Midnight Madness X.

[angledge]

This weekend, I am playing a new game. This game is called Midnight Madness.

Now you know as much about it as I do.

OK, OK – I actually know a little bit more than that. MMX (so called because this is the game's tenth iteration) is a species of urban game/alternate reality game. The name & idea seem to have come from a 1980 movie, Midnight Madness.

I have recruited an eleven-person group to form Team Heliotrope (all teams must use a color for their name, a detail that matches the movie). Our players are: hotpantsgalore, katieledge (who told me about this game in the first place), chaosvizier, marasca, a new acquaintance named petit_chou, & a bunch of non-bloggers. So far, all we know is that the game will start some time on Saturday night. The boundaries of previous MMs have been defined as Houston Street, 34th Street, & the East & Hudson Rivers - BUT games have left those boundaries, too. The basic form of the game seems to be a scavenger hunt. We will be given a starting point & there we will find a puzzle. Solving that puzzle will lead us to the next clue. Onward, until someone wins.

I only have three communications channels with the game operators (called "GameControl", another detail from the original movie). First, there is an MMX messageboard. Currently, the messageboard contains mostly smack-talk & speculation. Other than the messageboard, I have received two emails from GameControl. One let me know that my team registration had been accepted. The second message contained instructions for registering my cell phone & a team password with GameControl’s text messaging server. So... really, we know next to nothing.

But we're excited! One member of our team has played several other urban games before but the rest of us are complete n00bs. The MM website has messageboards from several previous incarnations of Midnight Madness, & some of those games lasted all night & took teams all over the city. I counted 13 possible team names in the chatter on the messageboards - we could be facing a large field. We will be armed with nothing but cell phones, maps of the city, & our wits.

Wish us luck.

Edit: new email from GameControl. We're starting at 8:00 PM somewhere in Riverside Park! They will email us a map tomorrow. Squee!!

Comments

[funkyplaid.livejournal.com]

I'm near my phone just in case...and when we can start breaking out the Midnight Madness film quotes, all will be right with the world. Good luck!

[angledge.livejournal.com]

You would've had so much fun with this. Well, OK, two hours sitting in the gutter on East 9th Street considering that I might actually be too stupid to play this goddamned game wasn't too fun, but the rest of the night was awesome!

If I ever hear about one of these with enough lag time, you & H* are going to have to come out to play! And if you hear about one in San Francisco that you want to play, please call me!

[funkyplaid.livejournal.com]

Oh, you bet, baby. This kind of thing makes me pucker with delight. You might be interested in the craze that Seth and Lara introduced me to in Scotland last month: http://www.geocaching.com/

When they come over in September, we're going to dig all over the place. I think you'd really love this stuff.

And congratulations on finishing the game!

[angledge.livejournal.com]

One of my uncles just completed a huge geocaching adventure in the deserts of central Oregon. It sounds pretty cool!