Intro and Rules

We moved into active planning mode back in April, after MN0 players had returned from Chicago with tales of adventure. I had wanted to have the event here in the Twin Cities since at least 2007, when they did the Journey:Glasnost event in San Francisco. The reports from that just charged me with desire.
But it was all very loose until the rest of the folks came back from Chicago fired up. So I asked if people would be willing to build the thing together and make it happen. We lined up a small team of people to make group decisions—Dok Harmon, JJason, Ink Tea, OliverX, Star5, and me—and moved the thing forward.
We did a lot of email and had some meetings, we built some google documents, and we debated what we wanted to do. Here's a set of google docs we put together and discussed planning:

• First a clearing house that had a lot of loose discussion and plans.


• Then a rules doc to discuss our hopes and ideas for making it interesting.


• This rules document was later condensed into a final rules doc.

I offer these as a look at some of our planning process. I don't mind being a "take charge" leader type, but honestly I get plenty of opportunities in other areas of my life. I wanted us to feel like we could all contribute and work within consensus, with each person feeling able to add (not to mention being able to make decisions at game time). By and large I think this happened, though you can check in with the other players in the bunch. I think MN0 as a group has some interesting things to move forward with anyways, and lessons learned.

Route & Map

Crucial to the planning process was the route. I had scoped out routes and locations around the twin cities a lot over the second half of 2007. Some of the pieces of that research made it into the final route, but ultimately that was a group decision. The Final Map is really a living document, which has a lot of points on it that were discussed and not used. When you review it, the Stage Points are in blue with a black dot, the pinkish points are bonus checkpoints (unstaffed), and the purple points are points that were discussed but not used. The line is useful as a kind of "best case scenario" for how long the route was if someone took it straight from stage to stage, without being pursued, without taking the bonus checkpoints, or without jumping public transportation. It would have been about six and a half miles to run this theoretical course.
Here's the other map ideas:

• version 1


• version 2


• version 3 which almost definitely required rail travel


• version 4 which had some issues of safety maybe?


• here's a what if we did it in St. Paul? version


• here's some experiments


• here is a length test of SF's Journey:Glasnost, which I studied along with the others to determine how long it might be to work best. They had a good shorter one for the second version, and I kinda liked that.

Communications

We did a lot of emailing back and forth. Here's a sample of some of the decision making:

On Sep 3, 2008, at 6:27 PM, Craig Daniel wrote:
A week and a half to go, and Spidere has to bail on us.

Anyone got any thoughts on filling up our now-even-emptier checkpoint
agent roster?

As mentioned at the start of this week, we have the following staff:

*Chasers*
Craig
Oliver
Star5
Ink

*Checkpoints*
0 JonO - deep breath and push
1 (working on someone, open to suggestions)- childhood
2 (maybe Laura, that's who I'm working on today) - adolescence
3 [spidere dropped out!] - adulthood
4 (no one yet) - middle age
5 JJason - old age
6 JonO death!

Well, I think we're going to have to ask a couple folks to set aside their preferences for the greater good. My first hope is that we can ask Star5 to help. Cali? Can you staff a checkpoint?

Because she's indicated some flexibility, I've asked Laura (MJ9) today if she can work checkpoint instead of magic running. We'll see.

One of our "magic runner" recruits is Loki (Erik). His flight from SF is booked and he's coming. If we have to, we can ask him to staff.

So that's three people I believe can be ... persuaded... which would bring our number to 5 of the 6 actual warm bodies needed (I double up to cover 0 and 6).

My original idea for recruiting was hopefully to get people with children to staff checkpoint 1. I wanted to ask Beverly Penn (Nicole) to bring her daughter June. I hoped to bring Eleanor and Henry as well, but I don't know because Leann has mentioned some family plans that evening. So I don't have someone there

SO this is what I see, if we can't add people to the list and our "please help friends out please" request is effective:

0 JonO - deep breath and push
[[1 - childhood]]
2 MJ9? - adolescence
3 Star5? - adulthood
4 Loki? - middle age
5 JJason - old age
6 JonO death!

Thoughts?

Love,
Jon

PS Here's what I said about ribbon:
http://www.jkmribbon.com/offray/gros.html
There's actual pricing here:
http://www.jkmribbonandtrims.com/searchresult.aspx?CategoryID=397
Two things:
1) I don't know how much to buy. Spidere budgeted 1.5 feet per person for 300 people (and that many showed up!) I don't know that we'll have anywhere near that number. However, if we're short, there's not exactly any place we can go nearby to purchase dozens of yards of ribbon at the last minute. Thoughts?
2) I can afford to buy 100 yards of each at JKM's prices. I don't have a ton of money to spare right now, so I know I can't afford 400 yards total. Anyone want to chip in? Corollary to that: anyone know of another place you can buy bulk ribbon cheaper? We should move on this early this week while there's still enough time to get it here if we buy online.

That's just an example. I count over 200 messages since April related to Journey to the End of the Night between the planners. It's probably more than 300. Lots of little details. I needlessly worried over ribbon, by the end. It was kind of ridiculous how distracting I let ribbons become. ugh. WHatever.

Promotion

We put in a group effort to promote it, with good graphic design from Star5, and considerable effort to get info into the hands of the press, as well as direct promotion and social networking. We all made phone calls and social networking outreach. We sent a lot of emails to our friends and relatives.

I wrote a press release and submitted it on repeat occasions to the big city newspapers, to City Pages, and fifteen community newspapers in our area. I also got help from Susy Derkins to translate it into Español which we submitted to three area Spanish-language community papers. The press efforts did get some notice, including a story in The Bridge, and some of the releases got printed wholesale (including my phone number!) in papers. And I got about five phone calls from strangers who read it in their paper and wanted to know more. That was cool.

We also worked up the MNZero website. I did some infrastructure work on other fronts too, with a minnesotazero gmail address, created an mnzero twitter account to help with short info if people wanted it; and got a MailChimp account for minnesotazero so we could also send trackable html emails and have an automated mailing list manager. Future MNZero events can (and some will) use these organs as well (I'm going to share the admin information with those people, obviously). There are also existing resources through Waste, which the PuzzleQuests have used already, and presumably will continue to use. These are just a nice addition to the ... portfolio... of tools we can use to promote future events.

Runners and Race Day

The numbers of rsvp's we had through the website, through direct conversations, and social networks gave us a sense that there might be as many as 80. So many people these days fail to rsvp (or note they are coming) that I think we might have expected 100 people or so. At least it was looking that way.
Of course it rained.

A lot.

It rained like cats and dogs all damn day! We had right around 60 runners, and on the basis of the noise and activity we saw late in the promotion process, I truly believe we would have almost doubled that number but for the rain. This is spectacular in my opinion.

Yes, it's not Chicago's impressive 200 or DC's ridiculous 300. But we are a smaller city. It could be pointed out there is no "public free games scene" to speak of in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and getting a handle on the "audience base" for this kind of event is still up in the air. Or to be more precise, we are that scene for the moment. Seeing the steady growth MN0 events have had since May is very encouraging. But it's all good.

We also learned late in the process that City Pages (the local arts weekly with a readership of a couple hundred thousand) has a bug in their calendar submission form. We submitted via web (though also through a traditional hard copy press release I point out), and Ink Tea worked over her very solid connection with one of their writers. I finally heard back from their editor who said if their website hadn't messed up our event submission we would have been A-Listed (the A-List is their events calendar that truly does have a measurable impact on turnout at local events).

There was a lot of discussion about rules tweaks, as well as discussion about the level of difficulty in the course. We settled the last stage details on Thursday night/Friday morning. We got, then lost one, then weren't sure about a couple, then nailed down all of our stage agents by Friday. We got ribbon (and then more ribbon, and some backup ribbon, and who knows how much extra ribbon?!) We got a decent sized bunch of staff chasers, and had all the printing and planning and bonus stage primping done by Saturday afternoon. It rained all day on Saturday. First in fits and starts, then in gallons, then stopped, then it pissed down for a while and stopped. Then it started again. At 4, I was beside myself. Though I spent the day keeping my chin up and my attitude with others cheerful and excited, I was barely a functional adult and very close to brimming with tears as I showered and changed, and loaded up my in-laws' van with a soap box for standing, a table and tent for stage three, and the desk for stage four (I shoulda took out th' drawers!). As I drove to pick up the manifest/map printouts, I saw sun through the clouds. As I plopped the printouts into a box, the rain stopped. After I put the waivers through the paper cutter, the streets looked a little dryer. Maybe.

I loaded up the final touches and headed for the starting line, and began to get into character...