The lovely Just Passing Through put together a fun & educational event last night: a GC Summit. Folks who had run Games and/or were considering running Games showed up to eat, talk, and watch informative lectures. Should we call it GC Summit 2008, seeing as how the previous one was GC Summit 2007? Sure, let's say that.
I bet that excellent videos of the lectures will appear on YouTube soon, thanks to Curtis (and maybe thanks to others... Curtis was working the camera... anyhow...). But the conversations before and after were good, too. Unfortunately, I didn't bring along my little audio recorder, so all I've got is a few snippets that lodged in my unreliable-narrator brain.
- On the car ride over, an idea batted around: open-source software that people write for Games. Not just the little web-crawlers and such. But the software that GC writes to track teams' progress, handle pre-game... more complicated things. This idea came up a couple of times during the Summit itself.
- It is now public knowledge that Greg et al. are thinking of a game in early November, but They have not committed, good grief people calm down.
- Casey Jade Holman, age 1.5-ish, has learned to say "puzzle." And she kind of chuckles when she says it. I mean, she says other stuff, too. I don't want you to think that she's growing up warped or something. I'm just pointing out that she seems to like saying the word "puzzle," is all.
- John Owens' good news is that he got tenure. John Owens' bad news is that he didn't receive an invitation to the "Back to Basics" game. G.C. sent physical invitations by post; so you were much more likely to get an invite if GC knew your address. Teams that did receive an invite received two, so they could pass one along to another deserving team. No-one passed one to John. When he said this, I thought back to when Alexandra said that Team Mystic Fish had an extra invite: I had just naturally thought Which less-connected team needs our help? Which of them could we pass that to? Saying "Should we ask Advil if they want an invitation?" is kind of like saying "I hear that the King of Sweden is coming to San Francisco; I wonder if he has a place to stay; should we call up and offer him a spot on the couch?" But if everyone thinks that way, then the King of Sweden ends up... I don't know where I'm going with that simile. But the upshot is... So Team Advil won't play; John will play with the Scoobies.
- DeeAnn talked about how to choose locations for The Game: not too long a drive between locations, but the drive should be at least ten minutes. Why ten minutes? DeeAnn explained: There should be enough time for a player to eat half a sandwich. If you pop into the car, unwrap your sandwich, and then boom you have to get back out of the car again, then you're stuck re-wrapping your sandwich and you're grumpy. Rich Bragg, hale and hearty, had doubts: Half a sandwich...so that's like 30 seconds, right? Brent Holman suggested packing many teeny-tiny bite-sized sandwiches. Perhaps Gaming scientists will one day discover the sandwich molecule, the smallest possible particle one can point at and say "that's a sandwich". Once we know how long it takes to eat that, we will know the minimum possible distance between Game locations. Or we could stick with the 10-minute drive rule of thumb. Whatever works.
- During the after-lecture conversation, Jan Chong's voice was kind of quiet. When two people started talking at once, if Jan was one of them, her voice go drowned out. It made me glad that she presented.
- A couple of newbies showed up, yay! And somehow we didn't scare them too much. Alexandra recruited them for her Leisurely Stroll team. (Or recruited them for something.)
- On the car ride back, one of the people in the car was the one who had, during Q&A after a lecture, asked Seattle teams taking up space in SF Bay Area Games, but not hosting Games themselves. Other folks in the car took issue with this--Seattle doesn't have a monopoly on freeloading teams. If there's a group to kvetch about, it's teams that play plenty but don't host. I don't think anyone convinced anyone else of anything.
While I'm thinking about it... in terms of where to put an "open source" set of Game-ish programs. Some wiki-ish place to put files might be enough, might not need to set up an open-source project. As Jan points out, each GC is probably going to want to tweak enough behavior such that they might want to read old code, but might want to drastically re-write it. I think Yahoo! Groups has a place to dump files, but only readable by people in the group, so maybe not good to use that.
Labels: puzzlehunts, teams
Heya Larry,
Just to clarify - the Midnight Madness invites went out on Valentine's Day so most of us received them Feb 15 or 16. As you know, Mystic Fish got one (plus the spare you mentioned). Coincidentally, John Owens has played on my Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt (CNYTH) team for the past five years or so. This year it was on February 23rd. So, in the inevitable downtime while our team was walking between clue sites, we chatted about the Midnight Madness game. Naturally, I offered his team our spare. He told me that he had already decided to play with the Scoobies, and I believe he might have mentioned that another team had also offered him their spare. So, if Advil had wanted to play, they could have! We also offered ours to Blinded by Science but they had already received XX-Rated's spare. So, we ended up giving ours to a Seattle team.