Brainstorming

This is a page for initial brainstorming... "a sort of free-form, judgment free repository of ideas that anyone can add to".

AD: One idea being, props in the laboratory could change in between teams' visits, so that you'd get the sense that you were going backwards or forwards in time (the most obvious - a wall clock).

AC: Wow...what an interesting idea. Maybe when they return to the lab they could discover that it is seven hours earlier than when they left (just change the clocks)...or what about seven days earlier? We could put fake newspapers in the rack, etc. Or maybe seven years later...it's now a Quickie Mart or something. Then each time they return it's a different time. Maybe the backstory is that the radiation in the lab is making the building swap with older or younger versions of itself. Or maybe the players have somehow infected themselves with time instability...or their purposely jumping around...

AC: It would be really cool if the players could somehow meet themselves. Maybe we could simulate it secretly video taping each team and then later have them somehow see themselves on the security cameras as they're doing something else.

AC: Be a temporal mechanic! Earn big bucks! [some sort of parody of those ads for being schools teaching one to be a airplane mechanic.

AC: Perhaps in our funny Doctor When web site (having a web site for each game seems to be standard operating procedures these days) we'll all be listed as lab assistants to Doctor When and we can list a brief CV for each of us including things like "Ph.D. in Temporal Mechanics from the University of Meat Machine" (or some other sly reference to each person's primary Game team) as well as listings of our fictitious papers we've published in fictitious journals.

AD: Location ideas--There's Squid Labs at the old Alameda Naval Air Station, which would allow excursions into clue sites in Oakland and Alameda, they have a lot of space, are very creative, and might really enjoy hosting us:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2007/09/fast-kites-from/

There's also this place:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/29/BU86190CQU.DTL

DS: On making puzzles solve for location names--Might there be some room for creativity here? For example (this is on 30 seconds thought, so surely more thought can do much better) -- a map that has, say, A-M on top and N-Z on bottom, and A-M on both sides. Then, with instructions like: "The next location is at the intersection of line segments given by the first and last bigrams of the answer -- bigrams always coding one top-to-bottom line and one left-to-right line." With lettering as given above, there is no overlap in top-bottom and left-right lines, so a word can uniquely specify an intersection. (Of course, not all words can be used with the lettering given above). Letters do not have to be evenly spaced, so we can get the intersections we want, and there are enough of them that people are not likely to try them at random (and they are not likely to be fruitful if they do -- and we can still require the solution word in order to get credit). And sure, there are no doubt logistics to work out with this idea.

AC: Maybe a musical puzzle that dealt with time signatures, or maybe the pieces of the music are out of correct time sequence. Maybe the pitches and note durations are Caesar shifted from each other.

AC: Maybe a musical puzzle with backwards masking.

AC: Making time travel affordable: a time-share time machine.

AC: For Doctor When's intro lecture on the history of time travel he should show pictures of all the pop culture depictions (as though they were real ideas and not movies) and explain (with derision) why they didn't work. (phone booths, the Time Tunnel, the chair in H.G. Wells "Time Machine"; having naked robots from the future hunt you down).

AC: Perhaps we could make a sundial puzzle in which the sun has to be in a certain position for them to solve it. Of course, that would be very limiting because of the timing. Maybe instead they can discover that the sundial can be rotated so that they can adjust its "readout." Or maybe they can use one (or more!) artificial light sources...or adjust mirrors. Maybe they sort of have to enter a "combination" (sequentially or simultaneously).

AC: A time machine for dumb people could be called a RETARDIS (or an idiot proof one).

AC: Maybe at some point we could tell them that the time machine works well enough that they can travel *through* time, but only observe...they can't get out. They have to make a "loop" through time, i.e., visit some space-time coordinates and then return to the present. We can't control the precise movements through time, but we can set it to sort of trace the path that Doctor When has been bouncing through time.

We'll shove them in the time machine and they can only "look out" through a monitor we've installed inside. (And we'll tell the players that we'll record all the imagery so they don't have to take notes during the actual "journey.") During their "journey" we make them watch a video we created in advance. It will show Doctor When in all kinds of famous moments in history and other weird situations: in the background as Caesar has his triumph through Rome, being chased by dinosaurs (we can also show him accidentally step on a butterfly and say "oops!"--an homage to the classic "butterfly effect"), watching the Declaration of Independence be signed, at the San Francisco earthquake, in the future, etc. [We can do this with a blue screen and then inject Doctor When into stolen footage from various movies; I think it will be OK if it looks hokey; if the players recognize the films we've ripped off even better.] We may or may not have Doctor When frantically trying to communicate something to the time travelers.

In between each time jump we can have the screen display some techno babble, like "re-establishing temporal cohesion." We should also have all sorts of lights, sound effects...and maybe even shake the floor like an amusement park ride.

Once they pop out of the machine, Rodney will ask them what they saw. He'll then ask them to figure out the next time and place that Doctor When would appear in the series because that will help him calibrate the time machine--that's the puzzle! (We hand them a DVD of their journey to analyze in depth.)

Concerning the details of the actual puzzle, we can encode the data either directly into the scenes we show them or in the actions that Doctor When is performing (that would be cool!) or we can "cheat" by having techno babble "readouts" overlayed onto the screen at all time and that's the puzzle data.

AC: Could we somehow use the relativity "twin paradox" as a puzzle?

AC: Alexandra suggested we explore corporate sponsorship to fatten our production budget.