From the time the doors opened at 7 PM until they were locked behind us at 8 PM, we milled around, dealt with the first of countless tech problems (many of us couldn’t log in to the app on our phones), shared excitement over our VIP badges, and connected with faces new and – for those of us who had met up at happy hours or library tours in the preceding weeks – old.
I was overjoyed when I
When the game started, we were asked to self-select into the Patience or Fortitude teams. As the least patient person I know, I obviously selected Fortitude, and was happy to end up on a squad of the Best. People. Ever. Ian1, Ian2, Amanda, Seth, Nazary, Julia, and myself. We called ourselves The Posse and I CANNOT EVEN EXPRESS HOW AMAZING WE ARE. Okay, caps lock over.
For the first hour or so of the game, there were often lines to unlock artifacts because certain sections of the library were closing early and there was a rush to get those items completed. The jokes that flew around about all the Patience people getting to the back of the line since us Fortitude players hated waiting never got old. Seriously. Never.
I mentioned earlier how amazing The Posse was. I mean, every team thinks they’re amazing, and they’re all probably right. The small subset of the 500 people that I got to meet contained some of the brightest, most ambitious, completely hilarious people I’ve ever met. But one thing that made The Posse stand out was our unique way of finding each other when we got separated. There is something sinfully gratifying about repeatedly making a high-pitched dolphin call in a library, a building more typically associated with silence and decorum.
Oh hey, did you know that you can't embed a wav file in a blog post on Blogger? Apparently not. But believe me when I say that I made a lovely recording of me doing our team call. It went something like...OOAH OOAH! Heheh.
Much of the game was as I described it in my last post – running around, unlocking artifacts, delighting in completely dorky glee when your phone vibrated in your hand, signaling that an artifact’s power had been transferred to you and its story was unlocked. The Posse sat at a table, a veritable mass of laptops, chargers and power strips between us, and discussed the stories we wanted to write, bounced ideas off each other, and got to work.
Much of the game didn’t happen as planned – when the app stopped syncing so items you had scanned weren’t actually unlocking on the website, or when one of the tech guys ran around saying, “Please copy and paste your work from the website into a Word document, the website is about to crash!” and other difficulties. But to say this sullied my experience in the slightest would be a lie. The point of the game was collaboration, and we got around all the snafus somehow.
Around 2 AM or so, it became apparent that we were going to complete all 100 stories with more than enough time to spare. The stash of Red Bull was depleted and motivation was waning. Many of us used this opportunity to explore the centennial exhibition leisurely, without the pressure of trying to locate QR codes to scan or running back upstairs to get started on a writing task. I cannot stress enough how truly amazing some of the objects are, and any time I encountered a pair of people standing in front of a glass case, deep in conversation about Dickens or Kerouac or Bronte, I tried to eavesdrop a little (hi everyone, the creeper in the black and red dress, that was me!).
But even the exhibition took only so much time, and eventually, we had to get creative. I stumbled upon this lovely 3 AM yoga class, for example.
Around 4 AM, we decided it was time to play freeze tag. Which morphed into the impending-Rapture-appropriate zombie tag.
Seriously. I played tag in the New York Public Library in the middle of the night. I CANNOT GET OVER THIS.
One part of the game which lasted throughout the entire night was, as I mentioned in the last post which you all so carefully read I’m sure, finding a random person’s postcard from the future and trying to deliver it. For awhile, people would walk up and down the aisles screaming someone’s name, hoping for a response. That was how I managed to deliver my postcard – after yelling “MEGAN! MEGAN! MEGAN!” a few hundred times, someone finally responded.
Sometimes though, that didn’t exactly work. People starting posting in the Facebook group or on Twitter. “John, I have your future!” People walked around with signs. They put up notes in random places. I walked into our break room at one point to grab a snack, and I found a napkin lying on the food table with my name and a phone number. I texted it: “Hi, this is Arielle. You have my future!”
Ashley took this amazing picture of my postcard still in hiding in the library stacks. I know I don't typically put my last name here so if you didn't already know it, let's just all agree to not stalk me, okay? Okay. And now that you DO know it, friend me on Facebook!When this postcard delivery shenaniganery was explained at the start of the night, I saw it all going very, very badly. But in actuality, it added about 300 fun points to the game (the game contained a superfluous points system, so now I have one too). This was particularly true as the night wore on and people became desperate – someone FINALLY connecting with their note from the future would result in cheering and applause.
Technical difficulties and intense exhaustion aside, Find the Future was an experience that I wouldn’t have traded for anything. I met amazing people, wrote a few pieces that I really love (future post!), saw influential artifacts, read up on the past and thought about the future. I’m super grateful to the NYPL for hosting us in an event that not only allowed us, but FORCED us to break so many library rules (Running! Photography! Food! Drinks! Yelling!), to the brilliant Jane McGonigal, and to my 499 fellow players, even the ones I didn’t have the opportunity to meet. You can now find me in the NYPL’s online catalog as an AUTHOR. Boo. Ya. Ka. Sha.
We came. We saw. We wrote the book. =)
