Logic puzzles galore

First of all; happy pi day!
So what I thought was a while ago, but looking back turns out to be 2.5 years ago, I wrote about Sporcle. Sporcle is a trivia and quizzing website that is sure to keep you occupied for longer than you planned. I've been on it for almost 3 years now (44 days to go, as the website tells me) and after being a passive user for most of that time, I decided I wanted to actually contribute my own quizzes to the website. Partly because I wanted to 'give something back', but mostly because designing quizzes is almost more fun than making them.
(Warning: the rest of this post will contain shameless self-quiz-promotion.)
My personal favourite category (apart from some random great quizzes like TripAdvisor reviews of Middle Earth or Llama or duck (check out the URL on that one)) are logic puzzles. So I decided to make one of those, and to my great surprise there wasn't a quiz version of one of my favourite games, Werewolves (or Mafia, as it is also known). So I decided to make that; I created a field of 5x5 squares, gave the boxes a name, made some of them into werewolves, and designed a path through the quiz so it could be solved. And then I tried whether it worked, and I published it. Fun fact: people do not all think the way you think. As a result, they will not interpret the clues the way you want them to. Also, they don't know things unless you tell them. So, apart from the technical creation part (which is pretty easy, really) this first quiz was also a lesson in quiz construction. I got a lot of helpful feedback, I improved the quiz based on that, and it works pretty well now.
Now with the werewolves quiz, a player doesn't know all the answers before they start to play. There could be 5 werewolves, or 8, or 10. This makes the quiz more difficult and also harder to create. So next I decided to make a more 'closed' logic puzzle, in which all answer options are given beforehand. Picking a topic close to my own interests, I made a farm animal quiz in which each square contains a chicken, horse, pig, or sheep. I thought keeping it down to four animals would make it pretty easy, but as it turns out, the fewer options you have, the harder it is to design the quiz. But I got there in the end. Also, I like to put in a couple of jokes to keep things light, which you can more easily do when players will not interpret them as possible clues. And then I did some beta-testing. I asked a friend to try out the puzzle for me, to see how she would solve it, and where she would get stuck, and which clues she would find ambiguous. And it was a revelation. Hints that seemed blatantly obvious turned out not to be so, and squares I thought would be solved second-to-last were suddenly solved much sooner because I'd overlooked a shortcut. So I improved the quiz based on that feedback, and after I published it I got zero commentary on the workings and a 5.00 out of 5.00 perfect user feedback score. Nice!
These first two puzzles being done, I decided to scout around for other topics of my interest, to see what subjects hadn't been made into puzzles yet. Sporcle doesn't mind multiple quizzes on the same subject (there are loads of Harry Potter and ISoIaF puzzles) as long as they aren't exactly the same, but I wanted to do something original. As it turned out, both Gilmore Girls characters and Disney animated films hadn't been made into logic puzzles, so I quickly created those two. I also started making walkthroughs, to show the players how they could solve my puzzles when they got stuck. Not surprisingly, they have been the most played puzzles I've created.
At a loss for new 'open' subjects, I created three more 'closed' puzzles based on my own interests; a cheesy logic puzzle (filled with cheesy puns), a school subject puzzle (my only 5x6 puzzle), and another farm animal puzzle (with cows, donkeys, goats, and turkeys). And then I was kind of stuck for subjects, until someone mentioned Shakespeare. There were some logic puzzles about Shakespearean characters, and some logic puzzles which featured his plays, but none that actually asked about only his plays (can you believe it?). So I made a Shakespeare's plays logic puzzle, and it got picked up by the Shakespeare curator, and after a couple of tweaks (and some more tweaks as the comments started to pour in) I actually got picked by that curator to feature on the Shakespeare page! Wooh!
Yes, it is a small and weird world, the world of Sporcle, and small things can make you happy.
What really does make me happy is seeing the number of people that play my quizzes. The number of plays per day varies wildly, as you can see below. The spike on March 5th was 200 plays of the What subject? quiz on the same day, no idea why that happened.

Number of plays March 1 to March 14.

But the total number of plays is well over 5,000, and rising steadily.
The popularity of my quizzes varies wildly, with the Gilmore Girls quiz being the absolute front runner at 2,300 plays. The Shakespeare quiz, despite the curator pick, remains the least played.

Total plays as of March 14th.

I love the user feedback; some users will leave an appreciative comment about the quiz or the topic or the in-quiz jokes. Others will score the quiz on a scale from 1.00 to 5.00. I don't really know why my Disney quiz scores lower than the others, but I'm really happy with the 3 scores of 5.00 on the quizzes that took me quite some time and effort to create.
I've been hunting for new subjects for a while, but I haven't written anything since the Shakespeare quiz, which in itself took me almost 3 weeks to make. It feels as if the first outpouring of creativity has dried up, and I'm looking for new ways to make these quizzes. I'm sure I will make some more in the future, but this is not something you can rush, as with all things that require inspiration.
End of the shameless self promotion. If you try out one or more of my quizzes, I hope you enjoy it!

Hag-seed

To make good on my promise to myself to read more from certain lovable authors, I ditched the John le Carré novel and started in another Atwood novel; Hag-Seed. Now this is not just any novel; Hogarth is doing a series of Shakespeare-retellings by contemporary authors in contemporary settings, and Hag-Seed was inspired by The Tempest. Or rather, not just inspired by, it is basically the story of The Tempest, including a thwarted theatre director, who aims at getting revenge through staging The Tempest. This sounds very forced, and it probably could have been in the hands of a lesser author, but the novel is actually brilliantly constructed.
Before we get into that, let me get this out of the way; I have never read The Tempest, nor have I ever seen a staging of it. It was one of those 'we won't go there' plays during my studies, and it isn't one of the plays that ever shows up at the local theatre (or not-so-local Shakespeare theatre). There is apparently a film version with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera', but I managed to miss that too.
So, no prior knowledge of the play or the story, although I did read up on the main plotlines and themes on Wikipedia (I found out in the end that there is a short synopsis at the back of the novel, but I'm one of those people who stays very far from the final pages of any novel). Also, the main theme is pretty obvious from the get-go; revenge. The main character, Felix/Prospero, has been thwarted out of his profession as artistic manager of a Shakespeare festival, and now that he has fallen low, he wants his revenge. After an exile of twelve years (not unexpectedly the same amount of time elapses in The Tempest), he finally sees his chance when his former enemies visit the prison in which he now works in a Literacy through Literature programme. It isn't hard to persuade the juvenile delinquents to work with him to get his revenge, and the end result is somewhat disturbing, but also a very entertaining read.
The 'actors' are asked to add their own thoughts, scenes and songs to the play, resulting in some very nice raps (I never thought I would ever write the phrase 'very nice raps'), which gives a triple layer to this retelling (the original play, the novel-as-the-play, and the 'modernized' version they perform). Again, this might have been very forced, but even though you can see what will happen way in advance, the plot never gets in the way of the story. One funny thing that happened was that I kept thinking the play was set in England, and it took about a third of the book to realise it was actually set in the US. Somehow, 'Shakespeare festivals' feel like something Britain-only, and the whole novel oozed Britishness to me. (And then it turns out that Margaret Atwood is actually Canadian, so I have been putting her novels on the wrong shelf of my bookcase for years!)
Anyway, it's a great read, maybe less so if you're not a Shakespeare/theatre geek like me, but even then the whole development of the main character and his young actors will still bring a smile to your face. Amazing, how something that should have been very heavy and deep with Literary Meaning, can still be so very light and pleasant.

Queen Lear

To keep up on my Shakespeare, which is something they command you to do before you are given your MA in English Literature, I've visited no less than two Shakespeare plays so far this year (and I foresee a third in the summer, when the open-air Shakespeare Theatre in Diever will stage Romeo & Juliet). But in winter we decided to stay indoors, and watched the plays at the Stadsschouwburg in Groningen.
The first was Hamlet, my fifth or sixth Hamlet in all, played by The Tiger Lillies. I had never heard of them before, but Wikipedia tells us they are "a cult British musical trio", which is not who you expect to put on a Shakespeare play. To this end, they teamed up with 4 actors, who played the main characters during the real 'acting' parts of the play, while they connected the acted bits through song and dance and a bit of cabaret. There wasn't much in the way of props or setting, just one big panel with some windows and doors, which could be tilted all the way to the ground when they didn't need it. It was brilliantly done; good acting, wonderful music, the (sometimes very high-pitched) singing was great and very relevant to the play. It also showed that you don't need to put on all of Hamlet exactly as Shakespeare has written it; you can just take 4 people and the main scenes and the gist of the story, and it will still work. I've seen Hamlet done with 6 actors who also played their own musical instruments at the Globe in London, and that one was slightly better on the acting part, but this one was better on the musical part. Anyway; a great show.
There were several other Shakespeare performances in the Stadsschouwburg this year, but we decided to stick with the one as there were other plays to be watched and it is still pretty expensive. But then one of the other plays was cancelled because the theatre went bankrupt, and we decided to visit another Shakespeare play just because we could. This was to be Queen Lear, an adaptation of King Lear by Toneelgroep Amsterdam.
Now while Hamlet had been basically the play that Shakespeare intended, with some scenes and characters removed and some musical intermezzos added, this was something completely different. Not only had they translated the play from English to Dutch, but they also reversed most of the gender roles. King Lear became a queen, his three daughters were now three sons, and their two spouses (the dukes Albany and Cornwall) had become gold digging women. Kent was there, still a male, and the fool was also still male. These were all the characters, but they proved that you can play Lear with only 8 people (with one doubling as the madman on the heath). But if all that change wasn't enough, they also changed the setting to the current time; not a kingdom divided, but a company, with several obvious references to the recent banking crisis. You might think that this is a bit too much for poor King Lear, and in some ways it was. At first you kept trying to remember what the 'real' play was about, and what they changed and why they may have done that, and what was going to happen next. But then the story got underway and you kind of forgot that you were actually watching Lear, until some of the typical Lear stuff started to happen, like the storm or the blinding of Kent or the 'Never never never never never' line. Which was good, because it is recognisable, but it also felt a bit tacked-on, as if they were trying to prove to themselves that they were still really playing Lear and not something else. They play in itself was well done, great acting and a good atmosphere, but during these typical Lear things it all felt a bit too contrived. King Lear is a universally recognisable story about old age and seeing your inheritance dissolve into nothingness, and they could have kept it just like that. I can imagine that when you tell people they're going to see Queen Lear you feel like you're obliged to keep in some of the typical Shakespearean stuff, but to me, it was not really necessary. The story was good enough on it's own.
But anyway, this was enough Shakespeare for a while, until Romeo & Juliet will start in Diever. That play will also be translated to Dutch, but otherwise they usually keep things original, and they have a large cast of volunteers so lots of characters will be there. It's good to see so many different versions of these classic stories, it shows how timeless and universal they are, even when translated to music or our modern times. But once in a while, it's still good to see the original thing, with lots of actors, in the open air.