21st
Game Season
For me, April is a transitional month, with pros & cons on several dimensions.
The natural world: days get longer, but my hay fever reaches an unpleasant peak.
My bank account: heating bills plummet, but the double whammy of property and income taxes hits in the middle of the month.
Most of all, though, April marks the transition between basketball season and Game season. For college basketball fans, April marks the beginning of a 7-month dry spell (though I’ll hardly be suffering this year, with the Olympics, including the Trials, running through much of the summer) - and Games are one of my preferred activities during that dry spell.
Many of you may not be familiar with The Game. (No, not the 1997 movie starring Michael Douglas - in which my wife Melissa was an extra, by the way! - though The Game is often mentioned as an inspiration for the movie. I don’t see the connection, really.)
The Game is… well, sort of ineffable. The best concise description I have is “puzzle hunt”, although if you know what Games are that’s an oversimplification, and if you don’t, it’s not very helpful. Traditional Games usually start on a Saturday morning, where 20 (or so) teams of 5 (or so) people assemble at a starting location, and the organizers of the event, aka Game Control, provide each team with a puzzle.
Now, the “puzzle” - which Gamers call a “clue” - may not resemble any puzzle you’ve ever seen. It could be a bunch of strange images on a piece of paper. It could be a box of chocolates. It could be a bag full of Legos with words on them. Generally the clue encodes a hidden message, and when you figure out what the hell is going on and decode it, it tells you where to go next, whereupon your team jumps in its vehicle and drives there, only to find another clue. … ~20 clues and ~30 hours later, you arrive, exhausted, at the finish line.
There are all sorts of variations on the elements of Games: duration (4 hours to longer than 2 days); transportation options (foot, SF MUNI, team van, chaffeuered limo); clue types (hidden codes, physical challenges, observation of pre-existing elements of the environment, team coordination); scoring (none at all to precise scoring for clues solved, hints used, and time taken); and others. It’s pretty geeky and (for a Gamer) it’s great fun.
For me, Game season started on Saturday, with a leisurely mini-game played on foot, run by Coed Astronomy. (Teams have their own names and sometimes traditions and costumes; my team’s current name is Meat Machine, which is a reference to one of the teams in Midnight Madness, a fairly bad early-1980’s movie notable for two things: 1) being the first feature-film appearance of Michael J. Fox, and 2) inspiring The Game.)
It was a great start to Game season (though a little cold): the clues were well-designed (I can’t talk about them, unfortunately, since they’re running the Game again this Saturday), and, though there was no scoring system, Meat Machine was the third team to finish. (I believe the Burninators, a team mostly composed of Googlers that routinely contends for the top spot in Games, finished first.)
I’ll post more about this Game next week (when everything’s public); two more Games are upcoming in the next few weeks - the Great Urban Race on May 3rd, followed by Shinteki on May 10th.
