...WARTRON SPOILERS... If you plan to play in the "re-run" of WarTron, then you don't want to read this page ...WARTRON SPOILERS...
Team Los Jefes drove through the newly-fallen night. The WarTron game was themed on the movies WarGames and Tron. Tron is mostly defined by its look: a dark world lit by vector-graphicish glowy lines. You're not going to achieve this look in the real world; Disney couldn't have made it happen if it hadn't had an army of hand-animators on hand capable of painting over movies. But if you're going to get close to the look, it's going to be easier at night.
Night had fallen. Game Control was sending us to a place where we'd hand over our van to a "valet parker". Of course we knew we were about to enter the world of Tron. Of course we knew that the "valet parker" was going to decorate our van to look Tronnish. Of course.
So we weren't surprised at the scene in Oregon City as we pulled up. We were impressed—conversation about the Black Letter Game halted; but we weren't surprised. Lots of vans with GC volunteers poking around inside. Some vans had lit-up El-wire framing their windshields. Tronnish. I activated some glow-sticks and put them in my backpack's exterior pockets. I'd brought a glow-in-the-dark light-up Tron-decorated frisbee, schwag from a past MicroSoft PuzzleHunt. I turned it on now.
In the story of Tron, our hero isn't exactly aware of having been scanned and pulled into the computer. The story of WarTron was similar: BigMac knew that we'd been sent to reset the servers, didn't want us to. It would scan us, pull us into the machine. But just as in Tron, we would not perceive this happening. There would be some disorientation, and then we'd find out that we were programs.
If we'd reached Oregon City earlier, it would have happened this way: Oregon City has an inconvenient cliff. There is an elevator that runs from the cliff-bottom to the cliff-top. And it goes to a floor above the cliff-top: an observation tower that glows in the night. We'd parked at the cliff-top. According to plan, we'd ride the elevator to the observation tower, a Tronnish-looking spot, and find out that our elevator ride had actually been our transit into the machine.
But we reached Oregon City a little late. The elevator, the observation tower—they were closed now. So instead, we and the other teams that arrived at about the same walked down a stairway down the inconvenient cliff. (But I'm darned grateful to Federico Gomez Suarez for taking photos of his (earlier) team's trip to the top of the tower.)
Down we walked. Down down down. At the base of the cliff, we found our goal: Brave GC volunteer Curtis. But Curtis looked different. He was wearing a new outfit, one featuring glowy el-wire. He was a Tron computer program: and apparently so were we. He addressed us: "Greetings, Programs."
BigMac had told Curtis to meet him here. He gave us our Tron Identity Disk.
It was a frisbee with a sort of code-wheel on it.
He told us about the benchmarks: obstacles for us to overcome to demonstrate
that we were suitable to help BigMac. And that we'd have "Data Transfer
Vehicles" to carry us around. (Vans with el-wire, got it.)
He told us that the Identity Disk contained our first puzz
benchmark.
(There was more to the identity disk than this. During the ballroom puzzle, we'd received name tags. Each tag had a strange decoration: a sort of ellipse-shaped circuit diagram with a letter in the middle; each team had a different letter. Our identity disk featured a similar circuit-diagram decoration, but with a number in the middle. This GC liked to set up games in which teams had to combine information at the end to collectively solve a last puzzle; so now we had some idea of our team's contribution to this effort: an association of a letter to a number. Other teams had no doubt received similar. And with a mapping from letters to numbers... well, actually, there were many codes that could work that way. We didn't know what to do with this. Hopefully, we'd find out at the end of the hunt.)
We thanked Curtis for the puzzle and walked off to find a place to solve. I looked Curtis' outfit up and down and gave him a thumbs-up gesture: "Lookin' sharp!" Coming from me, dressed in a pencil bandolier, a backpack with some out-of-place-looking glowsticks in the pockets, and a dimly-glowing frisbee, this was an ambiguous compliment. But I think Curtis took it in the right spirit.
It was dark, and we were in a sort of back alley, a road between the base of the cliff and the backs of some buildings. But we found a lit-up doorway and gathered around our puzzle. The code-wheel puzzle had us spin cardboard rings to make some twisty-lines connect some words. Someone on the team with good spatial sense did that lickety-split. We used transparent tape to make sure that the wheels stayed aligned instead of hunting through backpacks for a new-to-me piece of excellent puzzling stationery supply: re-stickable transparent tape; tape semi-sticky like a Post-It, transparent like scotch tape. With that done, the lines connected strands of words to make nonsense phrases. But the phrases, mispronounced sort of like we'd done with the Doubleclick set-list, named computer and electronics parts. We were a team of computer nerds, so these came quickly: someone looking at the disk would get as far as "Saul" and a chorus of "solid state memory" sprang up. (OK, I had to Google S100 Bus to convince us that we'd actually figured that one out—but once I'd looked it up, Jeff W. asked me if that was the Altair Bus, and of course it was.) There were blanks for us to write those in and numbers indicating letters to pull out to make a message: track ten name Someone quickly figured out that this meant that when we got our van back, it wouldn't just have el-wire. It would also have a CD in the CD player.
We'd arrived at the same time as a few other teams. The
van-decorators valet parkers
Data Transfer Vehicle Initialization Processors were somewhat slammed.
Thus, we had to wait a few minutes for our van.
When the van arrived, we piled in and started up the CD player. It was music from Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. We jumped to track ten, and Shazam told us the track's name: ARENA. Jeff P entered our answer. (Did it seem strange that we used our previous laptop network connection to enter our answer while we were supposed to be inside the computer? Did it seem strange that we'd brought the BITE device in with us? A little.) Good news: we'd solved our first benchmark.
After less than a minute of driving, we took the el-wire off of the van's windshield. The light was Tronnish, on-theme. But it wasn't pleasant to drive looking out at the dark night with one's vision framed by bright lights. We took down the lights, turned them off, put them on the back seat. We drove through the night, arrived at our destination: a suburban shopping center. We parked, walked past some buildings and thus into another parking lot. What we saw surprised me.
I'd volunteered for BANG 28, a night game for which the Burninators had made several puzzles involving light. So I wasn't so surprised at an oval glowing track or that there were light-decorated bikes to ride around that track. I was surprised that there was a large replica of the Statue of Liberty here at a parking lot of a shopping area of a suburb south of Portland.
A few teams had arrived at the same time. There were brave GC members here to administer a complex activity. One of the GC folks told us the rules. Teams would collaborate. Three of us would get on bikes. They'd ride around the oval. If they did it right, then each team would earn a glowstick. Once a team had earned eight glow-sticks, they'd receive their next puzzle. I perked up: I'd brought my own glow-sticks. Could I trade those in for a puzzle? If I did, was I well-prepared or was I cheating? The GC member said: I couldn't use those. Awwww, so much for being prepared.
One of the bike's wheel-lights made a message, but this was a red herring: it was just something that the bike's regular lights did. But as the bikes went past certain GC members, they held up phones displaying three-digit binary numbers. Someone figured out that this was like a three-peg Mastermind game in which we had three colored pegs trying to get them in the right order. So we yelled at the bicycle riders to change order, ordered so that GC would either like the ordering or else show a phone display whose numbers would tell us the proper order.
Eventually, we accumulated our quota of glowsticks. We picked up our puzzle, I picked up my personal glowsticks. We looked for a place to sit and solve.
The shopping center was closed up for the night; no donut store or what-have-you to seek shelter. So we piled into the van to look at our puzzle. A sheet of paper with markings. A baggie of marked cardboard squares to place in places on the paper. Many theories about how it might work, but after many minutes, none of them worked. We called GC for a hint: what to do once we'd put the little squares onto the paper. We'd tried ternary, that hadn't wo— GC piped up, surprised that hadn't worked. And so we said "thank you!!", hung up, checked our work, spotted our error and soon had the answer.
Time to get back in the van, head back to Portland and civilization. (But first, a stop for gas—we might be driving all night (we wouldn't) and Oregon's full-service gas stations probably didn't tend to stay open all night.)
On the van ride, we talked about Cyndy's birthday party puzzlehunts. These can be tricky, because it turns out that Cyndy doesn't pick all of her friends and family on the basis of loving puzzles, but she does invite them to her birthday parties. So some folks show up who are into puzzles, but some folks not so much. But the Jefes had been pleased to re-use some assemblage of PVC pipe for Cyndy's recent party; and though it may have mystified some people, they're probably used to being mystified by now. This year's theme was fortune-telling. Predictions, a chicken-entrails puzzle... Jeff W had even gotten into a glass box as a human Zoltar machine. (But he'd had to hop out soon after; turns out it gets swelteringly hot inside a glass box on a hot day.)
My travel book had mentioned Mill Ends Park as a place to visit. Since the "park" is a patch of dirt in a road divider, I'd decided to skip visiting it. But it was the site of our next puzzle. We picked up our puzzle from the road divider and crossed the road to the riverwalk park with a big lawn where we could lay out our puzzle next to little loo. Probably folks are more likely to sit on that lawn by day than at night, but there you go. Brave GC member Karl watched over us.
Muffled rockabilly woofed over us from the nightclub across the street. We sat in the night, lit by streetlights and lamps. Karl drifted over to watch us get started; he hadn't seen this puzzle before. Our puzzle was some superhero trading cards. (I'd figured that this game wouldn't have any superhero puzzles since a similar crew had run the Justice Unlimited Game a few years ago, but I was wrong.) Each card had some text describing a superhero on one side with one word bolded; the other had art and ternary numbers. So put together a spreadsheet: superhero name, bolded word, ternary-encoded text. The ternary-encoded text turned out to be a joke-y variation on the superhero's name, e.g., Spidermeh. What did it mean? Captain Marvel had become Captain Malvin. Like Alvin from Madagascar? Like Alvin of the Chipmunks? Why -Alvin? Anagramming the replaced letters; anagramming the replacing letters, ... No message leapt out. We caught transcription errors, fixed our transcription, but still had no message. Did each of them have the same number of replaced letters? (No) Did the resulting words fit into categories? Did the boldface words make categories? (No) The card texts all ended with "end of line", should we look at the ends of the lines? (No) This card's text lines had lots of periods and hyphens at the end, were they Morse? (No) We chased ideas, we chased our tails, we got nowhere.
We stared at the data a while longer, but in the end had to call GC for a hint. A nice police officer came along to let us know that the park closed at midnight. OK, so we'd probably have to move soon. We thanked him for the warning. The policeman looked at us sadly: it was 12:30am now. Oh man, how long had we been chasing our tails on this puzzle? Time to get up and leave this nice soft lawn, time to go back to the van. So we picked up our lamps and clipboards as Jeff P. got the necessary nudge from the GC helpline: the changed letters in each joke-y superhero name were always in the last N letters, where N was a very specific number. That was enough for one of us to see where things were going, so we thanked GC and rang off. One of us guessed that N was five, and indeed it was. Oh, five-bit binary.
We made our way back to the van. Some multi-taskers decoded the binary and walked at the same time; we finished up in the van. It was strange sitting in the van late at night, the engine not running, not going anywhere. The nightclub's rockabilly was long gone. It was so quiet and still. Just folks saying out one-zero-one-one-zero, replying with alphabet letters. somethingsomethingJIWCNSKA. I liked that it ended with SKA, but wasn't sure what to do with those letters. We still needed to use the bolded words. A trickle of ideas. Minutes ticked away, mostly in silence. We were stuck. Time to call GC again. They provided the necessary nudge: if we ordered the cards alphabetically by superhero name and then looked at the bolded words, those words said something about "shift four". No wonder we couldn't get something good out of our letters: we were supposed to caesar-shift them by four. Kind of discouraging that we hadn't spotted the message in the bolded words; weren't we experienced puzzlers supposed to spot these things? Ah well. After this nudge-upon-a-nudge, we soon had our answer.
Our solution-message from GC told us that for our next few puzzles, we might want to park the van somewhere and move around on foot; they would all be pretty close together. Cyndy started up the van and we rumbled out onto the road. It was late. Most of the folks out driving at this hour were partiers on their way to/from the next/previous nightclub. Partiers hollered. We kept pace with a monster truck. Downtown, there were some pedestrians out and about, generally pretty merry. As we moved through downtown, Jeff P. noticed that our destination was just three blocks from Ground Kontrol. We parked the van in a pay lot, which turned out to be a free lot if you parked there this late. We made our way to our next destination, making our way past the drunks. The drunks, in turn, tried to make conversation with us: "It ain' that mother-f***in s*** and." None of us had a suitable reply for that, or similar statements, so we kept going. Not everyone wanted to talk to us; some of them talked to each other: "Why is he down here? He just got out of jail?" We kept moving along.
Our next destination was inside! More specifically, it was Collective Agency, a sort of shared office-workspace. During the day, it was populated with high-tech startuppers collaborating on laptops, but tonight it was full of puzzlers. It was well-lit, had tables and comfy chairs. It had air conditioning, which you wouldn't think would be so important at one in the morning, but in the middle of a heat wave, it was nice! It had bathrooms available at 2am on a Saturday night—luxury for puzzlers. What a great spot. Some puzzlers couldn't withstand this level of comfort so late at night and lay crashed on couches. But most folks sat and solved.
Corby, now a computer program decorated with el-wire, handed us our next puzzle: some broken bits to repair. Ah, Tron had the character Bit, a sort of floating 3-D shape who could only say "yes" or "no"; and who shifted shape for each of those words. So we sat down at a table to reassemble our broken bits. This puzzle was a great late-night puzzle, because it started off with something simple to do: we had many, many pieces of paper with fold lines on them. And one piece of paper folded up as an example. So we folded them up. Each folded-up piece of paper was the same shape, a sort of rhombus. Each paper-piece had some words printed on it, some of them concealed in the folds, others exposed. Fold, fold, fold. Folding was fun. At this hour, it was kind of fun to fold without thinking about the words. But along the way, we figured out what to do with the words. We noticed some pairs like BATS and BELFRY; BELFRY was concealed in a fold, BATS was exposed on a "tab". That meant that we could insert BATS in BELFRY. And we had a bunch of phrases of the form "_____ in ______." And so we assembled.
We assembled a sort of 3-D star shape that seemed like the sort of thing Escher would have filled with lizards. There was more stuff printed: one number on each "point" of the star. Aha, these numbers were unique, and counted up. So they allowed us to order the points. And there were letters which, now that the star was assembled, formed words around the points. Each point had five words around it; each word had one letter bolded. Hmm, five-bit binary? One set of words was MANHATTAN BRONX QUEENS... oh, boroughs of NYC. And in that set, each word had its third letter bolded. Maybe we wanted the third letter of borough? So we had one letter per point and an ordering for those letters... and that worked. We'd solved this puzzle the way we were supposed to. We weren't exactly flowing. We were drowsy; we made mistakes as we went. But we caught our mistakes as we went, too. And soon we had our message: A HORSE ANSWER. Oh, NEIGH.
We were back out on the street a little after Portland's bars kicked everyone out onto the street. So many drunks, so many drunks. It was unpleasantly warm out, but not mind-numbingly hot; a break from the heat wave. The sidewalks were... bustling isn't quite the right word, because that implies people with direction. The sidewalks were busy and stumbly. Some of them wanted to talk to us. "What y'all be doin' with your time out here?" But we had direction: we were headed to our next puzzle. The drunks were aggressive-friendly. "Hi, Ladies!" And it's not like the drunks all disappeared when we arrived at our next destination, Voodoo Doughnut. Half of drunk-Portland was merrily standing in line, waiting for baked goods to soak up the alcohol like the Bacardians of Andy Prieboy's "Hearty Drinking Men" song.
Fortunately, we didn't have to wait in line. Brave GC member Sunshine was handing out puzzles: a voodoo doll donut; the usual pretzel-stick stake had been replaced with a hollow straw. Voodoo Doughnut has several picnic tables outside. Many were occupied by stumbly pastry consumers; a few were occupied by puzzlers. We found an empty table that wasn't covered with spilled beer, set down our donut and set to work.
The donut's straw contained a rolled-up piece of paper. It wasn't easy to get the paper out, but it was possible. An URL was printed on the paper, so we dug out a laptop to watch the puzzle, which turned out to be a video. The video depicted a circle. The circle was one color... except that it changed color about once a second. Around the edge of the circle were three smaller circles, one red, one green, one blue. So we watched this video. What did it mean? We stared. Nothing made sense. We stared some more.
The drunks were distracting, but only because I let them distract me. A guy sat down next to two young ladies at a nearby table after asking permission. As he set down his pastry choice, he said loudly "Don't judge me." This was his line that he used when sitting down next to young ladies. What did it mean that his line was "Don't judge me" and that he'd practiced saying it? Here was a man who made poor choices often. I realized that his "Don't judge me" had triggered a stream of judgmental thoughts. I went back to looking at the puzzle.
We had the necessary "aha". This was a color wheel. Each color that appeared in the big circle indicated a spot on the wheel. If the big circle was red, that indicated the spot on its rim closest to the small red circle. If the big circle was yellow, that indicated the spot between red and green. Connect the dots to make letters. Letters spelled out a message.
We ate the donut. As we walked away from Voodoo Doughnut, the line was shorter than it had been; the bars had now been closed for a while. We walked past a vent on the side of Voodoo Doughnut and inhaled about 100 calories of doughnut-whiff. The night was cooling down. It was now comfortable to walk around in shorts and a t-shirt. It was late; there were still drunks about, but not so many. There were few cars, we jaywalked with impunity.
And thus we made our way to Ground Kontrol, the video arcade I'd scouted a few days before. It was after hours; the front door was locked, but there was a doorman to let in puzzle nerds for this special occasion. Inside, puzzlers sat at tables, staring at puzzles. Most of the arcade machines were powered down; the propietors were cleaning up the bar.
Two machines were not powered down: Tron and Discs of Tron. Brave GC volunteer Curtis, attired in el-wire, brought us over to the Discs of Tron machine and asked who from our team would represent us. I wasn't the best arcade gamer, but I had played this game a few days before on my scouting trip, so I ended up as our brave volunteer. I played for a short while before being killed. Jeff W. was up next. I told him what I'd figured out about the game... and he demonstrated that he didn't need any help: he was really good. He quickly surpassed my score and made it a few levels beyond. Next, Jeff P. played a game and that was apparently enough to demonstrate that we properly appreciated this on-theme game. (I'm not sure what our goal was for this stage. Maybe just to play three rounds? In that case, I may have helped our team to advance quickly by dying early? Anyhow.) Curtis handed us our next puzzle.
I didn't really follow our progress on this one. Ground Kontrol, as you'd expect from a closed arcade/bar at 3 o'clock in the morning, was dark. Its tables, however, are lit: they have glass tops and are lit from below. So if you put a paper puzzle on the table, there's light shining up through your puzzle, but no light from above. It was tough to see the puzzle. So I ended up standing up over our group, shining a light down. I wouldn't have been much help anyhow: the important first stage was to recognize characters from arcade games. I didn't know many of those. Groups of characters matched to groups of cities; drawing lines between those cities on a map drew letter forms, making a message. Something like that. I don't know; I held the lamp.
The arcade had been noisy. Back outside in pre-dawn downtown Portland, it was quiet. The drunks were gone. It was just us. We discussed the very-impressive Ladies' Room at Ground Kontrol, glowy with Ms Pac-Man mosaic on the floor. We pointed out Portland hotels where Jeff P. and Donna had stayed before, plus one where they'd thought they were supposed to stay, but which had sent them elsewhere.
Thus we made our way to Pioneer Courthouse Square. We were supposed to find GC with a giant chessboard outside; but there was no GC out here. There were some teams sitting and solving something inside a 24-hour Starbucks, though. We entered the Starbucks and found a brave GC member there. Pioneer Courthouse Square, like the park we'd sat in earlier, had police-enforced hours. The cops had told GC to move on; she'd sought shelter in this coffee shop. So we picked up a puzzle. There was no free table at which to sit... oh, wait, a team had just finished and picked up. We bought coffees and pastries to "rent" our table and we sat and solved.
This puzzle involved a chess game and wordplay and we carefully worked through a long set of steps, then got stumped. We sat and stared. We thought of ideas, they didn't work. And then someone tried guessing an answer that matched the theme, and that was the answer. So we lucked out on that one. As we left the Starbucks, it was getting light out. We'd made it through the night. Now it was time to get back in the van. As we walked, we tried to backsolve how the puzzle was supposed to work.
Back in the van, we drove to a particular parking garage, following directions from GC. There, we drove up to the roof, where we saw several game vans. And there were a couple of brave GC members who asked us to leave our van unlocked. Aha, no doubt we were about to leave the Tron-world; no doubt they would remove the el-wire which had transformed our van into a Data Transfer Vehicle. So we put the el-wire back in the windshield. Hopping out of the van, we snapped photos. It was dawn. And in Portland, even the view from a parking garage is scenic. At dawn, anyhow.
We rode the elevator down to street level. We stepped out of the elevator and waved "hi" to brave GC member Karl who was hanging out. We walked to our destination: Ira Keller Fountain. There was a line of teams here, waiting to interact with GC. Apparently, everyone had been sent to this spot at about the same time; now it was a bottleneck. This meant that we got to see what we were in for.
One by one, a team would walk up to GC. A GC guard program (GC member in an imposing helmet) would confront them. Someone from the team would throw a shoe to knock over the guard's identity disk, which had been helpfully placed off to the side. The team would then approach GC member Lisa, who was dressed up in a green leotard because she was now acting as CLU, Lisa Goto's intelligent agent. She handed the team something and directed them to go play patty-cake with one of the other nearby GC members.
We waited in line and watched this scene repeat for about half an hour. The sun rose, replacing the last of dawn with daylight. I used the time to tweet a Matrix joke and talk with Team Bloodshot. I found out that Bloodshot, their usual speedy selves, had just now played a couple of puzzles that we'd been skipped over. We watched teams interacting with CLU. CLU started out with her head covered with a stretchy mask, which she took off partway through. Was it supposed to be a surprise that CLU looked like Lisa Goto? "Pretend you haven't seen the big reveal." "Yeah." And then it was Bloodshot's turn. And then it was ours.
Goto's CLU was glad to see us. She had a message to get to the outside: an override code segment. She thought we were from outside. (Yep.) She had divvied her message into segments because she could hold only one segment in her buffer at a time. (Wha? OK, whatever.) She was giving us one segment. (Aha, each team was getting one segment; no doubt we'd need to put them all together at the end.) She asked us if we knew how to get out of the computer. (We were kinda hoping that she was going to tell us that.) She asked us how we'd gotten in. (We'd walked down some stairs; that seemed to surprise her; perhaps she thought we'd ridden an elevator.) How did we enter information into the computer? (We... typed it?) How did information get into and out of a computer? (An... I/O Bus? I wondered if this was going to turn into a public transit puzzle.) Right, we needed to get to the Input/Output tower. But first we needed to learn the protocol to get past the tower guard. And so... she told us to go play patty-cake with GC member Corby. Apparently, the patty-cake was an encrypted set of instructions for the tower guard protocol.
We wandered over to play patty-cake with Corby, thus allowing the next team to come talk to Lisa. Corby was giving us a message with the patty-cake: there was a particular sequence of actions he went through each time. But if the person he was patty-caking with didn't mirror his actions correctly, he stopped and started over. So we played pattycake and took a video; but it took a few tries at pattycake to get the whole sequence. But we got it eventually and wandered off to study the video.
We figured out the general encoding scheme pretty quickly: there were five gestures to pay attention to and a separator gesture. Between a pair of separator gestures, each of the five gestures might or might not appear once. Aha, five-bit binary. It might surprise you that we figure out this much and were then stymied because we mixed up the gestures for bit-3 and bit-4. But that's what we did. So in the end we wrestled with this puzzle for a while and ended up calling GC for help. The GC smartie on the phone was able to figure out which bits we'd swapped and set us straight. Cyndy pointed out "I like this calliing up GC more often," so maybe historically the team would have struggled on without help; I was pretty glad we'd called up. Soon we had the correct answer: EMBODY.
We wandered back down to talk to Corby. We had the right word. Now we were to go back to the parking lot elevator. We could bypass Karl the guard with the password EMBODY.
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