"Hah! A little competition! It's not so easy, is it?"
A stranger was making fun of my behavior, and why not? I was conspicuously having trouble. I was pathetic. I was sitting on some stone riprap at the edge of the water at San Francisco's Maritime Park. I had a rock in my hands which I was carefully, slowly, totally failing to balance on top of another rock.
Another stranger said, "You need sand." And he was right. I was failing to get ready for BANG V. (BANG V is the point of this story.) And I would need sand.
About a year before BANG V (which is still the point of this story, which I promise I will get to eventually), I was surfing the web and came across something called "the 420 game." It seemed to be a treasure hunt game. This wasn't digging for buried gold--this was a treasure hunt in which one clue leads to another clue leads to another, and so on towards some goal involving triumph and/or candy.
I forgot what I was originally searching for and spent a while browsing more information about this game. Was it held every 4/20? No, no it wasn't. I figured out that it was one instance of the Game, a sporadically recurring treasure hunt.
I found no mention of upcoming Games, only past Games. I found no hint of how an outsider group might sign up. It seemed like a difficult activity to break into if you didn't know someone already in it, which I did not.
Thus I put the Game on my brain's back burner.
A few months before BANG V (which I promise I will write about eventually), I joined a social-network web site named Orkut.com. I started exploring, and saw it had forums on many topics... One was titled THE GAME. Holy moly. It seemed to be for participants in games-like-that-420-game. I joined that Community in a hurry.
In late February, within Orkut's THE GAME community, a forum topic emerged in which members introduced themselves. Various people listed the many Games they'd taken part in. My self-introduction was a little different. It was pathetic. I was the geeky kid saying, "You kids are so cool, let me join your cool club." I wrote this:
GAMEr wannabe 2/17/2004 8:50 AM
I've only read about it. I've never played, and don't think I know anyone who has. I'm hanging out here hoping that someone with half-a-team will send out a recruiting call, and will accept newbies.
I'd looked pathetic in public and someone had taken pity on me, and given me some information I wanted: a few days later, I got mail from someone named Alexandra Dixon.
Alexandra Dixon had played The Game before. (In fact, she had written the report on the 420 Game which had first caught my interest.) She was on a team called Mystic Fish. They would be playing in the upcoming Stanford Game. If I was interested, I should let her know.
As soon as I finished bouncing around the room with glee, I wrote back to tell her that I was interested.
Soon I was signed up with a subset of Mystic Fish for a smaller treasure hunt. This would be my audition. This would be BANG V.
I studied puzzles from past treasure hunts, trying to get my brain in shape.
A week before BANG V (which is still the point of this story), I was out of puzzles to study. But maybe there were other, better ways to prepare. I knew that the game would be at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf I decided to scout out the territory ahead of time, spot some likely hiding places to keep in mind.
This, as it turned out, was not a useful plan. I quickly figured out that hiding places abounded. If you wandered just steps away from the main tourist drag, you could find yourself next to a public dock, a small park, a decorative arch...
I sat down at Aquatic Park and watched some guy balancing rocks. I sat and watched the water, letting the dusky breeze waft away my cares.
Then I started thinking again. At the start of previous BANGs, teams had been given a challenge to complete before they started out. This spaced the teams out a bit, so that one team could not just follow another from clue to clue. Past BANGs had used rock-scissors-paper tournaments and horseshoes-played-with-tennis-balls. Whoever did best at the challenge got a head start at the clues.
I watched the guy balance rocks. I wondered if the BANG organizers had sat in this spot, where BANG V would start, figuring out what challenge to use at the start of this hunt. What if they had watched this same guy? What if they chose rock-balancing as the challenge?
I watched him balance rocks. It did not look so difficult. But perhaps it would be wise to practice. I wandered away from the crowd of people watching him balance rocks, clambered down onto the riprap and began my own sorry attempts. I made little progress. Balancing rocks was not as easy as it looked.
A little group of strangers walked by.
"Hah! A little competition! It's not so easy, is it?"
A stranger was making fun of my behavior, and why not? I was conspicuously having trouble. I was pathetic. I was sitting on some stone riprap at the edge of the water at San Francisco's Maritime Park. I had a rock in my hands which I was carefully, slowly, totally failing to balance on top of another rock.
Another stranger said, "You need sand." And he was right.
For an instant, his advice made no sense--I was facing an unbalanced rock, not a lawyer buried up to his neck. But then I thought about balancing eggs. I had the "A-ha!" realization that comes when someone totally gives you the answer. "Hey, thanks!" I yelled. "I think you just saved me hours of my life!"
As it turned out, BANG V had nothing to do with balancing rocks.