Hint: short words first

August 20, 2024 11:53 AM

Gisnep (Gisnep?) is a new daily word puzzle from MetaFilter's own ironicsans.

Nitpickers' notes: the site is still in beta, and I've seen a couple of quotes that are probably not reliably attributed. Neither has affected my enjoyment of the game. Well, the misattributions a little, but I got over it.

posted by Horace Rumpole (64 comments total)

Hey I like it (and it works okay on mobile, just medium clunky).
posted by phunniemee at 12:16 PM on August 20 [6 favorites]

I played it and now I want to play previous day puzzles. Which is testament since I usually hate word games.
posted by Lord_Pall at 12:17 PM on August 20 [4 favorites]

This looks neat!

One annoyance I have with this (and many other similar games) is the constantly ticking timer. Watching it go while playing just stresses me out and keeps me from really enjoying the game.

(ironicsans, any chance of an option to disable or hide it?)
posted by fader at 12:19 PM on August 20 [11 favorites]

For those that want more, this style of puzzle is called "quotefalls" in some pencil and paper puzzle books. this site has a daily puzzle with a week's worth of previous puzzles available. or you can buy entire books full
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 12:20 PM on August 20 [5 favorites]

that was fun and I'm not normally a word game person
posted by daisystomper at 12:25 PM on August 20

I got off on the wrong foot and had to backtrack but eventually figured it out. It took me ten minutes and sixteen seconds, though, so don't do as I did and get too committed to your guesses early on.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:30 PM on August 20

Ohhh...that was great! Can we play previous ones?
posted by victoriab at 12:31 PM on August 20

OMG, I loved playing these in the venerable Games Magazine back in ye olden days. I had completely forgotten about them. Thank you!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:41 PM on August 20

Wow thanks for the love! Today’s quote is a bit harder than usual, both due to length and lack of punctuation. Don’t get discouraged. Most of them are better.

Here’s some quick answers to questions I see:

Yes you will soon be able to hide the timer. I’ve heard from people who want a “Zen mode,” so that’s in the works.

I will also be adding a way to play previous days’ games.

I know, a lot of the quotes are of spurious attribution. I had a joke in an early draft of the “How to play” section about the sources possibly being misattributed because internet but I ended up taking it out for better clarity of instructions. Then I was going to make myself feel better by providing a link to a website I remembered that hunts down quote origins but when I went there it was so riddled with ads that I couldn’t in good conscience send other people there.

Yes, this format exists already, called Quote Falls as previously mentioned. I first encountered them in Games Magazine. I tried to add something new to make it a little bit different, so my big innovation is having some of the letters in the quote reveal letters in the source, which adds another type of hint. Typically you are given the source up front.

Also, I’m planning on a better mobile experience. I think I’ll have both a more refined version of the full game for people who want to play the exact same puzzle desktop users play, and also a more simplified “Gisnep Mini” for people who don’t want to squint at their phones.

Happy to answer any other questions about gameplay or (maybe more interestingly to some) how I made it without writing any of the code myself as an experiment in AI coding.
posted by ironicsans at 12:52 PM on August 20 [39 favorites]

I got off on the wrong foot and had to backtrack but eventually figured it out.

Yesterday I was at a point where I was like "Well either this word is 'shits' or I've made a mistake" and it was indeed the latter.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:59 PM on August 20 [3 favorites]

This is fun! I always enjoyed playing these with paper and pencil. (Yes, *pencil* -- hope my Clever Mefite rating doesn't take a hit.)

Thanks, Horace and ironicsans.
posted by jaruwaan at 1:01 PM on August 20

suggestion: dark mode! 😎
posted by taz at 1:08 PM on August 20 [2 favorites]

Huh, I’ve always heard these called dropquotes.

Interestingly if you’re doing them using computer assistance (eg with http://nutrimatic.org/ ) then you actually want to start with the long words (there are fewer possibilities). It’s definitely different if you are doing them as an unaugmented human.
posted by nat at 1:09 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

After 15 minutes and 38 seconds, I now know what it feels like to be ChatGPT.
posted by flabdablet at 1:14 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Dark mode huh? Well, I’ve been on the record against websites that use white text on black backgrounds since 2008, but perhaps if there’s enough demand I’ll figure out a way to make dark mode that’s still low contrast so it doesn’t hurt my eyes.
posted by ironicsans at 1:16 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Wheeeeee!
posted by Don Pepino at 1:37 PM on August 20

this is rad! though, i could use some tips...
posted by bluefly at 2:13 PM on August 20

That was fun! I'm glad to hear about the timer option coming, I also get stressed when it's visible. I don't mind seeing my time afterwards, but I hate having it ticking away visibly.
posted by tavella at 2:23 PM on August 20

For anyone who wants some tips, I made a little video last week for someone who wanted to see how I approach solving these. It’s about six minutes long, talking through my thought process. You can see it here.
posted by ironicsans at 2:32 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Oh hey, this is fun!
posted by BlahLaLa at 3:00 PM on August 20

That was fun. I think I prefer acrostics with their weird clues, but the "falling grid" works pretty well as a substitute, and requires a lot less squinting.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:07 PM on August 20

Neat! and HARD! I am a word game junkie so this one goes on my list for sure.
posted by Daily Alice at 3:14 PM on August 20

I used to do so many of these when I was a kid.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:30 PM on August 20

I, too, remember doing these puzzles in Games magazine. I’m impressed that you were able to do this with AI programming! I did not encounter any bugs and had a perfectly fine time doing it on my iPhone. In Safari.
posted by Emmy Noether at 3:30 PM on August 20

Awesome! I enjoyed it enough I made a shortcut to it on my phone’s homepage. No issues with playing it on an iPhone with Safari, except that I couldn’t backspace repeatedly to delete a whole word without having to re-summon the keyboard for each cell.
posted by ejs at 4:19 PM on August 20

ejs: Try starting in a cell that’s already empty and you should be able to backspace repeatedly without re-summoning the keyboard. I think. (This is one of the things I’ll work on improving when I do the proper mobile optimization)
posted by ironicsans at 4:30 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Thanks ironicsans, that's fun and well executed.

Flabdablet, same-ish time.

Tips:
1 - bit of masking tape over the clock, or an iron will
2 - look for small & common words, 'the', 'a', 'this/that' etc -- even a small entry reduces the available choices
3 - An uncommon letter is your friend. You may find you can narrow down the row it belongs in by looking where it would fall in words. For instance J would be rare at the end of a word.
posted by BCMagee at 4:35 PM on August 20 [3 favorites]

That was fun!
posted by bunderful at 4:52 PM on August 20

I enjoyed this and will play again, thank you! Another vote for dark mode.
posted by kinsey at 4:55 PM on August 20

I once wrote a silver for these that turned the whole thing into a giant logical expression and then called Z3 to solve it. It worked, but I think only sometimes -- sometimes Z3 would make bad choices and you would just be fucked. That's the problem with Z3 and other SAT or SMT solvers: extremely swingy in their performance, and not much to be done about it.
posted by novalis_dt at 5:12 PM on August 20

I love it! Quotefalls on the computer! Played very smoothly while typing on my desktop. 9:54.

Would totally be willing to add it to my daily list of games I play through. Like others have mentioned, while I couldn't care less about the timer, I'd love to be able to play previous days and track my stats with a login.
posted by stormyteal at 5:30 PM on August 20

Loved it. One suggestion: don't put the 'reset' button right next to the 'check' button. Ask me how I know...
posted by signal at 6:16 PM on August 20 [2 favorites]

@signal: Oof, sorry. A solution to that is coming too.
posted by ironicsans at 6:37 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Great work ironicsans!
posted by sixswitch at 6:55 PM on August 20

I’m short on work right now so if you want a basic accessibility review, let me know! I’d happily do it gratis.
posted by sixswitch at 6:55 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

@sixswitch Oh that would be great. I considered accessibility only a little bit for things like color and contrast. I would love to have an assessment of where it fails so I could make it more properly accessible.
posted by ironicsans at 7:10 PM on August 20 [1 favorite]

Very fun!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:55 PM on August 20

This is really cool! Well done!
posted by chbrooks at 8:21 PM on August 20

I once wrote a [solver] for these that turned the whole thing into a giant logical expression and then called Z3 to solve it. It worked, but I think only sometimes

The current puzzles will tell you which letters are in the wrong position if you've filled all the spaces but it doesn't match the quote. That behavior may change in an update.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:57 PM on August 20

Happy to answer any other questions about gameplay or (maybe more interestingly to some) how I made it without writing any of the code myself as an experiment in AI coding.

I read the “Making of” post linked above with its many mentions of employing AI, but it wasn’t until I solved my second quote just now that I realized—this is a game of choosing words to create a sentence based on context and best-guessing. ironicsans, you rascal, you built this to make us all experience what it’s like to be an LLM, didn’t you!
posted by ejs at 10:09 PM on August 20

Highlighting the current column's letters might be helpful. Played ok but not great on mobile Firefox, biggest problem was erasing letters. This is neat.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:22 PM on August 20

Tips:
1 - bit of masking tape over the clock, or an iron will
2 - look for small & common words, 'the', 'a', 'this/that' etc -- even a small entry reduces the available choices
3 - An uncommon letter is your friend. You may find you can narrow down the row it belongs in by looking where it would fall in words. For instance J would be rare at the end of a word.

Note that the quote may have punctuation that you can't see.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 11:25 PM on August 20

Mod note: This excellent post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:46 AM on August 21 [1 favorite]

UPDATE: I just pushed an update with new features which can now be found in a Settings gear. You probably need to refresh to the page to see it.

You can now:

* Hide the timer for a less stressful game
* Hide the pointers for an even cleaner game (those are already hidden on mobile, so if that’s how you’ve been playing you won’t see this option)
* Turn on word highlighting to help you see where words begin and end

Please let me know if I broke anything in the process!
posted by ironicsans at 5:55 AM on August 21 [6 favorites]

5:41 today, lots of words that felt intuitive to guess in the flow of the sentence (though my very first guess turned out to be off). No brokenness detected on desktop.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:17 AM on August 21

What fun! 3:13 for me! Definitely going into my morning game routine, joining Redactle, Connections, Wordle, Strands, and Pyramid Scheme.
posted by QuakerMel at 6:45 AM on August 21

6:36 for me today, after 7:10 yesterday. For whatever reason I struggled more with the words that wrapped today than I did yesterday.
posted by fedward at 6:54 AM on August 21

Might need to do some vetting on quote sources. The quote from 9/21 is attributed to a Confederate General and senior Freemason who supported the KKK. So what he's actually talking about in the quote sounds uplifting, but is actually about fighting for white supremacy.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:45 AM on August 21 [4 favorites]

And just to qualify my above statement, I know this is hard, and am not attributing any malice to the creator.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:58 AM on August 21 [1 favorite]

@Abehammerb Yikes. Apologies. I thought I went through and weeded out all the problematic quotes from my database but I missed that. I need a solution for this kind of thing because currently if I change the quote in the middle of the day, it will cause problems for people who left the game midway and plan on returning to it later. Maybe this time I plead ignorance and hope he’s too obscure for most people to notice. I just checked and at least I don’t have any other of his quotes in my list.
posted by ironicsans at 9:03 AM on August 21 [3 favorites]

I solved today’s #Gisnep in 09:08. 🎉
Think you can do better?
https://gisnep.com

I'm not very good at word puzzles. If my brain seizes on one possibility it's hard to look past it for another.

One trick that I can sometimes pull off is figuring out the name to help seed the quote. I managed it today despite not knowing who this person was.

The quote itself is fine, even if the author was oblivious to its implications.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:54 AM on August 21

@ironicsans...like I said...THIS IS HARD. Kudos to you for even trying.

I once had to parse a computerized dictionary source file because my company used three random words from it to initially set a new hire's password. I was considered the only IT person both literate and dirty-minded enough to find and delete words. I have rarely giggled more in one day of work, but I'm sure I did not get 100% of the even truly questionable words deleted.

The root cause was someone getting something like "tribadism employee unwanted" on their first day at work. Turns out those million typing monkeys weren't Shakespeare fans, merely assholes.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:25 PM on August 21 [4 favorites]

I enjoyed this, but even more I enjoyed the description of the design and coding process. Thank you!
posted by aincandenza at 5:23 AM on August 22

This is wonderful, thanks!
posted by Kwine at 8:40 AM on August 22

As a software engineer who uses coding assistants every day, I would be pretty interested to see the "99.5%" AI-Generated code if it is up in a repository somewhere.
posted by Kwine at 8:43 AM on August 22

Gisnep! made it to Laughing Squid! Congrats, ironicsans!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 11:03 AM on August 22

Thanks for everyone’s kind words!
posted by ironicsans at 11:13 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

4:43 for the O.W. game.

Please add game numbers so we can refer to them by number.

Love this. Very smart design. NYTimes will probably make you an offer by the end of the year.
posted by andreaazure at 5:07 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

UI nitpick: on a desktop browser with a screen that's not tall enough to render the main page without scrolling, like the 1280x800 one on my crappy old laptop, modal overlays don't work quite right.

The Share Results modal isn't too bad because although it appears well below the middle of the viewport, only a tiny piece at the bottom is actually cut off. But the How To Play and Settings modals both get controls obscured that need scrolling to reveal, and the scrollbar and thumb stay attached to the background content that the modals have dimmed out and overlaid.

Putting the browser in full screen mode works around these issues; if the background window doesn't need to scroll, the scroll bar and thumb attach themselves correctly to the modal. Clicking on the modal and scrolling it with the arrow keys is another workaround too. But it would be nicer if (a) the small modals that don't actually need to be scrolled were vertically centred in the viewport and (b) modals that do need to be scrolled have a scroll bar and thumb available that the background window can't steal.
posted by flabdablet at 5:24 AM on August 23

All the above applies to Firefox, btw; Chromium on this same machine displays separate scrollbars for background window and modals.
posted by flabdablet at 5:26 AM on August 23

Thanks @flabdablet. I have it on my to-do list to fix this but nobody had actually complained about it yet. Your nitpick pushes it up on my list!

@andreaazure I’m thinking of dates instead of numbers. Is there an argument for numbers over dates?
posted by ironicsans at 7:38 AM on August 23 [1 favorite]

1:41 today—it helps when the puzzle is something you yourself quote all the time!
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:25 AM on August 23 [3 favorites]

I thought my time of 2:00 was respectable but that's almost 20% longer than 1:41. Well done!
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:50 PM on August 23

@andreaazure I’m thinking of dates instead of numbers. Is there an argument for numbers over dates? posted by ironicsans at 10:38 AM on August 23

Either works. Dates get a bit strange for those of us in AU/NZ vs the rest of the world, but people are used to that.
posted by andreaazure at 6:49 PM on August 23