SCAVHUNT what.

[insanitysraving]

Article I-Name

Section 1. The name of this organization shall be The Official University of Chicago Official Scavenger Hunt Organisation Committee, also to be known as The Great Hunt, The Scavenger Hunt, ScavHunt, Scav Hunt, the Hunt, That Thing That Left All Those Cans in the Maroon Office, ScavCore, The Fucking Scavenger Hunt, The Scavenger

Comments

[seekingferret]

It's a thought-provoking question whether the current scav, with its outlandish requests for impossible items, is more interesting than the '87 scav which mostly asked for difficult and farflung but realistic items. I suppose it takes a different sort of person to do well in one or the other.

[insanitysraving]

I think a lot of the change has not only to do with increasing crazy in general but also the INTERNET. The internet makes it easy to know odd facts (like song lyrics, and what the largest church tower is) and order rare products. Therefore, it isn't as fun or challenging to search those things out any more. It's pretty obvious looking at it that today it would take much less effort to fulfill the 87 list than it did at the time.

[insanitysraving]

that really didn't have much to do with your question, now I come to think about it. It was just kind of an observation on why maybe the lists changed so much over time?

[seekingferret]

Mmm... the Internet also forced a lot of changes in the Mystery Hunt- again, things that were easily googleable were no longer good puzzles. Crosswords thus had to become tricksier- nothing is just a straight crossword anymore. And there's a lot more image-based puzzles now.

One of the puzzles in this year's Mystery Hunt, "Nationwide Hunt", would have fit perfectly at Scav- it required people to find random words in deliberately ungoogleable locations across the country, then assemble them into the puzzle.

I think if when you're designing the list you test to see how googleable the answers are, you can still craft a fun 'normal' scav.

[insanitysraving]

That's true: internets can't be the only thing responsible for scav changes, otherwise scav would probably have ended up more like the mystery hunt. Half of the fun of scav is the judges kind of going "WHAT IF" and then things appearing and it seems like over time they've gotten a bit drunk on power, shifting from rare things to impossible things. So now there's a sentiment in scav that if you actually just BUY an item that you are cheating in some way.

Maybe mystery hunt comes closer to a 'normal' scav because you are still looking for POSSIBLE facts, even though these are in fiendish-puzzle form?