We were at Rock Maze, near Deep Creek Lodge, when my daughters and their friends started up one of those sprawling, made-up-on-the-spot hide-and-seek games kids invent when they have a few acres of woods and not enough adult supervision to stop them.
I spotted where my younger daughter was hiding. The other kids, by this point a little band of allies, were nowhere close. So I did what any reasonable dad does: I leaned into it.
I changed my voice into an annoying, high Monty Python-esque troll voice and announced that I, the troll of Rock Maze, knew where she was hiding. I would share a hint, but hints have a cost. They would have to answer three riddles.
They agreed. Then I had a small problem: I did not, in that moment, have three riddles. So I did the very modern thing and looked some up on my phone.
This is where it fell apart a little.
The riddles I found were... fine. They were riddles. But having to essentially call “line” and look them up broke the moment. What I found was challenging, and the kids weren’t in logic-puzzle mode.
At one point, one of them threw up her hands and declared, "We don't need the chatGPTroll. We can just find her ourselves."
My wife, who was in earshot, laughed at the admonishment, and the name stuck.
They wandered off to search on their own for a while. Eventually — predictably — they came back, answered the riddles-three, got the hint, and found my daughter. Game complete. Trolls satisfied.
On the drive home, still riding the bit, I told them: "I'm going to make chatGPTroll into a website."
They gave me the look kids give when a parent has clearly promised something they will not deliver.
Today, I delivered. chatgptroll.com is live.
It's a small thing. It's a silly thing. But it's also the thing I want to keep modeling for my daughters: that the gap between "wouldn't it be funny if" and "I built it" is mostly just deciding to close the gap. The tools for shipping small ideas have never been more accessible. The hard part isn't the build — it's having the idea in the first place, and the idea usually shows up uninvited, in a troll voice, in the woods, on a Saturday.
So: if you're ever stuck for a riddle, and you need to extract a small toll from some children before granting them a clue, you now have somewhere to go.
The chatGPTroll is open for business.
Disclosure: These opinions are my own. My employer does not pay me to participate in kids’ games or to build digital versions of them.