A Trained ARG Soldier

After New Year I have come to the realisation that playing too many alternate reality games has turned me into a Cluedo/post-it note game genius. I think it must be all the mind bendingly difficult puzzles, all the late nights staring at cryptic pictures trying to piece together strands of information to gather up a story, but over the past few days I have been a fully functional criminal mastermind.

I went up to my friend's parents hotel as planned, nice journey and its always good to spend time with old friends. Sarah, the friend who was hosting the party had decided (last minute) to add a "murder mystery" theme to the proceedings and so I was armed with my ornate dagger letter opener Swatts had brought back from Venice for me, and I was ready to put my puzzlebox to the test.
The first night was the 30th, the party proper wasn't starting till the night of the 31st (as is customary for New Years eve parties I believe), so we just drank a ridiculous amount of alcohol and played board games. As the night wore on we descended from a pretty intense game of Monopoly (which I still managed to lose, even after getting hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair!) down to the game where you have a post-it note on your forehead and you have to guess who you are. I managed to get my person in 3 guesses! Booyah! Are they male? Yes. Are they over the age of 30? Yes. Are they the Principal of our old college? Yes - you dick.

The next evening was the party itself, Sarah passed around bowls with 3 different categories written on strips of paper - one bowl for names, one for items and one for locations. Now, after we had picked out our three selections, we were informed that in order to "survive" to the end of the weekend, we would have to kill each other off. It was an interesting move for a party, murder, and it certainly put us all on edge! The idea was that we would have to brutally bludgeon our "mark" with our designated "murder weapon" in the location we were assigned, and so their assassination target would pass to us. The person with the most murders to their name by the end of the weekend would be the winner. We were told this at dinner, and I can tell you - noone would accept ANYTHING from anyone else for the rest of the evening: "Hey Sam, pass me the salt", "Oh, I bet you'd love that wouldn't you - here I am passing the salt and then BAM, I'm lying salted in the gutter, dehydrated to death - I'm watching you..."

My mark was my friend Becky, and my weapon was to be a mobile phone - easy freaking peasy. Unfortunately, I picked a freaking doozy of a location. Off the hotel grounds. By the time I found this out it was already well past dark, and I'm not sure how my friend would feel about me luring his girlfriend down into the night in order to murder her with a mobile phone. I had to bide my time, but also, I had to keep an eye open because someone would have picked out my name, and would be baying for my blood! And to make matters worse, Becky was being super-paranoid about it, she wouldn't even accept a sparkler from me - asking that I put it down on the step so she could pick it up!

As the evening wore on, friends were picked off, girlfriend was taken out by a shoe wielded by my friend Ed. She didn't mind, it meant he had to deal with her mark, which was to somehow take out a guy she'd never met with a book. Ed didn't get very far with that either, no sooner had he killed the girl, then he was assassinated by Rob and his oh-so-mightier-than-a-sword pen, in the girls toilet - no less. We decided not to enquire as to why Ed and Rob were hanging out in the girl's loos. Ditt fell foul to a box of biscuits, Shirley to a teacup and Josh was powerless against Sam's pringles tube. But I persevered. In fact, I made it till the morning - the fresh morning air had never smelled so sweet! I didn't even mind that it was infused with the smell of 4 twenty-something guys all sleeping in sleeping bags and exuding noxious gasses - I was alive! Now to enact my dastardly plan:

A Sincere Christmas Message

I doubt I'll have a chance to post later today or tomorrow so I'm going to take this opportunity to say something before the year is out:

To those of you who've just stumbled upon my humble little patch of the 'net and to those regular viewers (do I have regular viewers?) I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and a brilliant New Year. I have to admit I will be glad to leave this year behind - as a family I know this has been the single most trying year of our lives, and my blood boils when I think about those we have lost and how pointless it all had seemed at the time. Since June I think we've had to learn to drag ourselves along, even if it means by sheer force of will. But, I hope, we've emerged the other side of what happened in Africa now and I think we are beginning to get on with our lives and, with any luck, 2011 will pass without incident.

Thankyou for taking the time to come here over the past two months and listen to my ramblings. So, there's no sarcasm or veiled wit in this post. Its just a pure and simple wish for, above all, a Happy New Year.


Merry Christmas.



Will
xx