{"id":1398,"date":"2006-06-05T11:29:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T18:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2006\/06\/05\/palms-down\/"},"modified":"2006-06-05T11:29:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-05T18:29:00","slug":"palms-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2006\/06\/05\/palms-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Palms Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rant of the day: In the context of The Game<\/a>, PDAs are nothing but trouble.<\/p>\n

I have never played a Game which used PDAs in which there wasn’t some sort of technical failure which required Game Control to reset, reboot, or re-install software on the device. In addition to being a roadblock, this also takes us out of the game world– breaking the fourth wall, if you will– and reduces our confidence in the omnipotence of GC.<\/p>\n

A secondary effect is that it’s easier to “back-solve” clues (i.e.<\/span>, reverse engineer the solution message) if you can just keep entering random guesses into the PDA. Team Snout played Paparazzi<\/a> over the weekend, and on several occasions we were able to guess the solution to a clue after having decoded less than half of the actual message data. But in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge issue– if you’ve figured out the solving method and started decoding the final message, shaving a few seconds by guessing isn’t going to make a huge difference to anyone.<\/p>\n

On the bright side, the Paparazzi Game was very well put together overall; especially impressive, given that this was a first-time GC. They didn’t attempt a story, but all the clues and most locations were well tied to the theme. Highlights in the latter category included a limo ride to Ruby Skye, dinner at a very familiar Chevys<\/a>, and a beautiful sunset seen from Treasure Island<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of my favorite clues solved to longer, riddle-type messages, for which the answer word or phrase served as input to the PDA. I guess I respected the fact that it was harder to guess the solution if you didn’t have the complete question as a prompt– kind of like a game show contestant buzzing in before the host has finished reading the trivia question, and missing an important detail. (“Who is the President of the United States… married to?”)<\/p>\n

And here’s their grand-finale video clue:<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/div>\n

It’s funny. I’m not really competitive as a Game player– I’m in it to have fun. But as GC, I feel much more of a drive to compare favorably with other event-runners. Maybe it’s because we have an audience; maybe it’s because I have more of an affinity for creation than re<\/span>creation; maybe I feel it’s a better measure of my abilities. Failing to excel during a single weekend can be attributed to any number of incidental factors. Failing to produce a good outcome after six to nine months of planning is, to me, much worse.<\/p>\n

Anyone can be a hero in the middle of a disaster. It takes a different set of skills and expertise to build something that will resist catastrophe in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rant of the day: In the context of The Game, PDAs are nothing but trouble. I have never played a Game which used PDAs in which there wasn’t some sort of technical failure which required Game Control to reset, reboot,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}