Lauren Woolsey: 00:09 Hello and welcome back to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility. I'm your host Lauren Woolsey, and I'm here today with Chip Beauvais to talk about a lot of his different puzzle projects that we've seen on Twitter and Break Kickstarter and all sorts of places. Welcome Chip. Chip Beauvais: 00:27 Hi there. Thank you. Lauren Woolsey: 00:29 So this episode's a little bit different because we're not talking about a specific game, but rather the kind of culmination of all of these different smaller projects that you've run in the past and what got you into the sorts of puzzle aspects. So, why don't you tell us what first drew you to creating puzzles? Chip Beauvais: 00:50 So, my first online puzzle project was the Twitter account, 'A Little Alliteration', and it was actually inspired by my daughter. She's six now, but she was a baby at the time and teaching her about words and vowels, I found that she really reacted well to different sounds and in particular she really liked alliteration. So, words would start with the same sound over and over, you know, would either get her attention or she reacted really happily to them. (Lauren: 'Aww, that's cute'). So, I started thinking about how... I started thinking about how much fun alliteration is and sort of the puzzle aspect of it built out from there. Lauren Woolsey: 01:32 Very cool. Yeah, I... I remember when that was a new account and I was immediately intrigued by it because there's not a lot of innovative stuff that appears on Twitter kind of out of nowhere. And all of a sudden there was like a weekly word game. So, from there, what were the other projects that you built up? Chip Beauvais: 01:52 So, there were a number of different Twitter accounts that I played with. So, some of them sort of survived longer and other ones, you know, I would play with the idea a little bit, but it wouldn't really have, um, it either wouldn't generate enough puzzles to be of interest or the solutions weren't really interesting. So, another puzzle that I built out on Twitter was one called 'Vowel Movements'. (Lauren: *laughing*). And this one was particularly tricky because instead of just keeping the first sound of the word the same, it would, um, in the puzzle, you would take an initial and an ending constant and you would only change the vowel between them. (Lauren: 'mmm hm') So, if you could imagine like Matt and mutt and met and then stringing these words together to make a sentence. And this was also around the same time, again with my daughter, what I did was I took a six sided die and I put the different vowels on different sides. (Lauren: 'hm'). So, I'd write down an M and a T and then just turn the die and pronounce the different words to sort of show how, you know, how vowels and consonants work. Lauren Woolsey: 03:06 That's a really neat idea. Chip Beauvais: 03:07 So, sort of a... alongside this, the other thing that I'm interested in is sort of writing programs that generate puzzles. So, most of these puzzles weren't sort of created manually or created sort of individually, but for 'A Little Alliteration', I would look up all the possible words that started with a letter sequence and then see if there was a group of them that would, um, you know, that would form an interesting sentence or an interesting idea. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). And one of the things I had to play with was actually the number of letters that would be the same at the beginning of the puzzle. So, I found that if there were just two letters that you were keeping the same, then it would admit too many possibilities (Lauren: 'Ahhh, right') and four letters would be too many (Lauren: 'Or too few). So, that's where... exactly. So, that's where I settled on three. So again, with a lot of these, there's a lot of experimentation early on until I find a format that works well for the puzzle. Lauren Woolsey: 04:11 Yeah, absolutely. I know that my... for some reason my brain struggled so much with all of the 'Vowel Movement' puzzles, but I really like the idea of that dice with the different vowels on it. I think if I had put that in front of me and like used it to try to do the problem solving, I would have... I would have gotten there a lot sooner a lot of the time. (Lauren and Chip: *Laugh*). Chip Beauvais: 04:30 Yeah, it's really hard because a lot of the, in the 'Vowel Movement' puzzles, the ones that I enjoy writing are very dense. So, you could say like, um, you know, to use the Matt/mutt/met example, you could say, I met Matt's mutt and that's a lot of fun to say as a solution. (Lauren: *laughs*). However, as a puzzle it ends up with I blank blank blank. (Chip and Lauren: *laughs*) (Lauren: 'Right'). So, there's really no guidepost. (Lauren: 'Right') So, it turned out to be a sort of a disconnect from the puzzles that I found enjoyable, but also the puzzles that were, you know, remotely possible for someone to solve. Lauren Woolsey: 05:14 Certainly. Yeah. And it's always interesting 'cause you also have to be limited then by the Twitter character count, which for most of the lifetime of this puzzle was... was 140 characters. And so, I definitely applaud your skill at being able to come up with something that fits into that kind of format. Chip Beauvais: 05:33 That's true. There's a third type of puzzle that I did called 'Magic Word Squares' (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). And so, a word square is a five letter word and a stack of five of them on top of each other where you can read the first word across, but you'll also read the same word down by reading the first letter of each word in the list. And the same applies the second word is composed of the second letters of all the words in the list. And this is something that I can't imagine what it would take to try to create this by hand. So, instead again, there's a computer program running that figures out, you know, which words can be used to sort of weave together in this way. Lauren Woolsey: 06:20 Yeah, I was always curious and my friends and I kind of talked about how you could possibly come up with these, but computer program makes sense (*laughs*). Chip Beauvais: 06:29 Yeah, part of the problem is developing a good word bank because you don't want to use words that are too obscure or words that are, you know, not common enough or not really seen as words like, you know, is micro a word? You know, I don't know, that's a, (Lauren: 'Sure, sure) that's an example of something that I would probably avoid. But for those, I'm giving the first letter of the top word, which usually had something to do with that week's theme (Lauren: 'mmm hm') and, uh, crossword-like clues for the remaining four. And that's a place where I did run against the Twitter character count limit. (Lauren: 'Right'). So, sometimes the clues would be, you know, a little bit more terse or a little bit more difficult for someone to figure out. Lauren Woolsey: 07:13 Yeah, just so that it could actually fit. (*laughs*). (Chip: 'Exactly'). Now, I also want to talk about the Break Kickstarter project that you had, but before we do that, I want to make sure that we get to the topic that we ask all of our guests, which is, what does accessibility mean to you? Chip Beauvais: 07:27 So, accessibility, especially in the context of puzzles, is really making sure that the puzzle is fair and considering what sort of knowledge you're relying on the solver to have. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). So, one example actually from the Break Kickstarter project, was... one of the topics that I used was, uh, Hitchcock movies and that's something that, you know, it's specific to a particular culture and sort of a particular time. So, that was most of the puzzles I did had more to do with the meaning of words (Lauren: 'mmm hm') and less about specific cultures. One of the other things I found was there were a number of people doing the Break Kickstarter project for whom English was not their first language. And it was interesting to see how they approached the puzzles differently. (Lauren: 'Right'). And it really brought to mind some of the places where I was using idioms without really being aware of, you know, of what someone would have to know in order to be able to solve that puzzle.(Lauren: 'mmm hm') Lauren Woolsey: 08:34 Yeah, so for our listeners, can you go through the Break Kickstarter project as a whole, then? And then we can talk about some of the thoughts you had that made you think more about accessibility for it. Chip Beauvais: 08:45 Sure. So, a while ago I'd thought about sort of manipulating Kickstarter as a platform. And one of my ideas was to create, sort of, a murder mystery type thing (Lauren: *laughs) where the conceit around it would be that there is a, Kickstarter project that's running live that's going to cause the end of the world. And the goal of the puzzle is to figure out which of those Kickstarter projects it is. 'Cause there's, you know, thousands (Lauren: 'mmm hm') or hundreds of thousands of Kickstarter projects at any given moment. And the solution the solvers would have to come to was that it was actually this Kickstarter that they were involved in. (Lauren: *laughs). So, the final twist would be you had to go through the Kickstarter, figure out all the puzzles and then deduce that this was actually the campaign that was going to end the world. And then if you figured it out, you would then drop your pledge. And that was how you win. (Lauren: *laughs*). Lauren Woolsey: 09:51 To prevent it from succeeding. It's perfect. Chip Beauvais: 09:54 Exactly. So, that was sort of the initial idea. And I ended up sort of toning it down a little bit, I would say, where essentially the Break Kickstarter campaign was a set of puzzles that you could play and you would, um... in most Kickstarters you pay for something that you're going to receive after the campaign is over and this is the inverse of that where you pay to have access to puzzles while the campaign is running and when the campaign ends. That's it. You're done. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). You've sort of... the rewards have been delivered as part of the campaign rather than after the campaign. Lauren Woolsey: 10:35 And I really liked the way that you handled the different pledge levels. Normally that's for, you know... the smaller pledge are like two copies of the game and I really liked that it was the different teams that you could put yourself into. Chip Beauvais: 10:49 Yeah, that ended up working differently than I'd anticipated because one of the things is I was alternating between having the pledge levels be teams and having them sort of be avatars. So like in a, in a fantasy setting, right? You would have here's the mage, here's the fighter (Lauren: 'Oh, sure') and you could pick your class. And then everyone would sort of be pretending to be the same individual person. (Lauren: 'mmm, mmm hm'). But by creating teams, I set up some expectations that were actually countered to the way I had set up the puzzles (Lauren: *laughs*). In particular, when using the word 'team', people expect to be able to work together to have a common goal and they expect that if one person solves it, then that's enough, where I really was tracking the sort of which individuals had solved each puzzle. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). And so, some players would say 'Oh, okay, someone on my team figured it out. I don't need to, you know, I don't need to get confirmation for my answer'. And so in that way, I couldn't really tell if people were playing, (Lauren: 'Oh sure') or if once someone on their team solved it, you know, I would, I wouldn't get the same feedback from them. And the other thing was that each team got a subset of the puzzles and in order to see the bigger picture, you had to share your solutions with other teams. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). And people were very suspicious about this because they thought, well, I want my team to win, (Lauren: *laughs*) so why would I help the competition? Lauren Woolsey: 12:28 Yeah. We put ourselves into that mentality when it's teams versus teams. Chip Beauvais: 12:33 Yeah, exactly. You know it didn't cause anything to go horribly wrong. It's just, I feel more that there were psychological impulses and motivations that players had that I didn't fully take advantage of because I didn't put thought into sort of this tribal approach (Lauren: *laughs*) to puzzle solving. Lauren Woolsey: 12:54 Yeah. I... I'm sure you didn't anticipate exactly how it would go once you suddenly had dozens of people working with the creation that you'd made. Chip Beauvais: 13:03 Yeah, exactly. So, one of the things about the teams is I thought it would be an interesting twist to introduce a new team about halfway through, or a little bit more than a third of the way through. So, I set up a new team and you know, a very sort of suspicious team that, (Lauren: *laughs*) and I thought, okay, this is something new to relieve some of the crowding on the individual teams. (Lauren: 'mmm hm'). What I didn't expect was that a lot of people felt that they would be betraying their team (Lauren: *laughs* "Right') if they switched sides. So I, I hadn't anticipated that. And so not as many people - Lauren Woolsey: 13:42 Yeah, within a couple of days, everyone already had all that loyalty. Chip Beauvais: 13:46 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I thought, you know, there's a smaller team so you have, uh, you know, uh... selfishly you have a bigger chance of having an impact by joining a team that only has four people as opposed to staying on a team that has like 30 people. (Lauren: *laughs*). But there was a surprising amount of loyalty as you, as you say, (Lauren: 'Right') no one wanted to abandon their team. (Lauren: *laughs*) Lauren Woolsey: 14:09 Yeah, that was a very fun project to be part of. Chip Beauvais: 14:13 Thank you. There was one other thing about accessibility in particular and representation that I wanted to point out. I find it hard to create Kickstarter videos. I know that they're a real important part of the campaign. So, I sort of crowdsourced the video for this project. Lauren Woolsey: 14:31 Oh, I remember that. Yeah Chip Beauvais: 14:32 So, I reached out to a number of people and I gave each of them a line that, again, was actually part of another hidden puzzle and I tried to make sure that I had, you know, representation from, you know, different genders and races and ages across the different people that I asked to be part of the video. So, I hope that that came across at least as, you know, as inviting, but also as, you know, solving puzzles is something that's not specific to a particular group of people, but it's, it's sort of a human thing. Lauren Woolsey: 15:11 Absolutely. Well, we will make sure that we have links to the three different Twitter accounts that you made, so that people can kind of look through the archives at all those different puzzles, (Chip: 'Okay, great') especially if anyone's learning about them for the first time, they'll be able to solve all those puzzles. That's one of the nice things about having it there. Chip Beauvais: 15:29 And so, one more thing I would add is another podcast that your listeners may already be listening to, but if they're not, they should, is Board Game Blitz. And if you listen to that podcast at the end after the credits, they actually have board game themed, 'A Little Alliteration' puzzles, some of which I've worked with them to create and others they've, sort of, taken the format and run with it themselves, so. Lauren Woolsey: 15:55 Oh, that's fabulous, *laughs*. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It was really enlightening to see kind of the thought process behind a lot of things and the fact that for something like Break Kickstarter you can't really play test it in the same way that you do with games because you need to have people running through those puzzles and that was kind of the first time that you got to see all of the psychology of all of that. Chip Beauvais: 16:18 Yes, and I definitely learned a lot from the experience and hopefully if I do another mass puzzle at some point in the future I'll be able to bring those lessons to bear. Lauren Woolsey: 16:29 Absolutely. Well thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening. Chip Beauvais: 16:32 Thank you for having me. This was a great discussion. Speaker 2: 16:34 For more information about the topics that we discussed in this episode and the links that we just mentioned, we'll have those in the 'about this episode' section on our website @playabilitypod.com and if our listeners have any questions or comments that you'd like to share with us, please email us @playabilitypodatgmail.com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening. Play with a new perspective.