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It’s been a struggle to come up with mental exercises that are difficult enough for the many, many brilliant folks who read mental_floss and visit mentalfloss.com. It’s difficult to develop puzzles that are (1) safe from Web searches, but (2) not impossible to solve. After seeing many difficult contests won in a matter of minutes, I’m taking this weekend off to reassess the Weekend Genius Challenge.
We get the most entries in creative-type challenges… having you write haikus using the two words from the ReCaptcha service, asking you to tell us where the “lost” hour went during Daylight Saving Time, and so forth. So we’re considering going that route for future WGCs. What do you think? Ideas, suggestions, and comments are more than welcome. In fact, if you’ll kindly take the time to chime in, we’ll pick a random comment and send the responsible party the mental_floss T-shirt of his or her choice. Thanks in advance.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to do Brain Games on a daily basis, with puzzles of varying description each weekday. And we’ll have results for the last two WGCs in a day or two. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Comments (18)
Comment
The creative challenges are a lot of fun and they do get the biggest responses, but I have to say that some of my best flossy memories are tied to the difficult puzzles – One of the best was when my whole family came together to try to solve the 60s music clip WGC.
What about if you do creative type WGC’s 3 weeks out of the month, and then on one super Saturday you can do the Ultimate WGC where you bring back the difficult puzzle challenges? That way you have the best of both worlds AND you also have more time to think up great puzzles.
posted by Jessica on 5-10-2008 at 9:47 am
I prefer the creative challenges, but then my brain isn’t working as sharply after having a baby 2 months ago. I changed my mind. I would rather have the difficult puzzles. My mind needs a workout.
posted by Amelia on 5-10-2008 at 11:44 am
Since I don’t usually compete in either the creative contests or difficult puzzles, I can’t say which I would prefer from the competitors p.o.v. But I do know that I get immense joy from reading the responses of other readers to the creative challenges and I imagine that it is much more entertaining for you and the crew to decide the winner(s) of the creative contests. I second Jessica’s suggestion since it will appeal to all the readers and WGC competitors.
posted by Kate on 5-10-2008 at 12:20 pm
I enjoy the creative challenges, but I also like to stretch my brain with more difficult tasks. If you’re worried about people finding the answer to a trivia question on the internet, maybe you could factor in soundbites or videos, things that can’t be put into a search engine.
posted by Jenny on 5-10-2008 at 12:45 pm
I think Jessica’s suggestion is absolutely perfect!! I sure would hate to see the hard puzzles go away altogether…
posted by Lisa on 5-10-2008 at 12:55 pm
I agree, I love the difficult puzzles, even though I’m always amazed at how quickly they get solved. Usually someone has a great answer before I’ve even gotten the puzzle! I think Jessica does have a good idea, and if the entire WGC is too much, do something where the second weekend of the month is a creative puzzle and the fourth weekend of the month is a difficult puzzle. That way everyone wins and you can come up with some real corkers!
posted by Amauriel on 5-10-2008 at 2:39 pm
The WGC is my fav part of Mentalfloss! I don’t care what type of challenge you do as long as there is a challenge! I think the creative one’s are just as good as the puzzles. JUST DON’T GO AWAY!!!!!!
posted by Sandy C on 5-10-2008 at 4:58 pm
I absolutely love the challenges and look forward to seeing them every week, even if I don’t always participate in them. I agree with what others have said - the mix of one type challenge one week and a different sort the next is cool. That way it enables people who might not have a particular skill set or inclination to at least participate some of the time.
posted by jenn on 5-10-2008 at 5:30 pm
I like the creative challenges the best as well. You can’t just google them and get away with it! I definitely think you guys could do creative questions alone for a while and come up with tons of great challenges.
posted by Anna on 5-10-2008 at 5:47 pm
I really look forward to the weekend challenge. I do enjoy the creative ones the most. However, I think my favourite WGC was last fall, when there was a series of word puzzles for names of countries. I liked it because it took awhile to solve.
posted by Carole on 5-10-2008 at 8:55 pm
Maybe not the most amazingly genius thing ever, more a test of imagination and luck, but the IMDB Keyword Quiz, which I came up with while a couple friends laughing at some ridiculous keywords that popped up for IMDB movies. You list off the plot keywords from a particular movie’s IMDB page, and people have to guess the movie. The general frequency of any given word makes searching the web a futile exercise, and as IMDB does only single-keyword searches, the most its search would do is narrow the choices.
Here’s an example set of keywords: Stepbrother | Breakup | Leg Injury | Oral Sex | Musical
Apparently you’ll find all these things in the recently-released Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The more obscure you go movie-wise, the stranger the keywords get, mainly due to people tossing out many keywords with little popular consensus, so if the movie itself is older or rare, you may want to narrow down the field to make the competition winnable and reduce the likelihood of frustrating someone into cheating the hard way by checking every movie with a particular keyword.
posted by Evil Timmy on 5-10-2008 at 10:34 pm
Please, oh please keep the challanges-the creative ones are the best. I read the mental floss blog everyday but I honestly look forward to the weekend challenge. Especially the ones like that where I can read about it before work on Saturday and think about it for two work shifts and spit it out Sunday night. I’ve yet to win-but please keep it up-it is appreciated!!
posted by Ste on 5-10-2008 at 10:54 pm
I think there is a challenge in just about everything we do in life, take for example common sense, what is common sense? The word today should be uncommon sense, since most people do not have it. Point is that’s the challenge,you could be smart and not have common sense.
posted by Robert on 5-11-2008 at 9:36 am
Oh I forgot logical, what is the best logical answer to the question, this too is a challenge, each person has a different logical answer, this is what I like about the challenge
posted by Robert on 5-11-2008 at 9:50 am
Please keep the WGC! It’s always an entertaining experience, whether one is participating or just reading others’ responses. Just keep ‘em coming.
Personally, I prefer the difficult ones, puzzles and posers dealing with logic, vocabulary or math. But the creative ones are great fun, too, and everybody has a chance to win. That’s the American way — fair and equal to all. [cue music]
You could say: Mental_Floss put the *us* in Genius!
posted by buddz on 5-11-2008 at 4:39 pm
what about special guest writer once month from submissions from readers? I’m new to the site and enjoy it very much.
posted by david w on 5-11-2008 at 6:32 pm
I think that making the WGC’s more creative is a great idea. It’s not often that people are given the chance to flex their right-brain muscles.
What I always think is fun is the ‘out-of-context’ game. it’s basically where a group of people (usually bored, and usually my friends) sit around and build a while conversation on a random sentence that can be taken completely out of context, and the others chime in and add to it. For example: if someone started out by saying “That thing finally broke. Thank God it didn’t hurt anyone!” and someone else says “Yeah, it almost knocked that guy out yesterday”, and so on. Hilarity and nerdiness ensues.
posted by heather on 5-12-2008 at 12:37 am
I don’t like the usual puzzle ones, only because I know by the time I’ve seen the post, somebody has probably already solved it. Creative ones give everyone a more level playing field, making it more about skill than speed.
posted by MH on 5-13-2008 at 8:28 pm