ObieGame 2013:
Red Menace
Plot outline:
Your government employer just dumped ('loaned') you onto an interagency project in the middle of nowhere Ohio. You'll get to stare at a computer screen, occasionally click a button or two, and run through not one, not two, but three whole simulations of a disease outbreak in a brand new - and rather buggy - piece of software.
Don't bother contacting IT - those guys are having their own problems.
But while you stare and while you click you'll also find some information you were never intended to see. Orders ignored, transfers of interstellar matter across international borders, experiments in which no one survived. An anonymous contact leaks you a recording that reveals a decades-old consipracy among hard-liners to do science the way they wanted.
That always ends up well.
When the third simulation starts to go very awry, you contact the one person you think you can trust... only to learn you should trust no one. Now you're trapped in a secure facility with only your wits, one nerve toxin device in desperate need of disarming, four floors between you and the exit, the living remnants of failed experiments scattered, crawling, hiding all around...
And fifteen minutes to get out.
Winners:
- Teen Titanz [only team to solve Deep Throat's riddles; bonus points for talking back to Boyd during the endgame]
- The Troublemakers [Second team invited to endgame; bonus for wreaking such havoc during Sim3 (we had to give them credit for it - we never specifically outlawed such actions)]
- Dove Party [bonus for having a team member willing to sacrifice themselves to save their team in endgame. We wrote you guys a movie for endgame, you scripted a scene we'd only hoped for.]
- Revengeance
[Y'all did awesome, seniors, and we're looking forward to the documentary!]
Materials:
Fun Facts:
- Simulation 3 moved into the 'real world' with red wristbands indicating infections and players trying to keep the disease from spreading. We had fun handing out spare wristbands to Wilder desk staff and Slow Train employees, and watching 'uninfected' players try and figure out how to have an interaction without making contact.
- We seeded the player pool with two randomly infected players. By four days in, over half of all active players were 'infected'.
- Unable to come up with a good scoring system for staying uninfected or infecting others, it was our honest thought that we would just instruct all players not to infect one another and that would be enough. We have no idea why we were so naive.
- As a joke/teaser we had players include their blood type on the registration form. Several players took this very seriouesly, even calling home to ask their parents to check their medical records. We then decided to assign 'jobs' in the database based on blood type as follows:
- A+ = Project Manager
- A- = Research Assistant
- B+ = Lab Assistant
- B- = Junior Research Fellow
- AB+ = Hazmat Operations
- AB- = Control Group
- O+ = Junior Intern
- O- = Senior Intern
- Don't know = Intern
- N/A = Lab TA
