Break this Code: “Tmb’a uism i xchhtm qv iv pwcz!”

Sponsored by Red Bull Mind Gamers

Participants will leave this session with a puzzle of their own design to stump their friends! We will learn about different kinds of puzzles, how puzzle designers approach puzzle creation, and the challenges of making a puzzle difficult but solvable.

Watch “Puzzling Out Puzzles” in preparation, a short video about what puzzles are and what kinds of puzzles exist!

The event will be streamed live on YouTube here:

Speaker:

Sara Verrilli has spent her professional career in the videogame industry, starting with the day she walked out of MIT’s Course V graduate studies and into a position as QA Lead at Looking Glass Technologies for System Shock. However, her game organizing endeavors started much earlier; she helped found a role-playing club at her high school by disguising it as a bridge group.

Since then, she’s been a game designer, a product manager, a producer, and a QA manager, in no particular order. A veteran of both Looking Glass Technologies and Irrational Games, she’s worked on eight major published games, and several more that never made it out the door. As a research scientist at the MIT Game Lab, she looks forward to corralling, encouraging, and exploring the creative chaos that goes into making great games, and figuring out just the right amount of order to inject into the process. And, while she still doesn’t understand bridge, she does enjoy whist.