Welcome to the Mastermind Season 7 Results Thread! Please note that the judges have only graded submissions that were submitted to the SUBMISSION thread before the deadline.
RESULTS
Congratulations to Stepan for receiving the highest amount of points with a score of 36 out of 40!
Congratulations to JL and Kard for receiving the second and third highest amount of points with scores 34 and 33 out of 40, respectively!
All prize winners will be contacted via email from info@mastermindbp.com shortly after this thread is posted.
All prizes come in the form of PayPal donations so you need to have an email that is connected to a PayPal account to receive the award(s).
Please keep in mind that the judge(s) have assigned grades based on the following marking criteria:
Communication /20
Creativity /20
Total /40
Communication:
For example, how well does the submission follow conventions of spelling, grammar, and structure? Are all formatting points followed?
Creativity:
For example, how interesting are the ideas? How well are they executed?
Finally, the judge(s) have provided all graded submissions with constructive feedback.
Thank you to everyone for participating in this season and we hope that you will come back for future seasons scheduled once every few months!
Thank you for your review! There sure are a lot of discrepancies in my text, including the dates. I changed the idea and its tone so many times during the writing that I got completely confused by the end myself. I started writing in one direction, then changed course, rewrote it, and then changed it again when I sat down to continue the story another day. That is how it works with time traveling, I suppose — total confusion. 😄
And of course, it is hard to imagine what life will be like in such a far future, and what problems our descendants will have.
Kardashiana7:
Congratulations on completing the challenge!
The use of case studies is a great idea, and very accurate to government briefings. The tone and register largely fits the task brief. Truman Television Industries is a fun name. Cheers for the trigger warning, never a bad idea.
Having more info summarised at the top would be helpful (date, specific department/recipient), who wrote the brief, and the subject/request) - both for fitting the brief format and for contextualising the piece. The “United States Government” is massive, and a classified document about a top secret spy would usually be restricted to/directed at a specific department/person.
The word ‘future’ is used quite a lot in the first paragraph. There is repetition at times, e.g. there is no need to mention twice that Truman was the CEO of TTI.
Overall, there is room for more speculative fiction - bar the machine itself obviously, the case studies could all plausibly have happened in 2024. What is new/different almost 500 years later? A more ‘fun’ case study would’ve helped (e.g. chartering life on other planets, some fancy new invention…), or you can add to the existing examples (e.g. in Case Study 1, an effect/cause of climate change that is new).
Communication 17/20
Creativity 16/20
Total 33/40
Stepan:
Congratulations on completing the challenge!
The redacted parts fit will with the brief. The use of a transcript is good, and allows you to get away with writing much more casually/creatively. Craigslist still being a thing in 2133 is hilarious. The self-fulfilling prophecy bit is fun (and realistic). I liked that you went beyond the task by writing the little intro/ending.
While Device X and ___ Special Agency are fine as names (the government and forces that be are often surprisingly banal), a more fun name could’ve been interesting (the CIA is notorious for backtracking fun acronyms, for example).
I would recommend reading the dialogue out loud to yourself just to double check that it flows naturally. I’d also recommend editing again from bottom-up, as the writing gets less tight towards the end. Optional but, in a transcript, it would be nice to add little details to indicate it is a transcript - for example stuff like [unintelligible] or “something something misused word [sic]".
The last line is slightly confusing/unclear - what is the new bot going to do in 2495?
Communication 17/20
Creativity 19/20
Total 36/40
JL:
Congratulations on completing the challenge!
Prophetor is a strong name. ‘Old Congress’ is a great example of showing not telling through the use of names. UBI and abolishing full-time employment through revenue from robot tax is a fun idea. The motivations were interesting and the “We were wrong” briefing ties it all together well and was a good twist.
“We’re going extinct” is a captivating opening line, and I love the dramatic but not melodramatic writing style, but it does slightly jar with the premise of it being a classified briefing to the Secretary of Defense. Similarly, the wide use of contractions makes it less formal - you can get away with the occasional “it’s”, but less so with “we’ve” and “we’re”.
20k years is an insanely long time - language, fashion, and customs will have changed dramatically in such a long period of time. Would be nice to see glimpses of that. Small comment but why does Doctor Humbracker being pale make him more recognisable as an intruder, and how does that link to him being tall (“as a result”)?
Communication 16/20
Creativity 18/20
Total 34/40