An installation which nicely sums up one part of what #emfcamp was like: the random midi keyboard left quite literally in a grassy field, vaguely facing null sector (where the party is at). There’s no sign. It just silently SCREAMS “play with me”. Turns out this keyboard controls the lasers which go out across the whole site! Deeply satisfying to play with.
We can make the world a little more like this. We can reward people for being curious.
If there’s any one thing I’m determined to bring more of to the real world, it is SIDE QUESTS. There were so many. Some were puzzles, others were treasure hunts. I still haven’t managed to find adequate words to capture that on saturday I didn’t feel like doing the “main story” and so instead spent a day quite literally walking around a field doing side quests. In real life. #emfcamp
I quite enjoyed the gchqnet treasure hunt. We had to find the “hexpansion” chips that had been scattered around site. #emfcamp
Particular highlight was finding Dan, one of the organisers of this quest. After I chatted to him for a bit he said “now that you’ve met me, here’s a hidden hexpansion” and offers me a secret one from his pocket. Mindblowingly cool - I’ve only ever experienced something like this in a game.
We can make the world more like this. We can reward people for being curious.
@herdingdata Why would you solve it when you could buy the perp a beer instead? :P
(It’s important to clarify that when I say “gchq” I do not in fact mean the government entity, I mean the EMF village name inspired by some guys who discovered in the pub one day that the domain gchq.net was vacant and purchased it for a tenner. Delightful.) #emfcamp
@heinragas this was a running joke! Though I did not manage to find the perpetrator to tell them how much it made me chucke
@herdingdata @heinragas Haha excellent! I’ll take credit for supply, but the application was courtesy of some of my fellow villagers…!
I confess I was slightly concerned that they might be inappropriate given the presence of children, but I think they’re not *intrinsically* offensive, and will either fly past them, or not be materially ruder than “lol bums” or other things they might come across day to day
(Wait I just saw the pink one - that wasn’t one of mine!!)
All of these side quests demonstrated a really beautiful thing: literally everyone who was there brought something with them which contributed to the experiences of everyone else. Sometimes as humble as a random interaction which sparks an idea. This is really quite a beautiful thing.
Sometimes/often it’s easy to feel powerless: that our voices can’t change anything. But that’s not true: we can. We all can. #emfcamp
@herdingdata Things like this work *great* in closed, trusting environments. You find them at sci-fi conventions (especially small ones, like Redemption) and bigger, weirder, events like Wasteland Weekend.
I could even see pulling off a lot of stuff in a semi-open environment, like maybe a uni campus at Fresher's week.
But to have stuff just out in the open in public, all it takes is one arsehole and the thing falls apart. So do you now guard all the elements? Needs a lot of people!
@herdingdata No problem. As your local friendly non-government agency, we monitor communications for all staff and targets. 😜
(We’re following you on a couple of personal accounts)
@semanticist yeh you’re right. I definitely don’t have a good answer. I was impressed at how generally trustworthy the EMF crowd were. I can’t help but wonder: if there were more fun easter eggs to be found, could it sway some people to divert their effort from being am asshole into going in search for them…? Idk
@herdingdata I think no, not least because some people have no imagination. Others have no time and have been ground down. In the EMF/convention/Fresher's Week context one thing attendees generally have is a lot of flexible time. It's hard to go a wander through Greyfriar's to find the secret wossname if you've only got 30 minutes for lunch, or worse, are late for work, or picking up your kids, or...
@herdingdata I think you need to adapt to the reality of the situation to make stuff work.
Signs in local shops with QR codes that lead to an app that gives location-based instructions. Did you know that you can make a slightly illegal AM radio out of a RaspberryPi + a long piece of wire, and then make your own numbers station with a <50m range (or use a car-FM-radio adapter)? An ESP32 can do similar with wifi.
I'd forgotten how much semi-planning I'd done for this sort of thing in the past!
@semanticist ok I see where you’re coming from but can I offer a little counterpoint: pokemon go was pretty successful for a little while. I could barely grab a sandwich without hearing colleagues chat about it excitedly and make plans to go find more
