Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I’ve been a fan of Jane McGonigal for a few years now, and enjoyed playing her Cruel 2 B Kind game in the Come Out and Play festival two years ago. So when she said she was running another game in this year’s festival, I signed up.

The game ties into the Olympics in that it’s a “Lost Sport” that was allegedly banned in Ancient Greece. In cooperation with the Olympic Committee, Jane is running an entire alternative reality game around the sport. The linked wiki includes rules for the Lost Sport itself, aka “The Labyrinth”.

The idea is that a labyrinth is laid out (Jane used chalk yesterday, but string can also be used). A set of people stand on the lines of the labyrinth to form the walls. A blindfolded runner is placed in the center of the labyrinth, and has to make their way out as fast as possible. The wall can guide the runner by humming; in particular, the people ahead of the runner hum, and stop humming as the runner passes them, so the runner just runs in the direction of the hum.

While being in the wall might seem boring, it turned out there were several subtleties. For instance, realizing that the runner runs in the direction of the hum means that you need to stop humming before the runner gets to you, or they’ll run into you. Also, only hum when you have direct line-of-sight to the runner or they’ll run into the wall - the labyrinth has 180-degree corners which are very confusing if the wall doesn’t coordinate the humming. It helps to stick your head out into the middle of the walkway when humming so that the runner can run directly toward the hum.

The really fun bit is that there aren’t enough people to form the walls of the full labyrinth. So after the runner passes you, you have to get ahead of the runner to form the walls that don’t exist yet. Since the labyrinth is approximately circular, the best strategy we came up with was to have both sides of the labyrinth take a step outward, rather than trying to have the inner wall people squeeze through to form the outer wall. Towards the end, as the numbers dwindled, we didn’t even have enough people to do that, so things got pretty silly as the wall raced to try to stay ahead of the runner. We had one runner actually outrun the wall which left him very confused.

I like that the game is cooperative and competitive at the same time - each labyrinth is working with the runner to get faster times, but you can have multiple labyrinths competing against each other (we had four labyrinths side-by-side in Central Park yesterday, and Jane was in contact with other labyrinths in Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo, each competing for the best times). As an example of how the teamwork of the labyrinth really matters, one runner yesterday set a world record of under 14 seconds, and wanted to take another crack at beating that record at the end. We formed a labyrinth out of the remaining people, and it just didn’t work. Each of the four labyrinths had devised their own strategies, and we were bumping into each other and not being coordinated. Apparently, it had taken several runs for him to get that world record time as everybody learned where and when to hum and move.

I haven’t looked into the larger alternative reality game yet, but I really enjoyed the “Lost Sport”. I’ll keep an eye out for future labyrinth runs in New York.

My life, it is busy.

Let’s do the quick update of every night since my last post on Monday, September 19th, when I went to the Social Media Club.

Tuesday: Stayed home and studied. My only day without interaction outside of work in the last three weeks

Wednesday and Thursday: Class (my normal Tuesday class was moved to Thursday due to a scheduling conflict).

Friday: Sailing out in the Hudson with Sasha and Ann. Unlike last time, it was windy and crowded out on the water. Lots of four-foot wakes rolling by, which made this trip less of an idyllic sunset cruise and more of a roller coaster ride, with the whole boat tipping over to crazy angles, or coming half out of the water when going over a wave. Lots of fun, but a lot different; when I took the tiller this time, the boat was much harder to control, and I gave it back after I almost ran us into Jersey.

Saturday and Sunday: The Come Out and Play festival. More on this below after the chronology.

Monday evening: Meeting with my group for my Corporate Finance class, so we could pull together our case study for class on Wednesday.

Tuesday and Wednesday: Class.

Thursday (tonight): Was scheduled for my night off, but then I saw that NYPL Live was hosting a discussion between Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame and Larry Lessig, who I think is awesome (I’ve read 2.5 of his books and loved seeing him speak a couple years ago). So I had to go to that.

Friday (tomorrow): Going to try to check out Art (212), which is free tomorrow evening, $15 otherwise.

This weekend: I could do Wired NextFest or BarCamp, but I think I need a weekend off. Too busy! I’m not letting two nights of classes a week plus the associated homework put a crimp in my social schedule but it’s coming out of my sleep and energy schedule. Hrm.

Come Out and Play festival: Awesome. The idea is to use New York City as a gameboard for many many games. Go check out the variety of games that they were running last weekend. Or read about it at cbsnews.com. I heard about it through Jane McGonigal, who I think I heard about from either danah boyd or Henry Jenkins in the last month. There were dozens of game over the weekend, but I only participated in two.

Saturday was Cruel 2 B Kind, the world premiere of one of Jane McGonigal’s games. The idea is that all of the players arrive in the same public space, where they are text messaged a weapon of kindness and a weakness for kindness. They must go up to other people in the area, and “assault” them with their weapon of kindness. If they attack another team, and the weapon is that team’s weakness, they defeat the team and subsume them. If they attack another team, but don’t hit their weakness, the other team must respond “You are too kind”. If they attack a random person who just happens to be in the playing field, that’s when the fun starts.

In this case, the playing field was Broadway between 48th and 58th. Ann and I broke our fast at Empanada Mama’s (sooooo good), and then headed over. We got there a few minutes early, checked in via text message, and then started scoping for other teams. Since all teams started off as pairs, we were looking for pairs of people with a cell phone ready to hand. This turned out to be relatively easy to do.

At 12:30, we were text messaged our weapon (wish people a “spectacular day”) and our weakness (I can’t remember - perhaps it was being wished a “delicious day”). We had pegged another group near us as being in the game. We walked up to them. I had on my Cubs hat, had out a tourist map, put on my best clueless expression and said “Excuse me, do you know which way Rockefeller Center is?” while thrusting the map at them. They pointed it out to me, I said thanks, and Ann and I said “Have a spectacular day!” They looked at us with this dawning look of horror and said “Wait, you’re in the game?!” It was wonderful. And we’d killed them. Bwa hahahaha.

We pulled the same ruse on two more teams before we got another one. By then we were up to 8 or so people, and the stealth option was lost to us. We didn’t adjust tactics quick enough, and were ambushed by a two person team before we got organized. Oops.

Never fear, our group of ten went on to take out another large group, and suddenly we were 25 or so. This was when things started to get a bit ridiculous. Our secret weapon at this point was offering to help people. So whenever we saw any group that might be another team, even if they were across the street, we yelled “Can we help you?!?” And they’d yell back “You are too kind! We love your shoes!” And we’d yell “You are too kind!” Meanwhile, the tourists waiting for the matinee Broadway shows were wondering what the HELL was going on.

We also had some pretty great reactions from deploying our weapon on unsuspecting passersby. One of them looked us up and down and just said “No” when we asked if we could help him. Most people just looked confused and intimidated.

A fun time was had by all, although it got a bit slow towards the end since no team who was vulnerable to our weapon got within a block of us because we were shouting it so indiscriminately. It would have been nice for the larger groups to get their weapons switched out more (they redeployed weapons occasionally during the game via text message) because we ended up just walking up and down the street for 45 minutes yelling “Can we help you?!”

For those that are interested in reading more, check out the account from the eventual game winners or this CNET article.

Then I went home and took a two hour nap, spent two hours talking to Christy and then Jofish, and then failed to study. Too much excitement.

But wait, there’s more!

On Sunday, Ann and Niko (no, not that one) and Jocelyn and I went out for dim sum before meeting up with Mira to go play the Go Game, which was basically an experiential scavenger hunt through Greenwich Village. We were issued a cell phone and a camera. I called the team Project Eris, in honor of both chaos and of the recently named dwarf planet, which a friend of mine co-discovered. The rest of the afternoon, we were issued missions via the cell phone which often had to be documented by the camera. Among other things, we had to have a mock kung-fu fight with a Matrix-y woman, explain social networking sites to a “grandmother” knitting in a Starbucks, stage a tabloid photo with Batgirl (see below), mock up a video game (we chose Pong), etc. They even posted all the game photos (you may have to login - use username nehrlich, password nehrlich and then go back to that link). Plus there were run around the Village missions where we had to enter a local establishment, find some piece of information and send it back to HQ, e.g. go to a Gristedes, find the “most patriotic section” (lots of flags), and look for the green dessert topping (maraschino cherries), and then find the ingredient it shared with antifreeze (we spent way too much time on this trying to google for stuff - we should have just guessed and moved on). But it was fun. Then we all met up back at a local bar for the judging portion, where we got to see what others had down. I think my favorites were the staged photo of Batgirl snorting coke off a dead hustler, and the amazing mockup video the winning team did of Katamari Damacy, where they ended up all rolled up in one big ball (after picking up lots of little things first). It was a fun time, and a good excuse to go run around New York with friends for an afternoon.

And now I shall shut up. I’d originally planned to write a couple blog posts tonight, but maybe tomorrow.

Technorati tag: cruel2bkind

Just a quick comment on this New York Times article about World of Warcraft.

“It’s the difference between an immersive experience and a mechanical diversion,” Mr. Metzen said. “You might spend hundreds of hours playing a game like this, and why would you keep coming back? Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon?

“It has to be the story. We want you to care about these places and things so that, in addition to the adrenaline and the rewards of addictive gameplay, you have an emotional investment in the world. And that’s what makes a great game.”

This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Absolutely wrong. I’m astonished that a representative of a game company as successful as Blizzard could even say something like this. The thing that keeps people coming back to a game like that is the other people. Period. The only killer app in the history of computer technology is human communication. I was an early player of MUDs, way back when. The games themselves were utterly primitive, text based adventures with simple combat rules. But they were addictive and enthralling because I was interacting with people all over the country. I wasn’t a sixteen year old twerp; I was Kamikaze the mighty thief. I earned respect based on my actions in the game, not on who I was in real life.

And, from everything I’ve heard about the current generation of MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games), social interaction is still the main attraction. Friends use it for hanging out together. Others use the game as a way of establishing an in-game reputation that they could never achieve in real life. It’s not about the story that the game creators write. It’s about the story that the players are creating together, the community that they are building. And any game creator that doesn’t understand that will get frustrated by why the players aren’t doing their uber cool puzzle area. Things never change; wizards on the MUD I used to play on would complain endlessly about the stupid players who wouldn’t explore their areas. They didn’t get it. It’s about delivering to your players what they want. And they want opportunities to create their own story, not play yours.