Lost sport videos

A couple of recent videos of people playing the Lost Sport of Olympia, around the world.

FooCamp

Shanghai

The saga of the Third Ring

I haven’t written about the collection of the other two rings – one in Wellington, New Zealand, and one in Japan – because they happened largely without my involvement, but the third ring that appeared last week, and the messages leading up to it, were right up my alley.

Last Thursday, a message in Hindi appeared on TheO’s voicemail, which my PMOG friend’s co-workers helped me translate (thanks Stephen, Kavita and Ritu! You were great).

The message directed the agonothetai to an area of Manchester, England; I have a bunch of UK friends from a different “save the world!” mission, so I tried to rally them to action, but without more specific maps they were reasonably hesitant. Finally, after a bit of language clarification, Mancunian cubicgarden (who helps direct some technology division for the BBC) volunteered, and headed out from the Night and Day cafe to investigate local galleries.

After a few days of the gallery being closed, he arrived at Richard Goodman and found the ring on display.

That’s where things got a bit sticky, though… The person collecting each ring sculpture has to produce a password, and Cubic’s laptop died just before the pickup, so he had to ring a friend to look it up for him. The gallery owner was not impressed, and emailed TheO to see what proper procedure was – and in the end, she refused to hand it over! Another person was dispatched, and denied as well, presumably for being “dodgy.”

We were all fretting because James has suggested TheO already suspects we know more than we should, and this was sure to raise the alarm over at Baddie HQ… but James and Eli Hunt reassured us via email, and said that the next person to attempt a pickup should “show full confidence in their task”.

Chippy (with whom I did the London omphalabyrinth), who’d met cubicgarden at an industry event (small world), headed from Leeds to Manchester the next day, dressed like a spy and prepared to roleplay. After a bit of hard questioning, the gallery packed up the ring and sent him on his way, as the rest of the agonothetai watching online breathed a sigh of relief.

The newest voicemail came out today, and it’s in Russian, so we’re already moving on the translation for it. It looks like it’ll be somewhere in South America, but as the translation is pending, we’re left to guess and speculate.

The latest email from James warns us that future ring collections will be videotaped for verification with TheO; this isn’t a problem for me, as I’ve already submitted myself as a counter-agonothetai, despite being labyrinth loyal, though I do need to complete the second half of my task over this weekend, which is to blindfold public statues.

Incidentally, I had an interesting internal debate about joining TheO, even as a double agent. I wondered, if I were willing to do whatever it took to help the six agono, including risk my reputation and trust, doesn’t that make me just like TheO, the group whose principles and methods I supposedly oppose? But in the end, they needed the numbers, and it helps James move up in the bad guy ranks, which helps our six. But nothing is ever black or white, in this quest.

All photos by cubicgarden, except the last one, which is by chippy. See more here.

Frodo, don’t wear the ring

A couple of pics from the Lost Ring community:

Mr. Judkins’s labyrinth running team in Wellington, New Zealand, posing with one of the six actual rings after breaking (again!) the world record for speed.

 

The Thumos for jasper’s Austin omphalabyrinth, executed in a relay between people on foot, on bike and in car (and via stroller).

 
The game is slow-going right now, as cities complete their omphalabyrinths, and as we uncover the locations for the remaining five rings; after translating a message in Armenian with directions, we’re now waiting for players in Japan to locate the gallery in which the next one is displayed.

London calling

Last Saturday, Jey and I met up with Tim (chippy) and Jem (Yembles) to walk a labyrinth shape formed of London’s city streets. Five hours, four miles and one pint later, we’d had a tour of the West End and more adventures than you might expect from an area of XYZ square miles.

We followed chippy’s design, and encountered, in his words, “many strange and serendipitous things, including us painting a labyrinth in an art gallery, moving hedges, sexy ladys, wall noses, lucky pennies, and unusual pets.”

I haven’t been able to match up the Trackstick data with my photos yet (and will edit this post when I get it working), but I have posted my photos to flickr. Here are some samples:

FTLR – Theo’s desynchronization mission

I finished and submitted my mission today; you can check out the photos here.

My mission was:

“Plant Transplant–This task is about giving new life to objects that would otherwise no longer be seen or used and disrupting the routine and environments of both the task partner and the target.

1. Create a flower out of a couple of supplies found in your house, items that are old and tucked away somewhere to be forgotten.

2. Write a secret onto a small piece of paper and attach it somewhere on the flower, like the stem.

3. Take the flower to a house out of your way and plant it in the middle of a bed of flowers where it will be seen, a symbol of permanence among the transient.”

I didn’t end up putting mine in a bed of flowers, because everything is in bloom right now so it wouldn’t have stood out! Instead, I put it under a lone tree in the middle of a construction site (representing impermanence). I hope that one of the construction workers will find it and enjoy it; it’s a bit of color in the midst of a lot of dust and rubble. I also included a little bee friend that I made to keep the flower company until that happens.

FTLR – calculating omphalabyrinth strength

A couple of people and I have been drawing city-sized labyrinths to form our knot in the omphalos net. (For a list of the 27 cities and their knot details, check out the excellent wiki page.)

I came up with a couple of big but asymmetrical and ugly designs, and jasper in Austin drew up some truly beautiful, evenly-spaced circuits. After sending them off to Eli Hunt, he selected two – one as a main labyrinth, and one as a second, bonus option. Here is how I calculated their strength as knots in the net:

- Using this Google Maps distance calculator, I measured the widest parts of the labyrinths (as per Mr. Hunt’s instructions) and converted the miles to kilometers
- The next step is to convert meters to stadia, an ancient unit of length. For our purposes, we use the Olympic numbers, meaning that 185 meters = 1 stadia
- The omphalabyrinth strength formula is (Stadia x number of Circuits)/6
 
 

Jasper’s labyrinth (dubbed “elegant” by Mr. Hunt) is 7 circuits, and 1.757 miles across (or 2827 meters/15.281 stadia) – making its strength 17.82.
 
 

This semi-wonky four-quadrant labyrinth (dubbed “charming” by Mr. Hunt) is also 7 circuits (measured after the method of the Sao Paolo labyrinth), and is 5645 meters (or 30.5 stadia) across, making its strength 35.6.

According to sapagoo in IRC, “if we have 27 omphalabyrinths with an average strength of 11-13, we should be good. so I would classify a strength of 17.8 as “Great” and helping to offset the small omphalabyrinths we are bound to have.” So, good news overall! I’m sure the whole Dallas team will want to do both; we have yet to schedule a date, but I’m hoping the people from other Texas cities will be able to travel in for the event.

Losing myself in Find The Lost Ring

Since this blog is relatively new, I haven’t yet written about ARGs in general, and Find The Lost Ring specifically. My experience with FTLR has been something along the following lines:

1. Very fast and intense learning curve as I worked to catch up with about a months’ worth of information . Find the Lost Ring is a complicated immersive fiction with roots in Greek history. Long story short: an Olympic game that was banned has been revived in order to convert the world into a giant portal to allow six people to return to their own worlds, which exist parallel to this one.
2. Fun period of making lots of posts and emailing with characters
3. Realizing I was immersed in the world after seeing a cement truck on the expressway and catching myself thinking, “That shape would make a great omphalos, and it’s even hollow!”
4. Some small frustrations due to lack of activity, somewhat appeased by guessing that things would pick up at about three months before the Olympics (three months being a typical, solid length of time for a game).
5. Becoming totally overloaded by a sudden flood of in-game information and activity, but not being able to keep up due to real-life activity taking priority, and so retiring away for a few weeks

And now,
6. Catching up again and settling back into the comfortable space I had carved out earlier on

I have just received a Trackstick from one of the characters, so that we can trace out a traditional labyrinth shape among the city blocks of Dallas; twenty six other cities around the globe will be doing the same thing. Each of these points represent knots in an omphalos net. Then, like the oracles at Delphi, whose hallucinatory visions were actually a peek into parallel worlds, the multiverses will be aligned and our traveling friends will be able to return to their homes. Not bad, for a half day’s work and a tank of gas.