...WARTRON SPOILERS... If you plan to play in the "re-run" of WarTron, then you don't want to read this page ...WARTRON SPOILERS...
Some "weekend" games had Friday pre-games to give teams a chance to... theoretically socialize, but also solve some puzzles. The WarTron Game was one of those. Thus this game had a sort of prolog. We got re-acquainted with BIGMAC; we got to meet Professor Goto.
Late Friday afternoon, Jeff Phillips and Donna Whitlock, two members of Los Jefes, wandered into the lobby of a nondescript PDX airport hotel. Driving down from Seattle had worn them out a bit and a tour of Europe had jet-lagged them, but they perked up enough to be friendly. I was in that lobby, too; Team Los Jefes had kindly allowed me to tag along with them as an embedded reporter so I could see how they were unlike (and/or like) other teams. So far, I already knew that Jeff and Donna were sneaky. When I'd talked with them in early 2011, they'd maintained operational secrecy by totally not telling me that they were about to announce a The Game, World Henchmen Organizatinon. Hench had been awesome, of course; I'd played in the San Francisco re-run, when Jeff and Donna had flown down to reprise their roles as supervillians.
That was then. Now it was time to go play The WarTron Game.
Thanks to WarTron's application process, I'd had a chance to play with Los Jefes a little, but we'd been geographically scattered across Seattle, Zagreb, and San Francisco. (Yes, Zagreb.) We'd "met" in a Google Hangout. That had worked out OK, but I was still curious to know how the team got along while physically together.
Jeff and Cyndy Wessling arrived. Don't confuse Jeff P. and Jeff W. The Jefes got their name because the original team had three Jeffs. We piled into the van and drove to the site of the evening's festivities, the North Star Ballroom. We were signing up down in the basement when Nikhil showed up.
So we were assembled:
We were gathered. We'd checked in in the basement, picked up an instruction packet. We were ready for the evening.
So we made our way into the ballroom, set up with tables for a banquet of puzzlenerds from all over. In the parking lot, we'd met up with FrankenFish—a team that had started out as Mystic Fish but had kept only one regular fishie, Paul Chou, and picked up four ringers: Girts Folkmanis and three folks from Boston I didn't know. In the ballroom, there were some teams I knew, but plenty I didn't. John Owens had razzed me about the work I'd been missing—he was taking a sabbatical from teaching and was working at Twitter just across the hall from me. But though I knew the folks on John's team, I didn't know the team itself—it seemed to be a combination of folks from other teams, perhaps a group of folks willing to travel from the SF Bay Area to Portland to play. How many "FrankenTeams" did we have here, anyhow?
Some of these teams were from Portland. Puzzled Pint had been going on for a couple of years, nurturing a local culture of bibulous ratiocination. I didn't recognize these folks. I guess that several of them were nervously looking forward to their first overnight games ever.
The event was catered by Hot Lips Pizza, but the drink coasters were from Game Control. These were supposed to be a simple puzzle whose answer we could use to learn the answer-checking system. But this puzzle stumped us. I was no help, ratholed on an idea that went nowhere.
We got instructions for an answer-checking server. This was
pretty cool, a server we could ssh into that presented
us with a sort of curses-like interface to a bugs database. But since
Professor Goto had hacked the database, it was now riddled with answers.
So if a puzzle answer was BEETROOT and we searched the database for
beetroot, we'd probably get a message from Professor Goto telling us
where to go to next.
We got a B.I.T.E., a sweet piece of ghetto electronics glued into a little cardboard box. It looked like a box with a panel sticking out of it with a 16-segment display and some colored LEDs. And then you noticed the weird sensor circles on the side. And the mysterious buttons. As with Justice Unlimited and the Hogwarts Game, we had a device of unknown capabilities. Acorn showed us how to hook its USB plug into a laptop and then use minicom to log into the device itself to interact with a command-line.
This game had a story. I don't mean that all of the puzzles advanced the plot—but some of them did, and there were definitely some characters to keep track of. We knew about two of them because they'd mattered when we applied for the game.
Professor Lisa Goto was a computer programmer, a computer game writer who'd done some work for the Department of Defense a couple of decades back.
BIGMAC was an AI which Professor Goto had created back in the day, which had then gone awry. But folks restoring some data from backup had accidentally brought BIGMAC back. BIGMAC was childish and could hack into other computers. He'd disrupted our application process plenty.
I was walking around and spotted Lisa Long and I smiled and waved but she harrumphed and looked the other way. Oh right, she was a member of GC, acting in character as Professor Lisa Goto in this game. Professor Goto, apparently, wasn't a nice person. I slunk off to continue whatever errand I was working on.
(Later in the evening, Professor Goto went away and then "her cousin," also played by Lisa Long, visited our banquet. Thus Lisa didn't have to act like a bitch all evening. A good thing, since she's usually far away in England, so probably a bunch of Portland folks were meeting her for the first time this evening.)
According to the game's story, all of us teams were here to see an announcement of WarTron, a new game from GotoVision, Professor Goto's game company. But the announcement was tomorrow and we didn't know exactly where we were supposed to be.
The Doubleclicks were a "nerd-folk" music duo. They played a set of music as teams ate pizza and concentrated on The Game. Were we their worst audience ever? Maybe. You hear actors griping about dinner theater: audiences concentrating on food instead of drama, projecting your voice to be heard over the sound of smacking lips and clinking silverware. The Doubleclicks' audience wasn't just eating. We were also reading over the materials we'd been given, getting set up with the ssh instructions, solving the coasters puzzle. Their music was a good fit for the audience's interests: they sang about video games, superheroes, Dungeons & Dragons, geeky things. But the audience was, by and large, doing its best to ignore them and concentrate on other things.
The ballroom was crowded and loud; this wasn't just because of live music, it was also puzzlists milling around and trying to talk. I don't think there was ever a time when I was able to hear everything that folks on my team were saying.
When the Doubleclicks' first set stopped, you might think that things
would get quieter, but there was still the hubbub of conversation.
And things only got louder when folks' BITEs lit up. The 16-segment
display was flashing
e r t A l e r t A l
When we minicom-logged in, there was an alert message waiting for us:
BIGMAC wanted us to use our the BITE's wardial function
to get some military secr data from the internet.
In the movie WarGames, the wardialer is a computer program that tells a modem to call many many phone numbers, noting which of those calls are answered by other modems. In the movie, our hero uses the program to dial every number in Sunnyvale, trying to find an indial to the Protovision game company's computers. But the BITE's wardial was different.
When a BITE wardialed, it made a sound. Then you could press one of its side-sensors up next to another wardialing BITE's sensors and they would exchange information. Each BITE had one piece of data that we needed to combine to solve this wardialing puzzle. So we needed to make the rounds, bumping BITEs... So there was much frantic running around the room. I wasn't running. I was still failing to help with the coasters puzzle. Other folks on the team were running around. But every so often a team would walk up, gesturing at their BITE and I would point out where Jeff P. was wandering through the mob.
But then, an announcement: The BITEs weren't quite working right. We were supposed to pick up one piece of data from each team. But some boxes weren't exchanging data nicely. So teams ended up getting the puzzle data from GC instead of from each other.
Curtis introduced the Doubleclicks' second set, telling us to listen closely. I wasn't much help on the coasters clue, so I tried listening closely, scribbled some notes. But I didn't notice anything unusual about their songs, aside from the nerdiness level. I went back to igoring them and being no help on the Coasters puzzle. But when the Doubleclicks announced that they'd "accidentally" printed up too many copies of their set list and would have them available after the show, all the puzzlers in the room perked up. This must be puzzle data. Some puzzlers advanced menacingly. "After the set. The set list will be available after the set." The puzzlers stopped advancing menacingly.
So the Doubleclicks had been playing to an audience that largely ignored them to concentrate on puzzles; but now they were playing to an audience who was anxiously hoping that their music would finish, thus opening up puzzle data. Worst audience ever? Maybe. (Or, as revealed in a later podcast interview, the Doubeclicks had played to worse audiences after all. At least we didn't throw things.)
The wardialing data given us a series of nonsense phrases—but once we had the set list, someone noticed that the nonsense phrases were mis-pronounciations of Doubleclick song titles. I wondered if the Doubleclicks had been subtly singing the mis-pronounciations instead of their regular lyrics. If so, I hadn't picked up on it.
To get the data that BigMac wanted, we used numbers provided in the wardialing data to index into the not-mispronounced Doubleclick song titles. This gave us PORTLAND WOMENS FORUM, which some Googling revealed to be a place: no doubt this was where we were supposed to meet the next morning. When we entered the solve into the BITE, Bigmac liked it.
It was getting late. We gave in and asked for a hint on the coasters. In hindsight, maybe we didn't need to do that. The ballroom had mostly emptied out—I'm not sure that everyone on the team had had a chance to look at the puzzle. But it was late and we were winding down.
Excellent GC member Corby pointed us in the right direction. (Where by "us", I mean smarter folks on the team than me. I never did figure out how that puzzle worked.) We entered the solution for that into an ssh session and were rewarded with a notice saying that we'd demonstrated, through this simple sample puzzle, that we knew how to enter answers via the ssh interface. Ergo, I'd stared at a sample puzzle for hours while failing to solve it. That didn't bode well for the future.
Jeff and Donna got woken up late at night by someone coming into their room: the hotel accidentally rented out the same room to two sets of people. It eventually got worked out, but not until Donna went down to talk to the front desk.
Nikhil ended up with the BITE device in his room. Thus when it started beeping to give him an alert message, he got woken up. He mailed the message to the rest of the team:
Hey, good job decoding those secret mil--I mean, random data I found on the Internet! Now I have everything I need to play that awesome game you told me about--GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR! So long, LUSERS! Enjoy your weekend while you can! Press Enter to continue.
So last night's random data from the internet had actually simultaneously told us where the next morning's GotoVision new-game-announcement was going to be and had contained military secrets... military secrets whose encoding was based upon a set list from the Doubleclicks? Sure, why not.
Up early, I got ready for a long road trip in a heat wave. I fixed sandwiches. I decided that a long-sleeved shirt would be too hot during a heat wave; rigged up my pencil bandolier to hold the things that would normally go in my shirt pockets.
Then I made my way down to the hotel lobby where the team was gathering to make our sleepy way to the game start.
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