Elementary School of Fish: The Gamists' Ball

Back at Eudemonia, it was crowded. The place was full of gamists chowing down on pizza and matzo. We made our way through the crowd. Ah, it was the end party. Had the game ended? That's when Darcy rushed up and handed us a soccer ball on which someone had painted some numbers. "It's a giant ball of evil, hurtling towards Earth!" she told us. Apparently, we were still in the Game.

We looked at the ball. We started noting down which numbers appeared on it, hoping that a pattern would emerge. Then our PDA started beeping: the game had ended.

Now that the game had ended, the PDA revealed all of the hints for this puzzle: this soccer ball's numbers corresponded to a Minesweeper game. Oh! I went to go return the PDA to the Taftians so they could tote up our meager score. Meanwhile, Brian and Dwight solved the minesweeper, then converted the mine pattern to five-bit binary numbers and got a word out of it.

My usual post-game brain-crash set in. There was an ending skit, in which Zorg menaced us all with a mega-bomb. The situation was defused when Rachel Weinstein of Team XX-Rated did something I couldn't see. Maybe she stole the mega-bomb. Let's say she stole the mega-bomb. That would be a good ending.

There was some more talk, more chatter. I went to the back room to pick up some puzzles which we'd been skipped over. Also there was Jeff Stribling of Red 5 and Rachel of XX-Rated, talking. Jeff was saying something about what it was like to play as half of a two-person team. I hoped he'd have some great insights to share that would help me the next time I ended up as one third of a three-person team.

Mostly, he just said it was hard. There are some puzzles where it helps to have more people. E.g., gathering data from paths in a park--the more people you have, the quicker you can find the data. But the important thing is to have fun. Don't give up on puzzles, even though it seems like a bigger team would be better-suited for solving them. Keep going.

I thought about the frustration I'd felt when I'd seen the team working slowly, few hands making heavy work. Had I had less fun? Well, not really. When I played BANGs and Shintekis with my not-serious-puzzler friends, did I feel frustrated when we didn't make fast progress? Well, no.

I felt like I was on the brink of some great insight on the place of The Game in Modern Society. That obviously meant that I was exhausted, and it was time for bed.

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