[Palindrome] Information for people playing remotely

[Deborah Levinson <debby_levinson yahoo com>]

Eric and I have been talking about how to improve the Hunt experience
for players based outside of Hunt HQ. While we don't have a perfect
solution yet -- especially since we just started talking about this
today -- we have some proposals.

1) INSTANT MESSAGING. IM is a good way for remote participants to keep
in touch with each other as well as with those of us at Hunt Central.
If people have IM screennames they want to send me, I will compile them
all and post them on a Hunt web page. (See next item.) You should be
able to reach me via IM during the Hunt at debbylevinson (AIM),
debby_levinson (Yahoo), or debby (zephyr, assuming I'm logged in to
Athena). Most IM clients will allow you to set up group chat as well if
you want to do remote co-solving.

2) WEB SITE. I am going to try to put together a short web site that
lists our basic contact information and most important, shows current
puzzle status. There is nothing worse than claiming a puzzle and
solving it remotely, and then finding out that someone broke it hours
before. Hopefully I will be able to allow people to post to this page
remotely; if not, I'll figure out some other solution.

3) PHONE. Phone is a less ideal method for staying in touch with Hunt
HQ, because many of us may be deep in our own puzzles when you call.
Try IM first, or, if we're lucky, we'll have option 4 ...

4) MESSAGE BOARD SYSTEM. We do not currently have a message board
system set up, but Eric and I would like to. I don't know if I'm going
to have time to get this done today, though I know my ISP supports a
BBS system. If there is anyone else out there who has spare time and
wants to work on this, *please let me know.* We could probably even use
a system like EZBoard as long as someone is willing to take the time to
set it up and administer it.

Eric, have I missed anything?


Please note that while we encourage everyone to participate in the
Mystery Hunt, no matter where they live, we simply don't have a way
right now to make the remote Hunt experience as good as the on-campus
experience. If you think you're going to feel really left-out if you
participate at home, you may not want to play at all. We will do our
best to make the Hunt fun for everyone -- after all, that's our motto!
-- but it is especially tough to maintain community across the country
for an event that requires co-solving in close quarters.

And yes, we talked about webcams ;-) maybe next year ...

--debby

=====
Debby Levinson
debby alum mit edu

I feel that I have only a rudimentary smattering 
of information, and most of it's wasted on words 
like "rudimentary" and "smattering."
-- Columbine

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