Solution: Sociology Meta

Answer: CLIQUE BAIT

Written by Jonah Ostroff

In the Sociology round, each puzzle comes from the profiles for two of the five sea creatures. Thus, each sea creature has four answers. These four answers form a sub-meta, where each answer extracts a letter in a way hinted at by the name of the creature.

Hammerhead

Each answer is cryptic wordplay for a letter.

EARLY CAMBRIAN: C (beginning of CAMBRIAN)

TALK BACK: K (end of TALK)

YOUNG AT HEART: U (middle of YOUNG)

DEEP END: P (end of DEEP)

Octopus

Each answer contains two (possibly diagonal) compass directions, one at the start and one at the end, which can be read as semaphore.

EARLY CAMBRIAN: J (East-North)

WRACK ZONE: Q (West-Northeast)

WILD ORCHIDS: B (West-South)

SHIITAKE: F (South-East)

Salmon

Each answer contains a silent "dummy letter".

TALK BACK: L

WRACK ZONE: W

THE LISTENER: T

BUSINESS: I

Starfish

Each answer is a movie title starring an alliterative actress.

YOUNG AT HEART: D (Doris Day)

WILD ORCHIDS: G (Greta Garbo)

THE LISTENER: T (Tessa Thompson)

ARRIVAL: A (Amy Adams)

Tuna

Each answer contains a double letter.

DEEP END: E

SHIITAKE: I

BUSINESS: S

ARRIVAL: R

The meta page shows ten pairs of fish, each with a thought bubble. In each pair, the left fish’s thought bubble contains a letter, and the right fish’s thought bubble is blank. For each answer, we can find a unique fish on the left column which is thinking of one of its letters, and write the other letter extracted from that answer in the other bubble:

The letters extracted from the fish on the right spell the answer, CLIQUE BAIT.

Author’s Notes

This meta went through so many drafts that we had to enlist four different outside groups to alpha test it, because so many of the other authors got spoiled on earlier versions.

The idea of having five different letter extraction mechanics came fairly early, but it was less obvious how I should take the resulting 20 letters and turn them into a 10-letter answer phrase. The first few drafts involved finding the differences between the extracted letters in each fish. However, there’s no internal confirmation that you’re doing the right thing, so if you get one fish mechanic wrong you get nonsense letters, but it’s unclear where the mistake is. The new shell gives half of the extracted letters, making it easier to detect when something is wrong.

Another difference was flavor text. In early versions, there was flavor text cluing each fish’s mechanic. This meant that it was easy to get all of the mechanics with one or two examples. Most testers were able to guess CLIQUE BAIT with just 3 or 4 letters, and I didn’t want the meta to be solvable with just 3 or 4 answers. I changed to the pared down version, where the only hint to each fish’s mechanic is its name, so a lot of answers are needed before patterns emerge.

The removal of flavor text meant that the set of fish had to change a lot: there’s really no good way to clue the old Tuna’s “find the solfège note in the 7-letter answer, then use it as an index” (e.g. REPO MAN = E, EXAMINE = A) with just a name. So that was replaced with Hammerhead, and Grouper was renamed to Tuna. But then Sturgeon’s “find the letter you can delete to make a new word” (e.g. WHINE = H, MARIE = I) wouldn’t cooperate with Hammerhead: one really wants answers to be one word, while the other wants them to be two or more. Thus Salmon was born.

In the final version, testers generally found Octopus’s mechanic to be the hardest, and Tuna’s to be the easiest. I tried to balance this by making Octopus’s puzzles easy to identify. Meanwhile, Tuna got a bunch of audio clips, which most teams put off until the end.