How'd They Do That?

First, we all put on our white lab coats and safety goggles, and retreat for several months into our secret laboratory (pronounced luh-bor-uh-tree) to concoct devious puzzles, scheme, and generally test our plans for hax0r gaming domination.

Well, not everyone wears a lab coat, they're optional. But safety goggles are a must. We don't want OSHA shutting us down.

Alright, alright, I'll tell the truth, but only because I'm feeling truthy this evening.

We do start planning several months in advance, that wasn't an exaggeration. An event like Hack or Halo doesn't just come together in a couple weeks time. We are all pretty hardcore about learning from past experience, so after HoH4 we started discussing what went well and what we'd like to see us do differently the next year. And as early as July wxs was kicking around new ideas on how to structure the Hack side of the game with folks.

In October, Compton officially put together the HoH5 team - several familiar faces as well as welcoming a new member to the Hack side of the house and we started planning in earnest. wxs and his team are hard at work on Hack. a few months ago Compton and I met with a member of the XBOX team at Microsoft to learn more about how the NXE is going to impact Halo 3, so we can start planning tournament structure and implementation. At present we are still planning for a bracketed tournament starting with 64 players in 5 minute 8 person slayer elimination rounds until we are down to the final four Spartans… And mjxg cranked out a new tshirt design and a totally badass poster for HoH5. Remember how awesome our posters and t-shirts were last year? Yeah, that was mjxg's handiwork too. Who knows what else we had him design this year...

So all this work goes in before any one of us boards a plane for DC (or hops on the Metro, as the case may be). Once ShmooCon starts, we are all working like crazy at the booth to make sure HoH recruits players and runs without a hitch. You'll find me, mjxg, and compton signing people up for HoH. The Hack crew are all behind the booth making last minute tweaks to the puzzles and testing everything again. And again. And sometimes again. We do a dry run of the event Friday night, where we load all the gear into the room and light it up, testing to see that it works as expected and iron out any execution wrinkles that will cost us precious time on game night.

What's that? You don't know how game night runs? Oh my, we haven't really explained that at all yet, have we? There will be some changes this year, but the basics remain the same. HoH is Saturday evening, after the talks are done and before the party. You can Hack or Halo. If you want to sign up to do both that's fine, just don't whine to wxs about how you lost time on the Hack puzzles because you were busy shooting it up in Halo, or make excuses to me about why you missed your Halo timeslot because you were so engrossed in the DDA exercise in Hack. Only a master of time management can transcend the Hack or Halo experience, turning it into Hack AND Halo, young Padawan. Announce winners at end of game we do*. However, our fabulous prizes are not handed out until ShmooCon closing ceremonies on Sunday. Oh yeah, one other thing… Spectators at HoH are encouraged, but so help me, if you walk in front of one of the Halo game screens while people are competing I will subject you to the verbal equivalent of a gravity hammer and mercilessly berate you and say not nice things about your intelligence.

Game on...

-KxP

*DISCLAIMER: Last year (Or maybe it was the year before. I'm not sure) we didn't know the winner until Sunday morning because we had to figure out who had the most boxes, and then when we looked at the score sheets we saw there was a 4-way tie. We had to determine when each player solved each puzzle in order to calculate who did it fastest. So we may not announce the Hack winner Saturday night, even though I just said in a bad Yoda impression that we would. Not valid in AK or HI. Batteries not included. Your mileage may vary.