The Stack

It’s been a busy week. And PAX was the start of it. And of all the games available for play or merely on display, there was one that I felt I needed to post about here: this year’s iteration of the PAX XP challenge.

PAX XP was introduced at last year’s PAX Prime as a way to encourage people to participate in every aspect of the convention, rather than just ensconce themselves in one area, as is very easy to do. It accomplishes this through what’s come to be called “gamification” — yes, even gaming conventions are being gamified. I suppose it’s the audience most likely to be receptive to such things. Here’s how it worked last year: Ten people, stationed at specific locations listed on the PAX XP card you got with your program, held special hole-punches, and would punch the appropriate slot on your card either on request or, in some cases, after you performed a simple quest, such as getting up from a beanbag chair or reciting the Konami Code from memory. Once you got all ten holes punched, you could “level up” by turning the card in for a PAX XP keychain fob — a good choice of prize, it seems to me, because it provides an undeniable physical recognition of your accomplishment while at the same time being valueless enough that it doesn’t inspire cheating.

It should be noted that PAX XP wasn’t even the only such activity running at PAX. There was a similar set of simple activities run by a group of indie developers this year as an enticement to visit all their booths. Both this year and last, Magic: the Gathering people had people stationed throughout the grounds running puzzles that got you an invitation to some kind of M:tG event. (Last year, I finished all their puzzles simply because I liked puzzles, but had no interest in the event.) The thing is, these other activities were blatantly geared entirely towards publicizing their particular products. PAX XP 2010 had a little bit of that — one of the hole-punch-carriers was stationed inside a Plants vs Zombies exhibit — but mostly it was about calling your attention to attractions that you had already paid for, and that made it somehow feel more legitimate.

This year’s PAX XP challenge was a bit different from last year’s. ¹Apparently the version described here was also used at this year’s PAX East, with a different solution. Instead of tying up 10 people with hole punches, they posted throughout the grounds 38 laminated sheets of paper bearing QR codes, each decodable to a letter ²Actually, one “letter” was an apostrophe. Other punctuation was not included in the codes. and a clue. (So, already it’s more like a real game.) The letters were to be unscrambled to form a phrase which you could say at the main desk to get this year’s keychain (which is larger and more impressive than last year’s). The clues were mostly things like “Word 2 has one more letter than the final word” and “The letter O appears in four words straight”, but a few of them gave the location of other QR codes. One QR code prominently posted at the entrance yielded “Defeat my puzzle and become the hero of PAX!”, which seemed useless at first, but turned out to be a strong hint about the whole sentence, if you had the necessary cultural references.

Notably, finding all the clues wasn’t necessary. I managed to figure out the sentence from only 24 of the 38 — and this was despite a couple of inaccuracies in the clues. (Two QR codes gave L as their letter, even though one of the clues directly stated that there was only one L in the sentence. One clue incorrectly stated that the letter T only appeared at the beginning of words.)

The really clever thing about using QR codes is that by now most of us automatically filter them out, like banner ads. Consequently, they’re unobtrusive, and easily ignored by people who don’t want to participate in the riddle-hunt. But at the same time, they give the people who are participating a reason to pay attention to QR codes. A few of the commercial exhibits had codes posted that looked like they could be PAX XP clues but turned out to be their company URLs. I’m not sure if my confusion there was deliberate on their part or not; if it was, it didn’t work very well, because I didn’t actually open the URLs after decoding them, but I suppose someone with a different decoder app might have opened them automatically.

I can’t say for sure how popular the whole thing was, but I managed to win an additional “speed demon” award for being one of the first solvers, and that was on the second day of the convention. Also, only once in the entire three days did I see someone else pointing a phone at one of the codes, and he turned out to have no idea what it was about, having not read his program yet. But I suppose that in most cases taking a snapshot of the code is a quick procedure that you wouldn’t notice happening; in this one fellow’s case, it was rendered difficult by glare on the lamination. But hunting for scattered clues is a very adventure-gameish idea, and most gamers aren’t adventure gamers. I suppose there must be enough people participating for the organizers to think it’s worthwhile to keep doing it, at least. It’s not like everyone has to do everything, even if that sentiment goes against the original point of the exercise.

As per this blog’s charter, WarioWare, Inc. was deemed off the Stack as soon as I completed story mode, which happened before the last post. But there were a couple of days left of PAX after that, and of course the journey home, all of which involved waiting on line to one degree or another, and you know something? WarioWare is positively ideal for waiting on line. Particularly in Grid mode, where there’s so little at stake. So I’ve made some pretty good progress towards really completing the game.

So, here’s a brief description of the game’s optional goals. First of all, every microgame in Grid mode has a threshold, a number of iterations that you have to complete without running out of lives in order to get its spot on the grid marked with a red flower. Supposedly something happens when you get all the flowers. I’m still fairly distant from this goal, and it’s not clear to me that I’ll ever achieve it, unless I find myself in another situation involving lots of waiting in line. At the moment, I don’t even have all of the microgames available in the Grid — remember, they only show up there after you’ve randomly encountered them in Game mode, so there’s the whole last-pixel syndrome to contend with. Add to that the fact that Grid mode is the title’s tedious side, and this is a goal for the very patient.

Secondly, certain levels in Game mode unlock extra content when you pass indicated thresholds. It should be noted that these goals are impossible to reach the first time around. When you reach the threshold necessary to proceed with the story, you immediately get an epilogue to the current level and then get thrown back to the level menu. So in order to complete more microgames than it takes to continue the story, you have to come back to the level after completing it — which reinforces the idea that these are optional challenges, and not part of winning the game.

The content you unlock in this way consists mostly of additional games — mostly versions of the microgames that have been expanded into full minigames, which means they play continuously instead of being interrupted every few seconds. One of the unlockables is a full version of Doctor Mario, a game I recall mind-melding with in its coin-op incarnation back in my school days, an experience much like the play-by-brainstem necessary in WarioWare when it gets fast. It seems a little ironic to see it in this context, an inversion of the usual sort of unlockable mini-game, which is something less sophisticated than the main game.

It’s notable, however, that I’m definitely not playing the game in order to gain access to the unlockable content. This is clear because I delilberately threw access away. I actually bought this game used — something I don’t normally do, but this was at a rummage sale for charity, and it looked to be in near-mint condition, with its box and instruction manual and everything. The instruction manual contains a sheet of stickers, and specific spots marked in the manual for you to stick them, which tells you what audience they were targeting. The copy I got was pristine, with all of its stickers still on the sheet, which is a pretty good indication that the person who bought it wasn’t part of that target audience. Months later, when I actually got around to playing it, this helped me to forget that it was used, and I was briefly confused by how different my experience was from that described in the pristine manual: everything seemed to be already unlocked! Once I figured out what was up, I went into the options menu and reset the whole thing, erasing the previous owner’s progress.

This is because, to me, the point of unlocking stuff is simply to unlock it, not to have it unlocked. It’s not like I’m going to spend any significant amount of time playing the unlockable minigames. Their purpose is only to acknowledge by their presence what I have done, like an Achievement or Trophy on the newer consoles. These optional goals are, after all, the only way to win in a game that’s otherwise based on the sort of old-school arcade-game design where things just keep getting harder until you lose.

(Remember, this game is from 2003, so this sort of structure is retro. The game even acknowledges it by throwing in an entire level where the microgames are all simplified versions of Nintendo classics (such as Doctor Mario), some of which were otherwise never released outside Japan. The mere fact that it gives you lives is basically retro by now.)

PAX is full of games, but it’s even more full of people. The show was simply oversold. I haven’t even really tried to get into any panels or events other than the IF-related ones, but even those, contrary to expectation, have had queues too long to fit in the room. Are there really that many IF fans at PAX? Not really. At one of the panels, someone asked the audience to raise their hands if they had played a text game in the last year, and only about half of them raised their hands. Even that was more than I was expecting after hearing people talking in line. Some of them had no idea what they were in line for, and just wanted to get into anything. This was a good half hour before the doors were opened.

After one such experience, I made sure to bring some entertainment on subsequent queues. This isn’t at all unusual, of course. A lot of people in the queues were playing on various handheld devices (mostly various forms of Nintendo DS). But I’m still trying to get get through Heimdall, which means using a relatively bulky laptop. If I can sit down while playing, I can of course put it on my lap, where it belongs. But the people in charge liked to keep shifting the queue around while we were waiting, to use space more efficiently. Standing up and holding the laptop in one hand, one has only one hand free for gameplay. But you know something? For a primarily mouse-based game like Heimdall, that’s enough. If I weren’t playing Heimdall, I probably would have been trying to play IF, that being more appropriate to my immediate context, and to play that standing up, you’d really want a harness of the sort seen in The Typing of the Dead.

Here I am at PAX East, surrounded by games both new and old, PC and console and tabletop. And yet, by my self-imposed rules, I have to focus my attention on Heimdall for long enough to write another blog post, because I played it a bit while waiting in the airport on the way here. It’s one of those moments that makes me ask myself why I’m doing all this. I suppose the traditional “because it’s there” will have to do.

The overall goal in Heimdall is to recover three weapons weapons of the gods, stolen and hidden by Loki: Thor’s hammer, Odin’s sword, and Frey’s spear. (The spear is something of a surprise to me, but a quick google turns it up in a few other games, if nowhere else.) The manual also mentions a three-tiered model of the world, with the human world of Midgard sandwiched between Asgard, abode of the gods, and an underworld whose name I don’t recall. (I don’t think the manual used the word “Niflheim”, but Norse mythology seems to have multiple underworlds.) So just from the point of view of symmetry, it seems likely that each weapon is hidden on one of the three worlds.

So far, however, I haven’t left Midgard. I think I know where the weapon on this world is, because there’s really only one island left that I haven’t explored thoroughly, and it’s the island that’s reachable last. The ordering of the islands is partial — there cases where you can definitely say “this island comes before that one” and other cases where you can’t. It’s definitely worthwhile to try to clear the islands in the order they become available, though. This was a mistake I made early on: on the first island I visited, a man asked for a sprig of hemlock, and I wandered far and wide looking for such a thing. It turned out to be found on the next island over, which I could have visited first. I just hadn’t explored it fully.

A lot of the items that I had found no use for before turn out to be quest tokens for the final island. Those scrolls bearing “runes of power”? If you’ve collected a full set, it lets you skip a fight. Whether it’s a fight worth skipping, I’m not sure. One of the islands exists primarily to provide you with a scroll that instantly kills giant serpents of the sort that guards the waters around the final island, but I managed to kill that serpent with simple melee before I found the scroll. It all really comes down to how much food and healing magic you carry to the final island with you. This stuff has been absurdly abundant throughout the game up to this point, and cheap to buy in stores, but it seems to dry up immediately once you’re on the other side of that giant serpent corpse. So you really want to carry as much as you can. But then, each of those power-rune scrolls takes up an inventory slot each. I’m loath to give up a collection subquest, but surely I’d be better off devoting those slots to food?

I haven’t mentioned this here yet: I will be attending PAX East this weekend. I will probably be spending a lot of my time at the IF Hospitality Suite. Any reader of this blog who is willing to trade pokémon is welcome to find me there.