence "She came to the Royal Ball neither naked nor dressed" into languages which are related to English, languages in which the key English words "naked" and "dressed" have long-established equivalents. But if I didn't know the solution, could I _paraphrase_ the question "How could she come to the ball neither naked nor dressed?" _even_ _in_ _English_ _itself_? I would be afraid to make _any_ change in the key words, for fear of losing exactly what the riddle might turn on."
Quoted without comment because I'm lazy.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:31 PM
I'm upset that no one is interested in figuring out how my game goes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:31 PM
Ben, although I may be giving you grief in this thread, I agree with you. I've never cared for these games and especially detest that they are frequently used in job interviews in my field "to see how you think" because I don't believe they are an accurate predictor of success. I'll definitely join your fight against using these games in that setting or any other one that tries to project some kind of meaning onto them. But if Tia and the others want to goof off on a Friday by playing one, I'll gladly let them have their fun. I'll just stick to another thread.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:32 PM
Ben, while you're not busy, could you fix the unsightly lack of space between the last "Latest Comment" and the credits?
Which, given the defunctitude of the Reading Group, might take some subtantive editing.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:33 PM
There are lots of more elaborate puzzles than that, spencer, including one where you have to come neither naked nor dressed, neither on foot nor mounted (I think by being half on, half off a horse?) and a bunch of other seemingly contradictory conditions, which I would quote if I could be bothered to look them up (I read about 'em in The White Goddess).
Robert Graves maintains that Lady Godiva's actions were in line with such strictures.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:33 PM
Why couldn't she come to the ball in a bathrobe? Or pajamas?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:34 PM
you would know that there had been a fire
This is not true in novel X.
I was disappointed to learn from the Granta story that John Collier's Three Bears Cottage is inaccurate in its description of death by Amanita Phalloides.
In the case of a mystery story, it's a bug if the motivations of the killers (or whatever) turn out to be inhumanly complicated and the plan would put Rube Goldberg to shame.
I don't know, some people like Agatha Christie.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:35 PM
13 - I'm afraid to play it. It reminds me of the Thematic Apperception Test.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:35 PM
Not enough skin.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:35 PM
Why couldn't she come to the ball in a bathrobe? Or pajamas?
Yeah!
And Becks, I didn't ruin the last game. I'm pretty sure I didn't even ruin the one to which I knew the answer. Nor did I delete the thread, which is within my power.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:35 PM
Bathrobe or PJs: not enough skin. Doesn't make it interesting. Gotta keep it lurid to keep the readers interested.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:37 PM
And on a scooter?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:37 PM
ooh, i'll play.
golly, what wasn't wrong with his day? he lived a hopeless life of suburban ennui, a postmodern drone driven by vestigial primordial genetic diktat. things will change when he sees a hot young cheerleader and a bag blowin' in the wind.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:37 PM
And Becks, I didn't ruin the last game.
And we do appreciate your restraint.
which is within my power
I believe you're missing a "Muahahahaha".
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:39 PM
Those might have been things that were wrong with his day, but I asked what went wrong.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:39 PM
24 - See what I meant about the TAT?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:40 PM
Muahahahahahahahahaha!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:40 PM
Ben--
Are you (or Graves) saying that there is enough vagueness in the superficial contradictories that it is intelligible to select an object that satisfies the conditions of both while violating neither's? To me, that doesn't really explain the appeal of riddles, which I think Putnam's Wittgensteinian account does. I've never felt like riddles are supposed to be solved, per se, unless the listener recognizes a certain pattern that is repeated in other riddles (whose answers the listener knows).
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:40 PM
unless the listener recognizes a certain pattern that is repeated in other riddles (whose answers the listener knows)
Are the solutions to all pointless riddles reducible to the solutions of other pointless riddles? If so, and if such riddles make Wolfson nonplussed, are they NP-complete?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:44 PM
He got canned.
I deny the stipulation that she has to show some skin, as it was not part of the original question and therefore can't fairly be imposed after the fact.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:45 PM
Ben, there's nothing incongruous to start the imagination in your game. But I'll play anyway.
Was he the victim of a crime?
Did he have transportation trouble?
Did he enjoy his food?
Did he have trouble in love?
Did anything cause him physical pain?
Did he have any kind of religious or existential crisis or doubt?
Did a friend or coworker behave unpleasantly?
Does he have any medical or psychological problems?
Is he satisfied in his job?
Is he productive at work?
Was his favorite sports team successful?
Okay, that'll start us off.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:47 PM
Also, perhaps because there is a link within your post title, the post title itself is not a link.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:49 PM
I deny your denial. D^2. Putnam's version of the riddle is -- riddled, as it were -- with sexual innuendo. The court lady fell out of favor and "one can easily imagine how"? And then his command involves nudity? Old man Putnam's a perve.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:50 PM
Ben, I suggest you expand a little bit on the very beginning of this post, for the benefit of those of us who didn't see the drowned man post before it was, apparently, deleted.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:51 PM
Tia: no, no, yes. No, no no. No, yes, no. Yes, no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:51 PM
I deny the stipulation that she has to show some skin, as it was not part of the original question and therefore can't fairly be imposed after the fact.
I think that's sort of Ben's objection, isn't it? I'm not crazy about such games, either, but Becks is right: read and comment on a different thread. (Though, IME, in most of job interview questions, you're generally provided all the information, or you really don't have to arrive at the "right" answer.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:53 PM
He didn't do any of those things; he merely imagines he did because he's insane.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:53 PM
SCMT, I'll read and comment on any thread I like! Even if the point is to argue with the premises of the post to which the thread is attached. Especially if the point is to argue with the premises, in fact.
So there. Nyah.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:54 PM
B: the second sentence was badly written, but meant for Ben.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:56 PM
I like mystery novels, but I'm not a fan of these so-called riddles. Maybe it's because they feel like the riddler is toying with the audience, rather than presenting a knotty but potentially solvable conundrum.
I realize this is heresy to say in this crowd, but these games remind me of nothing so much as my Philosophy 101 professor trying to get the class to opine on whether a person born on a desert island and raised without human contact could be purely amoral. Yeesh. NOT, in my opinion, an interesting or engaging thought exercise.
(Can a class opine? Or only a single person? Ben, I'm looking to you for guidance.)
Posted by A.W. | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:56 PM
35: It was just like the "Drowned Man Redux" thread, but with a different answer.
36 makes it obvious: He is Forlesen, from Gene Wolfe's eponymous story, which ends "No. No. Yes. No. Yes. Maybe." (Modulo the difference between "Yes" and "No.") The question now is, to what question is this the answer?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:56 PM
Okay.
Does he have a medical problem?
Does he have a psychological problem?
Was his favorite sports team not successful because it played and lost?
Or was his favorite team not successful because it's off-season?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:57 PM
Medical problem: death.
Psychological problem: brain death.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:58 PM
Oops, we're not talking about the hanging guy in the forest.
Posted by spencer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:58 PM
#40: Shit, I'll have to wait for another day to pick a fight with you, then.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:58 PM
Ben, I suggest you expand a little bit on the very beginning of this post, for the benefit of those of us who didn't see the drowned man post before it was, apparently, deleted.
There's another drowned man post to replace the deleted one—what's the problem? (Seriously: what do you want explained?)
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:59 PM
Tia: yes, no, no, no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:01 PM
(Can a class opine? Or only a single person? Ben, I'm looking to you for guidance.)
My current theory is that a class can opine.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:02 PM
37: But my kind of game tells you that there's a predefined story you're getting to, and that the goal is to ask questions, not just to figure it out, so it isn't changing the rules in the interim.
No one has to enjoy this kind of game, but I don't really think there's a way to reason people who do into recognizing its inferiority. I wonder, though, if the liking and disliking camps are different in any other ways. I wonder how much it would be correlated with liking fiction, or some kind of psychological measure of valuing independence versus relatedness.
If someone else wants to suggest a different interactive game, that would be fun. I thought of Botticelli, but then I thought that with access to the internet that would be too easy for the question-askers, because they could come up with first order questions too easily.
Ben, could his medical problem be fatal, if untreated?
Does his favorite sports team no longer play?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:08 PM
No, no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:11 PM
Is his medical problem centered in the upper or lower half of his body?
Does he not have a favorite sports team?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:14 PM
Oops, that first one wasn't yes or no, but it was binary, so just imagine I had phrased it as yes or no.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:14 PM
That's not a yes/no question (upper), and yes (he does not).
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:15 PM
so it isn't changing the rules in the interim
I don't think B was suggesting a change in the rules, just that no one had mentioned that she had to show some skin. That - I guess; I don't get the answer - is still consistent with the original preconditions.
I'd be curious, too, if there was a proxy. If I had to guess, I'd bet people who enjoy the games may be the sort who enjoy writing stories or other doing expressive arts. Obviously, I'm going a lot based you. We should check with Osner.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:16 PM
Is it a problem with his arms or hands?
Is it a problem with his shoulder?
Is it a problem with his brain?
Is it a problem with his skin?
Is it a problem with his back?
Is it a problem with his ears, nose, or throat?
Is it a problem with his bones?
Is it a problem with his heart or cardiopulmonary system?
Is it a problem with his digestion?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:19 PM
Weiner, Andrew, and Cala appear to be on the games' side.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:20 PM
Was his medical problem preexisting (to the day in question)?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:21 PM
We could ask them, too. (I was going by the last time I looked at the sidebar.) I could see Weiner being a secret painter; Cala, not so much. Andrew is too new (I think) for me to guess.
Did SB play?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:23 PM
(Hey, I've never read Tristram Shandy. Should I go see the movie, or will I enjoy the book better if I read it first and see the movie later on video?)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:23 PM
Tia: no (arms or hands), no (shoulder), no (brain), no (skin), no (back), yes (ENT), no (bones), no (heart/cardiopulmonary), no (digestion).
My Alter Ego: Yes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:23 PM
SB knew the answers already. I think w/d indicated he would like to play if he didn't already know the answers.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:24 PM
Does he have a cold? Does he have an earache? Does he have a sore throat?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:26 PM
Shit, this is getting awfully Kobayashi Maru-ish...isn't it?
Posted by Prof. Goose | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:27 PM
Is the nature of his work relevant?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:28 PM
My favorite takedown of such games is here; I'm of the disdain school. They're not like the pirates puzzle someone mentioned last time, where you can work out the solution with a pad before asking any questions.
Posted by mjh | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:28 PM
yes (ENT)
Ooh! Did he go to the ER?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:29 PM
So there's a third game: what ties together Tia, Cala, Weiner, Osner, w/d and Andrew, but not Wolfson?
(Does text normally play? Creative, clearly, but somehow I can't see him playing for long.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:30 PM
He has a sore throat.
The nature of his work is, arguably, relevant.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:30 PM
I love the link mjh gave.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:31 PM
My gut says it might have more to do with valuing independence v. relatedness. Of course, by this theory you should expect to see more women playing than men, and that hasn't been the case. Small sample, though.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:32 PM
I liked the game, "See if we can tell a joke about herring!" Let's play it again. Herring is always funny.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:33 PM
I think we can all agree that Weiner's basically a woman.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:37 PM
I've never cared for these games and especially detest that they are frequently used in job interviews in my field "to see how you think"
What field do you work in? I think the only right answer would be "I can't believe you're making me play this horrible game."
b-wo: Is his office internet connection down?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:38 PM
Objection! It has not been established that his office has an internet connection.
But, the answer is "no".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:39 PM
that's a new rule. but i give up anyway
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:41 PM
Objection! It has not been established that his office has an internet connection.
For that matter, have we established that he works in an office?
Does he work in an office?
Does he sit at a desk with a computer?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:42 PM
I said, "if you don't want her to leave you, give HER A RING," not give her "herring." If only we'd signed up with Spring PCS.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:43 PM
Is his sore throat caused by a bacterial or viral infection?
Or was it abraded in some way?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:44 PM
I can't imagine how the movie Tristam Shandy could bear the slightest resemblance to the book Tristram Shandy unless it starts with fifty minutes of blank screen and a voice-over. So it doesn't matter.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:45 PM
74 - I'm a software developer. And to answer Tim's 37 - no, they don't provide you with more information. They ask the same type of riddles that Tia did and then subjectively judge whether you ask "good" questions. Meh.
(And, lest you think I object to those types of interviews because I'm bad at them, I'm not. I actually do quite well on them. They just offend me because I don't think they accurately predict job performance.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:45 PM
79 - Oh, please let it be abraded.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:46 PM
I've never cared for these games and especially detest that they are frequently used in job interviews in my field "to see how you think"
Buck was once asked in a job interview "If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half ina day and a half, how many pancakes does it take to shingle the roof of a doghouse?" He replied "All of them," and was hired. The boss was a serious loon, though, but has been an annoying mentor figure ever sisnce.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:48 PM
. They just offend me because I don't think they accurately predict job performance.
I agree. But, again, they aren't looking for a specific answer. Or, if they are, they probably work for a company you should avoid. Because they're doing it wrong.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:49 PM
78: Heh. Hee. Hah.
Thank you. But like I said, I'm a sucker for herring humor.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:51 PM
84 - True, they are evaluating the candidate's ability to think and not looking for a specific answer but I think these ridiculous scenario questions aren't the best for that. Better is the type of question Microsoft uses (like How many gas stations are there in the US? How would you figure it out?) or something relevant (I usually ask them to imagine they're designing a website that allows people to renew their driver's license online and tell me what questions they would ask the client to refine the requirements to see if they think of issues relating to security, scalability, usability, performance, etc.) I think either of those address what I really want to know (can this person hunt down ithe necessary information from Google/other information sources/the client required to do the job?) better than whether they can figure out why a guy is stuck up in a tree.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:57 PM
I have a theoretical dislike for the How many Xes are there in Y–type questions, because you know what they're about? Bullshitting.
Tia, your questions about his medical ailment are beginning to require more sensitivity than the instrumentation can provide.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:09 PM
Oh, Jeebus. I thought you were talking about the, "How many gas stations are there in the US? How would you figure it out?" type of questions.
Which I suspect track something. The smartest person I know (by a lot) is unbelievable at them, though he hates them. OTOH, the most successful person I know (by a lot) is terrible at them. Which is why I said I don't trust them for job performance.
If they're asking something else - yeah, rubbish.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:12 PM
You know what I don't like about these games?
I suspect they will lead to the premature death of the F5 button on my keyboard.
So, does he work in an office? At a desk? With a computer?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:18 PM
There are times, both in terms of ages and the actual situation I'm in, when I enjoy playing these games. I'm uncertain if my current age and blog commenting satisfies those conditions.
Also, do you really think Ben isn't making this up as he goes?
Also, I tried to comment on an old thread today, the comment got caught by the filter, and I don't think it's been unhooked yet.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:20 PM
Also, do you really think Ben isn't making this up as he goes?
I absolutely am not! MAE: "Yes" all around.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:22 PM
As proof that I'm not making it up, I have vouchsafed to ogged (peace be upon him) the answer.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:23 PM
Can we guess yet, Ben?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:27 PM
You can guess whenever you like, though I have to say with what's been asked so far you're unlikely to come close.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:28 PM
91 puts an end to my theory that he was a porn star who had injured his throat in a bizarre cocksucking accident. Too bad.
Is the thing that went wrong related to blogging?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:28 PM
No.
Man, you guys are not. even. close.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:30 PM
Well, I haven't read any of the questions asked or answers given, so this might already have been tried...nothing?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:31 PM
No, something definitely went wrong.
Drastically wrong.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:34 PM
Horribly wrong?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:35 PM
Did the thing that went wrong happen specifically to him?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:35 PM
Yes, Tim, and no, My Alter Ego.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:36 PM
Was it a Tuesday?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:38 PM
Underspecified.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:39 PM
Terribly wrong?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:41 PM
Did he own a shaggy dog?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:42 PM
Yes and yes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:43 PM
Underspecified? Tuesday is pretty well defined to my way of thinking. Unless I need to specify that it was still Tuesday in his time zone.
Different approach: Did large numbers of people die as a result of the thing that went wrong?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:44 PM
I meant, you silly person, that the situation does not specify the date. As to your different approach, the answer is no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:45 PM
Did his shaggy dog die?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:49 PM
#60: Go see the movie, b/c, honestly, even though the book is fantastic, there's no point waiting around until you read it. Plus, it's not like the movie is going to give away the plot or anything.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:50 PM
108: Ah.
(Part of what I do like about these games is the strategic aspect of trying to ask questions that are specific enough to confirm/refute your own theory without clueing in the other players as to what your theory is.)
Does he know that something has gone wrong?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:53 PM
His dog died in a bizarre cocksucking accident!
With the gas station thing, you could just go to the Census Bureau's latest economic census, then project the figures forward from the last year they have available. I have templates for plotting such growth curves, with multiple ways of handling sub-categories -- depending on whether you think that a particular sub-category is going to grow significantly out of proportion to others (for instance, convenience store gas stations as opposed to stand-alone gas stations), etc.
Can I have a job at Microsoft now?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:56 PM
Unfortunately, Adam, coming up with a way to actually find out the answer isn't what they want. They just want to see how well you can B.S. an answer.
111: yes.
109: no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:00 PM
All you guys who are complaining about the game format should really read my proposed modifications et seq. in the other thread because I think it would make a much more interesting and complex game.
To answer the questions above -- I dig expressive art but am not much of a writer -- my pleasures are music (violin & guitar), and reading out loud to others (usually to Sylvia nowadays; a few years ago I had this wonderful set up with a friend where we would get together and smoke marihuana on a monthly or so basis, and read each other stories -- if anyone would be interested in setting up a reading-out-loud group in NYC please contact me, I'd be totally into it. Drugs optional.) And I am a computer programmer which I occasionally find manifesting itself as an expressive art. (I think a few other of the people listed above are programmers, like at least Becks; but Wolfson is too so that's not the crucial link.)
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:01 PM
You really think asking if it was Tuesday preceded by finding out that the wrong thing effected other people didn't make it clear that you thought it was tuesday, september 11th 2001?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:04 PM
Did the thing that went wrong happen while he was at work?
Did it similarly affect anyone he works with?
115: I said I liked that aspect of these games. I didn't say I was good at it.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:07 PM
Wolfson isn't a programmer; he plays one on tv.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:07 PM
MAE, the answers to your questions in 116 are "no" and "no", but you might want to think about definite descriptions and your use of "the thing that went wrong".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:09 PM
Did the thing that went wrong happen over his lunch break?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:14 PM
As proof that I'm not making it up, I have vouchsafed to ogged (peace be upon him) the answer.
But if Ogged isn't commenting, how could he cry foul if you are making this up as you go along?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:18 PM
HINT: when you say "did the thing that went wrong foo?" I am parsing that as "is it the case that one and only one thing went wrong, and that thing foo?". Now, the question as stated was "what went wrong?". Thus it is not necessarily the case that there is one decisive wrong-going event such that questions as to its location in time, for instance, can sensibly be answered.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:18 PM
Fine, did something go wrong over his lunchbreak?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:19 PM
On one way of construing things, yes; on another, no.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:22 PM
Did the scenario involve passing gas?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:24 PM
slol, I think you would like this song. I love it (and his other work), even though I don't know any of the original songs and don't understand much of the Yiddish. Unfortunately the lyrics aren't on the web, but if you call me I can attempt to sing it to you or, probably more effectlvely, play my LP into the phone.
59: I'm no secret painter, couldn't do anything with canvas and a brush to save my life. I did used to write stories, though, and want to start again sometime. Also there's the free improvisation stuff Labs said you guys didn't make enough fun of me for (can't find the link). I like mysteries, too (though I appreciate mjh's link in 66; it's a lot like Woody Allen's "Match Wits with Inspector Ford").
121: No Russellianism!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:25 PM
No, but if that's what you're into I know a place in Chicago…
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:25 PM
But Weiner, I don't know how else to answer such questions!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:27 PM
Were the things that went wrong bad for him but good for one or more other people?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:27 PM
MAE, why ask a question involving a conjunction? You have unlimited questions, and you get much more information by asking each conjunct separately.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:29 PM
Was his ability to use his vocal faculties at his job affected by his sore throat?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:29 PM
Probably they were, Tia.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:30 PM
Is that relevant to what went horribly wrong? I guess not.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:33 PM
Did his sore throat get progressively worse as the day went on?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:34 PM
Actually, the sore throat went away at 3:41, as a result of the application of Ricola.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:35 PM
Is the solution at all related to the scenario (aside from the relation of being the arbitrarily asserted solution "to" this scenario)?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:35 PM
My current estimate of how long it will take for y'all to get the answer: a year. Anyone want me to just give it away?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:36 PM
I call bullshit. That was so madeup post-scenario proposal.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:36 PM
136: Yes. But I'm one of the haters, and I feel that way about 10 comments into any of these threads.
I ahng out for the snark, and because I'm a sad and lonely little man.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:37 PM
Ok, the Ricola thing was made up just now. But only because I'm frustrated by Tia's weird sore throat fixation.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:37 PM
Is his sore throat actually relevant to what went horribly wrong?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:38 PM
No, Tia, not in the slightest.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:39 PM
You haven't answered 135, or the two conjuncts of 128 (which I hereby ask in case you demand that they be asked separately).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:40 PM
Was news concerning the unspecified wrongness which is at the crux of this riddle broadcast on TV?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:40 PM
The answer to 135 is yes. The first conjunct of 128 (was the wrong-going bad for him?) is hard to decide. Let's put that aside for now. The answer to the second conjunct (was the wrong-going good for others?) is "Yes".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:43 PM
143: No.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:44 PM
OT, but it would be nice if the site overlords could change whatever it is that makes portions of the archives invisible to Google. Earlier today I was unable to find the original reference to my waking each morning to Debbie Gibson tunez, and now I cannot find the thread in which someone posts as "bridgeplate" simpliciter. This is cramping my style.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:48 PM
Was the wrong-going within the sphere of his personal life? Was it within the sphere of his professional life?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:48 PM
He didn't realize it, but he was actually dead. He was killed when an intruder broke into his house, but because his marriage was strained and for various other reasons, he did not realize that he was a ghost -- and anyway, this one kid has some kind of special powers that allow him to see ghosts, and since the man is a therapist, he thinks that the kid is one of his patients. This scenario took place on the first day he was dead, thus representing his first "mistake" (wrongness).
Alternative scenario: Raised by his aunt and uncle on the remote planet Tatooine, the man worked as a farm hand until one day he is recruited by one of the last remaining Jedi knights. Events transpire until one day (this day!) he gets in a duel with his father, who has become a freakish half-man half-machine with fearsome Jedi powers, in which his hand is cut off. Being a Jedi knight is considered his "job" in this scenario, although he does not get an official salary or health benefits. He then has to wait 8 hours in the emergency room at Cook County Hospital, destroying all hope that his hand can be reattached and requiring him to be retrofitted with an electronic replacement that (eerily!) takes him in the same direction as his father from a certain perspective.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:50 PM
Wein-ro, the archives aren't closed to google. Try your search on yahoo.
Yes, MAE, and I say again to you: yes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:50 PM
Did he discover that he was, improbably, his own grandpa, as per the humorous country classic?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:51 PM
I alert all players to the update on the front page of the post.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:51 PM
No dice, Adam, at least with respect to your second proposal. It's already been established that he works in an internet-equipped office.
As for the first, can the dead have sore throats? Hmm...
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:52 PM
In this case, MAE, I am an autocrat. You will not win by coming up with interesting proposals. Remember, this particular instantiation of the game-form is primarily designed to illustrate the ridiculousness of the form in general.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:53 PM
SHould I buy this belt buckle?
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:58 PM
Yes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:59 PM
Boy Ben, I thought you were just chain yanking, and then I thought I would humor you when you complained about no one playing, and now I really regret it.
I continue to maintain that enjoyment or non-enjoyment of this game hinges on feelings toward relatedness and independence, because most of the people who hate it express resentment of depending on or being controlled by someone else. But it's okay to say, just temporarily, hey, I'll make it my goal to see what this other person has in mind. There is nothing autocratic about that. You assume that the person is doing it in good faith and there's something coherent, if not unsilly, at the end. You're just demonstrating that its possible not to play the game in good faith; you're not making an interesting point about its essential nature. You're like an abusing boyfriend arguing that relationships are hell.
In other words, don't hate the game, hate the player.
And I never said it was a riddle. I said it was a game.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:00 PM
Is the wrong-going all of one kind?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:01 PM
Wow. My faith in Google is shattered.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:06 PM
They also kowtow to the Chinese.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:07 PM
I don't think I'm playing in bad faith. I really do have a story answering to the scenario.
MAE: I'm not sure I know what you mean by that.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:07 PM
Also, is it still my turn?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:08 PM
Tia, what do you mean by "relatedness and independence"?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:09 PM
You're playing in bad faith if you're giving me that he has a sore throat but that's irrelevant to some other thing I'm supposed to know. There has to be a finite set of things you're supposed to know and they're supposed to cohere into a story. "Irrelevant" is supposed to be one of the answers the answerer can give.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:09 PM
Oh, ok. I thought I was limited to yes/no answers. It wasn't bad faith, it was ignorance!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:10 PM
Does the question "what went wrong" pertain to the man in the description?
Does the "what" refer to an event an ordinary person would call discrete?
Is the "what" independent of the man as an ordinary person would judge its independence?
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:11 PM
160: What I was getting at in 157 was, are the things that go wrong all related to each other (beyond just the fact that they are part of the scenario)?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:13 PM
I mean, is it more important for you to feel independent, autonomous, and in control, or is it more important for you to feel you have successful relationships with others? Obviously, both are important in some measure to everyone, both to some extent depend on the other, and if you put people in different contexts they'll emphasize one or the other, but it's probably fair to say (if John Doris doesn't come by to castigate me) that some people tend to emphasize one more than the other. It's frequently theorized that women are more concerned with the self-in-relation, men with the self as independent and discrete, although I think later work showed those preferences were highly context dependent and you could get men and women to exhibit the opposite preferences easily (now John Doris loves me again). I could try looking up some of that stuff if it's of interest.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:14 PM
You're not playing in bad faith in the sense that you have an answer; you are playing in bad faith, given that you yourself don't *care* about the answer, but only about making/proving the game annoying. It's the difference between laughing with, and laughing at.
In short, the point of this thread is that Ben is being a little bitch. But to be fair, we knew that going in.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:16 PM
A little priss, B.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:17 PM
I'm not sure I'm in agreement with Tia's theory about relatedness/indepence, though.
But then, I suppose I would say that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:17 PM
169: ??? We haven't banned the word "bitch," have we?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:18 PM
I'm not sure how informative yes/no answers will be to you questions, Andrew, so in the interest of wrapping things up:
If what you mean is, are the wrong-goings actually connected to the man, yes.
An accurate and complete description of what went wrong would involve reference to more than one discrete thing.
You'll need to tell me how you think an ordinary person would judge its independence for an answer to this questions to be meaningful.
166: yes, all the things that go wrong are related to each other.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:19 PM
No, it was a joke. Not a good one, apparently.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:20 PM
169: lint puppet!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:21 PM
Is the scenario written in standard English?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:22 PM
166: yes, all the things that go wrong are related to each other.
How is this possibly consistent with 140-141?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:22 PM
Did the wrong-goings all occur at the man's workplace? If not, did some occur en route, and some occur at the workplace?
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:23 PM
He had a sore throat. That's not what went wrong.
Ok, remember how I wasn't saying whether or not things were relevant at that point? The sore throat is irrelevant to the set of things that went wrong. The members of that set are related to each other. That's what I meant.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:25 PM
No and no, andrew.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:26 PM
Do the wrong-doings bear some identifiable and reasonable relation to your initial description?
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:27 PM
How is a sore throat something going right?
And see, if there are distinct sets of things we're trying to figure out, you're playing in bad faith. And do not tell me about ignorance. You understand the point of this game; you're just choosing not to play it right in order to "prove" it's a bad game, when all you've proven is that you're a bad player.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:29 PM
Tia: I'm not sure it's bad faith. I thought Ben was playing the right way, too.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:32 PM
No, Tia, I really thought I was restricted to yes/no answers. Henceforth I will say what's relevant and what's irrelevant. Anyway, the sore throat was preexisting, hence wasn't something that went wrong that day. (MAE asked this in 58.)
Do the wrong-doings bear some identifiable and reasonable relation to your initial description?
By the standards of the drowned man? Yes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:35 PM
Let me ask this differently. Will any of the elements in your description be an easily identifiable causal result of the wrong-goings?
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:36 PM
Debbie Gibson tunez
Bridgeplate simpliciter
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:39 PM
If not, then your description really doesn't adhere to the game-form.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:42 PM
Are the wrong-goings financial in nature?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:43 PM
I'm not just talking about yes/no answers; I'm talking about what you're trying to get people to do.
If you didn't understand before, I'll explain it (that's for you, Weiner):
You give a few details of a scene. Your initial details should be both incongruent and suggestive, so as to give your fellow players ideas for questions to ask. They should not have to attempt, as I did, to create categories of all possible events and winnow from there. Your details should describe some elements of the endpoint of a coherent narrative. Your goal is to get people to tell you what happened in that narrative. There should not be discrete sets of unrelated information you try to get the players to guess. It's a story. The goal is to have the players tell you the story.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:43 PM
When the full story is known, it will easily be seen why the man behaved in the way he did.
MAE, they are not.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:43 PM
Well, that's not enough though. There must be more to it than a bare consistency with the underlying scenario, which is what your description seems to involve.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:45 PM
Wait, let me take that back. I can't really explain this without giving large portions of the game away. Suppose you want to eat an orange, and you think you have some at home. But when you get there, you find out that they're all moldy because they were left out in such a way that encourages mold growth, so you don't eat them. Is what went wrong related to eating?
Andrew, if it will be seen why the man behaved as he did, that is more than consistency.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:49 PM
Ben, was he not supposed to go to work that day?
(You still have not justified the inclusion of a supposedly irrelevant element in your mystery.)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:50 PM
Tia:
It seems like what you're saying is that it's OK to leave out information, just not too much information. Is that right?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:52 PM
I do think that it is permissible to blatantly subvert the conventions of the game by making the story so blatantly not incongruous that one does not know where to begin. cf shaggy-dog jokes.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:53 PM
Well, I'm multi-tasking inefficiently here. Yes, it may be more than bare consistency. But, to repeat what Tia has already pointed out, the game-form description involves some surprising and incongruous set of facts, and the challenge is to invent a story which explains how such an incongruous set of facts could come to exist. The incongruity is a self-limiting part of the game; more importantly, the incongruity is an entertaining part of the game.
Your description is entirely ordinary, and therefore does not meet the criteria required by the game-form.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:54 PM
[fixed matt's link]
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:57 PM
Here's an incongruous set of facts: on the surface, everything appears to be just as it ordinarily is. And yet, something major has gone wrong. We stipulate that it is not a case of suburban ennui, or the like.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:59 PM
I like it when there are spontaneous outbursts of funny doggerel and slash fiction. That seems like it might be to fun to institutionalize.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:59 PM
Does the man act in such an ordinary and not-unusual way in an attempt to cover up the wrong-going? Or in an attempt to ignore the wrong-going?
(Dammit, there's got to be a pony in here somewhere!)
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:59 PM
195: UNLESS the story isn't actually written in standard English.
Is what went wrong that Ben Wolfson wrote the post that will destroy Unfogged from the inside?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:00 PM
193: It's more about the quality of the information. The elements you choose should provoke curiosity in the game player, and there should be a limited set of possible explanations for them. There are only so many ways a drowned man can non-nonsensically get into a tree. Wolfson's story is not so limited.
194: You are arguably playing a different game, or at least you're playing a less fun version of this one.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:00 PM
There are only so many ways a drowned man can non-nonsensically get into a tree.
You know what actually would be entertaining? Try to come up with a whole lot of stories about how a drowned man could get in a tree. Really tax your creativity.
That would be entertaining.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:02 PM
Answer 192, Ben.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:02 PM
Eh, I think that's still too vague Ben. The puzzle must be entertaining and self-limiting, much like Jeopardy questions must be conceivably answerable, or at least subject to educated guesses, by the players involved.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:04 PM
202: Ben, that's what you DO in the game. You can't get to the answer unless you can come up with different scenarios. The ability to answer the question different ways is not devalued by the game.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:04 PM
#200: The demise of Unfogged has been oft predicted, but it seems to be its own perpetual motion machine.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:05 PM
Tia, either you or someone else said that what you do is narrow the field until you get to the RIGHT scenario. That is manifestly different from just tossing out a bunch of scenarios without bothering to calibrate them with any set of conditions held by the master of ceremonies.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:06 PM
195: I do think this gets at what makes me less than fond of these games. When Tia plays a game, the people who will do well (?) are people who think like Tia, and make the sorts of connections and see the same incongruities that Tia does. When Ben plays the game, we're trying to guess what Ben could be up to. We know he's trying to prove a point. So I come up with three possible answers: easy & dirty ("nothing's wrong"), irritating and pointed (something to do with a shaggy dog), or so obliquely related to the facts disclosed that you essentially have no chance of guessing it (quit and make fun of Ben from the sidelines).
It's the type of game that I think people are likely to enjoy most when run by someone who thinks much like them, I suspect. In this case, the only person who will be able to guess the answer is, obviously, Cornel West. (Batsignal!)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:06 PM
Well, as an argument against the game I think this little experiment has itself gone terribly wrong.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:08 PM
For instance, here's a possible scenario for how a drowned man might have gotten into a tree. He was in a forested park with a lake and was essentially a sort of silvan base-cum-bungee jumper—an outdoorsy thrillseeker. He had climbed up a tall redwood and secured his bungee cord to the tree, and then about himself, except he didn't do the hottest job. His plan was to jump out of the tree and reach his lowest point right over the placid surface of the lake. However, owing to his poor job securing the cord to the tree, when he jumped his weight caused the cord to slip down the trunk, and he actually ended up beneath the surface of the lake, where his cord got entangled in a fallen tree, trapping him. He drowns.
As time passed, the tree and his clothes both rotted away. Freed from the branches, the cord jerked back and, because his clothes were no longer really present, rendering him effectively thinner, and because he was wet and a bit slippery with watery mosses or whatever those things are, his body was flung from the cord, and he flew out over the forest, his body landing in a tree some miles away.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:13 PM
What's wrong with quitting and making fun of Ben from the sidelines? Isn't that basically the regularly scheduled program here?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:14 PM
But no one would leap right away to proposing that.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:14 PM
Ben, that's a silly "answer." if the tree rotted, the body would surely have rotted, and you wouldn't have a "man" hanging in a tree; you'd have, at best, a skeleton.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:16 PM
That's dumb. Bungee jumpers wouldn't tie to the trunk of the tree or they'd bounce back into the base.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:17 PM
The tree was much older than the body, and only actually needed to be strong enough to keep him down long enough to drown.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:17 PM
And that would be a dissatisfying solution to the game, Ben. It's simply a boring scenario. The two scenarios presented thus far have involved a swimmer being scooped out the water and drowning, and cannibalism. Also, the scenario depends upon some very fine details (the cord gets entangled and the tree rots) that are not amenable to winnowing by yes/no questions.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:19 PM
When Tia plays a game, the people who will do well (?) are people who think like Tia, and make the sorts of connections and see the same incongruities that Tia does.
I didn't make up either the drowned man or the abalone, and lots of diverse groups of people have gotten there. It's not about thinking like me, I don't think.
Ben, the game consists of the tossing out + winnowing. You object to the winnowing, but it helps motivate the tossing out by giving it a goal. The person who can think of lots of ways a drowned man could wind up in a tree (and who has a talent for asking pertinent questions) will do well in the game. The rightness assigned to the answer is arbitrary, but it's still a fun journey. Maybe I should revise my theory and posit that people with irrationally strong antipathies to this game are people who are really afraid of being wrong, and can't see when wrongness is just an inconsequential construct to create a goal-oriented game, rather than a brainstorming session, and don't like the idea of temporarily, artificially, and lightheartedly priveleging someone else's notion of right over their own.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:19 PM
pwn!
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:20 PM
210 -- And see, if we were playing with my cool new improved rules (version 2.0!), you could have jumped in to the drowned man thread with your excellent bungee-jumping story and started answering people's questions on your own. People would then have to keep track of the parallel universes that you and I were describing and bring the two stories to fruition.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:24 PM
Osner, you're crazy. One of the frustrations of the form is going back and forth figuring what the questions are to each answer.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:27 PM
That seems like a pretty baroque, and, uh, insulting theory, for which you have no evidence (I don't mind 20 questions or that game where you announce that you spy something with your diminutive peeper—I guess that's a variant of 20 questions). And I don't see why the tossing out needs external motivation. Frankly, I see the game as involving a hell of a lot more winnowing than it does tossing out. If I were thinking of a number between 1 and 400, you could winnow it down pretty fast with just a few questions. Why would you start tossing out guesses until you had a fairly constricted range? The situations here are even more complex. There's no profit in tossing out solutions until you've got a pretty good handle on what's going on. Being able to think of what might be relevant is important in knowing what to ask, granted, but it's not the same.
I will own that my proposed situation is improbable, but I would rather come up with tons of such situations and have them criticized & refined on internal consistency/plausibility grounds—that, to me, is what's enjoyable. I don't need to be spurred on to do that by the promise of getting something right.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:32 PM
"proposed situation": that is, with the bungee cords and whatnot.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:34 PM
As far as the objections to the bungee-jumping situation goes, the snopes.com site that was linked here explains that the original diver-in-tree scenario was physically impossible; but minor hitches like that seem not the point in this game. And the explanation involved the phrase "donkey dick"! And no one remarked on it! Sometimes I despair.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:38 PM
I think Osner's version would only work with nested comments.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:39 PM
11: Everyone who complains about how rigid the puzzles are seems to neglect that it isn't really rigid to ask your interlocutors, for the moment, to suspend disbelief and try to arrive at someone else's vision. It's not like having a variety of ideas is disparaged in the process; the person who can think of the most possibilities will be the best at the game.
It's pretty rigid when the revelation of the specific scenario you had in mind causes you to suddenly delete the whole thread. It's pretty flexible when you open a new thread for an alternate scenario.
I will now read the next 200+ comments.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:40 PM
I will now read the next 200+ comments.
The thing to get out of them is: donkey dick. I'm going to be insistent about that.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:46 PM
I don't think it's baroque, and it wasn't intended to insult. I was responding, I meant somewhat needlingly, to someone who's devoting a great deal of effort to telling me how stupid something that I and a lot of other people enjoy is. I understand that Unfogged is place where people get all in each other's shit, as the kids say, and I don't really care. (I care more about this irritating parody game) but I don't think you have cause to be sensitive now.
If you don't mind 20 questions, etc, then you've basically given up your theoretical objection here (you can certainly keep "I just don't enjoy it"). Twenty questions is just as "straitjacketing". You don't have to like to play. But I don't know why you went to all the trouble of making up a faux-variant to make fun of people who like it and actually encouraged them to play. If you were really ingenuous with this "a man went to work" scenario, then you didn't understand the rules, and you might have asked someone before you assumed you did.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:47 PM
you might have asked someone before you assumed you did
I don't get this. If you assume you know something, why would you ask?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:57 PM
The thing to get out of them is: donkey dick.
A buddy of mine from college had an extended shaggy dog story that ended with the punch line, said by a querolous old lady:
"Is it...mule dick?"
To this day I don't get it. But it was funny anyway.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:57 PM
Ok, I still have many, many comments to read - and I'm a slow reader - but on Agatha Christie I believe Raymond Chandler's big criticism is that in order for Christie's scenarios to work out she very often has to make it so that certain characters turn out to have acted in ways completely contrary to the ways they'd been developed throughout the story previous to the time the solution is revealed.
(On the other hand, at least one of Chandler's novels has Marlowe solve a mystery on the basis of facts not all of which have been previously revealed to the reader. (Unless I really didn't notice those facts, even after checking and double checking.).)
In the Tia question game, however, there is no prior character development to work against so they're not analogous.
(I loved these games when I was younger, by the way, but have no strong feeling either way.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:59 PM
eb, I opened the thread for the purpose of playing the game. Since that purpose seemed negated, nothing else important had happened on the thread; no one had made a joke, etc. all there was at that moment was the answer to the riddle and Michael being, in my opinion, extremely unpleasant, and me responding to him, I thought I would redirect people's creative attentions elsewhere before the thread became too substantial to delete.
I'm sorry if you thought I was wrong to, I don't really feel like I can vigorously defend it, but only explain my reasoning.
it's a small thing, it's true, but it sucks to have to hear the answers early to games or riddles you would have been interested in playing or figuring out. I always regret it. Once you've heard the drowned man in a tree one, you can never play as questioner again.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:00 PM
"Querulous", chops.
I apologize for my unnecessary rudeness, Tia.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:02 PM
Once you've heard the drowned man in a tree one, you can never play as questioner again.
Yes, it's like losing your Innocence.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:02 PM
That kind of innocence is well lost.
I leave as an open question what other kinds of innocence might also be well lost.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:04 PM
(and I've enjoyed my experiences figuring them out, and would like to preserve that experience for other people. I've actually just been trying to do something nice for people by devoting time to answering questions. It's actually not surpassingly entertaining to be the answerer in blog format. But I always had fun asking, and thought other people wuld have fun answering the questions.)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:04 PM
230: at least one of Chandler's novels has Marlowe solve a mystery on the basis of facts not all of which have been previously revealed to the reader.
Which one? I've read them all, I think, except Playback. Also, I don't necessarily think that's wrong, at least I don't always see mysteries as puzzles that the reader ought to be able to solve in advance. More, a bargain that when we find out what happens it will have had made sense. Though if Marlowe, as the narrator, is holding back that's obnoxious. (Also Chandler is not always about the solution; I'm not convinced the solution to The Little Sister makes sense.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:05 PM
Tia, I appreciate the joy you bring to people with your Friday games, even if they aren't my cup of tea. And I think you have shown extreme restraint for playing along with Ben and not posting a new game consisting of "A man goes to school one day, to all appearances just as he does every day, reads, takes his lunch break, returns from lunch, reads some more, and goes home. Why must he be a little bitch? Give an accurate and complete account.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:07 PM
Hah! That couldn't possibly be about me, since I don't do nearly enough reading to answer to that description.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:08 PM
Tia, while I don't particularly enjoy the games, I did and do appreciate the generosity you demonstrated in doing them, and the willingness to innovate--it means that the blog is continuing to grow, rathe rthan repeating the old forms.
(As I said above, I like it when all of a sudden everyone's trying to top each other in mini creative writing contests. I think it would be fun to have a weekly feature where some interlocutor assigned a topic and/or form.)
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:10 PM
I was trying to guess what you grad students did all day besides futzing around on the Internets.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:10 PM
A man goes to school one day, to all appearances just as he does every day, crys, takes his lunch break, returns from lunch, crys, masturbates, crys, and goes home. Why must he be a little bitch? Give an accurate and complete account.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:13 PM
I'm really trieing hard to not to say anything about spelling in 241.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:15 PM
236: It's the The Little Sister. I don't have it with me, but Marlowe says something to the sister like "You told me X" and if you check out all conversations with her, X is never revealed. I still like the writing, though, which is the main reason I read his novels (except Playback, which I've also not read).
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:15 PM
Okay, Ben, I certainly haven't meant to give offense to you either, and I'm sorry I did. Thanks, Chopper and Becks for the luurve. I was thinking also thinking an Unfogged advice column could be fun.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:15 PM
You're trying to climb on to a roof and are offered "possible solution 1" and "possible solution 2" but no amount of questioning reveals the nature of the possible solutions, only that they are solution 1 and solution 2. Finally you choose the second: why?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:16 PM
You assume that the possible solutions are being given to you in the order they've been attempted in the past, and reason that the first one has always failed and people have had to move on to the second.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:18 PM
243: Gene Wolfe does that all the time. He will say, "That is why x happened when y" and you go back and you read the passage that takes place at y and there is nary a mention of x. And while you're flipping back to check this he steals your fudgsicle. Aargh.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:24 PM
242: You hardly succeeded, now did you?
I swear to god, I must have a brain tumor or something. My ability to write and proofread is just slipping through my mental fists like grains of sand.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:24 PM
Of course, I'm also a little drunk.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:25 PM
So am I right, or what? Eb?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:26 PM
Obviously, he's a little bitch because he's deeply unhappy with his masturbatory technique.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:29 PM
Yes, that's also why I cry all the time.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 10:30 PM
250: If by right you mean, "is your solution the one that a kid who was probably around 10 years old at the time and who liked coming up with bad puns was thinking of?" then the answer is no.
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