Like many annual activities, this year's MIT Mystery Hunt was completely virtual for the first time. Participating hunters needed to retrieve items sent into a parallel universe and bring them home. To do this, players wandered around in a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in which MIT was rendered into a fantasy world that the organizing team just happened to be developing last spring.
Says longtime participant Stephanie Howell, "It was amazing luck that Galactic Trendsetters were already working on an MMO of the campus before we realized how long social distancing was going to need to remain a policy. I'm honestly not sure if a hunt could have happened if the creating team had to change gears in June to something completely online. It certainly wouldn't have been this well put together."
