Summer 2011 Season

Scott Hardie | June 6, 2011
It's time for a new season in the goo game! Preparing GooCon this weekend took me longer than expected, so I'll have to save the full ten-week schedule for the new goo season until tomorrow or maybe Tuesday.

However, I am prepared to announce three minor changes to the game effective immediately:

- You'll now earn an extra chance for every fifteen goos solved during the regular season, instead of every ten.

- When you play in the tournament, all guesses will remain hidden until you record your own guess. This is intended as a simple alternative to the convoluted revelation of guesses last season.

- When all tournament players have recorded their guesses for the day's tournament goo, it will become available to all players immediately

Good luck in the new round!

Scott Hardie | July 22, 2011
Starting with the "Poe-pourri" goos next week, I'm trying out a new format for clues that should make the game easier. Feedback would be appreciated if you feel like commenting.

Chris Lemler | July 22, 2011
You could extend the clue a little bit instead of three or four words in the clue

Scott Hardie | July 22, 2011
That's essentially the idea starting next week, more words and more detail. The shorter clues were an effort to reduce the goos down to more of their essense, and to allow for more creative wording than the previous sentence-based format did, but that brevity has often resulted in harder goos. The new clues next week are an attempt to combine the best elements of both clue formats (creativity + detail).

Chris Lemler | July 22, 2011
well you also could give a sub category and keep the clues to help figure out the goo's

Scott Hardie | July 24, 2011
Like "other categories" used to be? Arnold Schwarzenegger would be cross-listed in Movies, Government, Contests (competitive body-building), and Family, something like that? I gave up on those partly because of the time it took to research a person's entire career to make sure that I didn't any categories, and partly because of the frequent controversy (public and private) that occurred over whether I had missed a sub-category or included one that didn't really apply, either way confusing somebody out of the correct answer.

Take Arnold for instance: Should he be listed in Controversy because of the child out of wedlock that has gained so much attention, or was that entire news story only a subset of his pre-existing fame for other things (it wouldn't have been reported if he was just some guy instead of a movie star and former governor)? You may also have come across his Japanese commercials; are those noteworthy enough to list him in Advertising or too minor in the big picture of his life to be counted? Should the commercials land him in Internet since they're something of an online meme? He's also been in a famous motorcycle crash that could count in Accidents. You could make a case for his inclusion in Sports, Sexuality, and Fads as well. "This way lies madness," I would say to the person attempting to apply a set of categories that everyone can agree upon.

From time to time, I've considered adding a "tag" system to the game, something that would allow you to create any tags you want for each celebrity and see what other tags people have created. In Arnold's case, this would make possible such niche categories as "Austrians" and "Kennedy family members" and "Batman villains." It wouldn't have to be complete, because it would be entirely voluntary on the part of site users. What keeps me from adding this is figuring out how to reconcile it with the nature of the game: It would keep people from guessing current goos until late in the week to see if other people tagged them first with helpful hints, and few effort would go into tagging old goos because who cares? It's a competitive game anyway, so I don't know who would go to the trouble of voluntarily tagging any of the goos and helping fellow players; this isn't NNDB or Wikipedia. This is one of those ideas that I've kicked around for a very long time that will probably never happen.

Scott Hardie | August 18, 2011
Fyi, there seems to be a problem with today's brackets being redrawn based on players going back and guessing at goos from earlier this week. I can't deal with it until tonight, sorry, but when I do, all brackets will be adjusted so that they're based on the outcomes of guesses within the first 24 hours like they should be. Please continue solving today's goo as fast as you can and ignore what the Current Scores page says about your opponent. Sorry for the trouble.

Scott Hardie | August 18, 2011
Short answer:

The problem is solved. Unfortunately, today's goo has to be removed from the tournament because some players saw it without activating it. The contest will resume tomorrow with the same brackets we had today. I'm very sorry for this. :-(

Long answer:

Some players have wondered how it's possible for tournament brackets to change after being announced at 12:00am this morning. The brackets are not set in stone; there's nowhere that I specify that X player will face Y player today. Instead, the Current Scores page draws all brackets dynamically based on a number of variables: how many players there are, how many extra chances they earned, how each player guessed at each goo along the way, et cetera. You may have noticed that it takes longer to load that page the longer a tournament goes on. It has to draw brackets dynamically for two reasons:

1) Some players enter a pending guess shortly before midnight, and I don't mark it correct or incorrect until after midnight. If the guess turns out to be wrong and that player is eliminated, the brackets need to re-align instantly, to account for the new number of players. This has caused confusion already, so I'll add a prominent warning to the top of the Current Scores page when yesterday's pending guess may affect today's opponents. (I used to stay up every night until midnight to avoid this, but it just wrecks my personal and professional life too much to do that over many nights. I'm considering changing the publish time from midnight to something like 9pm est instead so that I can monitor it.)

2) A tournament goo might need to be removed from the tournament after it publishes, if nobody solved it and all players are eliminated from the tournament, or if something weird happens like a player blurts out the answer in TC. (Don't get any ideas!) On such an occasion, that goo would be treated like a bonus goo; your guesses affect your lifetime score but it has no other bearing on the season. A new tournament goo would take its place in order the next day. The Current Scores page would need to re-draw the daily outcomes to reflect this.

All of this is fine, but it doesn't explain the magically re-aligning and self-correcting brackets today. What happened was, one of the players activated Tuesday's Literature goo back on Tuesday but didn't enter a guess before midnight, then returned today and entered a guess two days late. During the brief time that this player's guess was pending, the site treated it like a pending guess entered on time and didn't penalize the player, which radically re-drew everybody's opponents over Wednesday and Thursday (due to the butterfly effect). As soon as I marked that guess wrong a short time later, it snapped everybody's brackets back into the correct place. Obviously, I need to alter the site to handle the unusual scenario of a pending guess entered too late after an activation made on time, so that this doesn't come up again. I'll do that tonight. It's a rare scenario if it has only just happened now after three seasons, but my code should have accounted for it and I'm sorry that it didn't.

However, this problem cascaded into a second problem. As I wrote on June 5th at the top of this very page, one of the changes beginning this season is that after all remaining tournament players have entered their guesses, today's goo gets revealed early to everybody else. It's intended for the waning days of the tournament when there are only 2-3 players left and they both guess shortly after midnight; there's no need for everybody else to wait a whole 23 hours to see a goo that has already served its purpose in the tournament.

The problem is, due to the brackets getting so radically re-drawn for a few minutes, the site got confused as to how many players remained in the tournament and thought all of them HAD guessed, so it revealed the goo to everybody without requiring activation. At least one player deduced the answer without properly activating it first and sent me his time (I appreciate his honesty), but I don't know how many other players had ample time to figure out the answer and might take advantage of that. The only fair way to handle this is to strike today's goo from the tournament and resume tomorrow with a re-do. I am so sorry for the players who triumphed in today's brackets; I wish this had never happened. Tonight, I will revise the code that lifts the veil on tournament goos so that I have to activate it manually (or maybe I'll just delete it), so that this won't happen again.

I know that this was a long-winded and technical explanation, but I hope it clears up what happened and why we have to take the undesirable step of canceling today's tournament goo. What an irony that it happened on this celebrity of all celebrities. Please accept my heartfelt apology for the mix-up.

EDIT: Solve times are still on display for the players who activated today's goo before guessing. Please don't be confused by this; the goo is definitely removed from the tournament.

Erik Bates | August 18, 2011
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | August 18, 2011
As long as Erik has outed himself, then I may as well mention that a third code problem caused all of this in the first place: Erik guessed "SURRENDER" instead of "surrender," and my code was apparently too stupid to recognize capital letters. If Erik had guessed anything else other than the right answer, this same mess would have still happened, but the fact that his guess technically shouldn't have become pending in the first place just makes this extra-irritating. I guess this was bound to happen sooner or later, and today happened to be the day. I am not very proud of my work right now.

Chris Lemler | August 18, 2011
Well it was a accident it happens you still to good work on this site

Erik Bates | August 18, 2011
[hidden by request]

Steve West | August 18, 2011
I think you gave me indigestion too... bastard.

Erik Bates | August 19, 2011
[hidden by request]

Steve Dunn | August 19, 2011
Stock market is way down today. Thanks a lot, Erik.

Scott Hardie | August 19, 2011
The code changes that I described above are now complete.