Snout Games FTW (Part 1 of 4)

Last week, Mike Selinker's Wired post on "The 10 Greatest 'Games' Ever Played" made a bit of a splash within the Game community. (I was personally quite chuffed that 40% of the events he called out were Team Snout productions.)

Before the article went up, Mike posted on Facebook asking if anyone had photos from any of the events they'd be willing to share. I sent him a few pictures which Wired didn't use in the end, but since I had already spent the time digging them up, I figured I might as well do a show-and-tell here over the next few days.

Starting at the top of Mike's list...

1. Hogwarts wands

Here's Sean Gugler (late of Doctor When Game Control) testing the wand prototype. The cable is providing power, and sending data back to a laptop which records the wand motions. We had everyone on GC cast the same spells, so wand-maker Acorn could see how much variation and "slop" there was in different people's movements and adjust the recognition software accordingly. (Photo by Curtis C. Chen)



Here's Seth Golub of Team RadiKS (Relaxed Alchemical Dilettantes Investigating Kurious Spells) in wand class on Saturday, demonstrating the "Nope!" response which indicates an unrecognized spell. You can see the full reference for turning spell names (puzzle answers) into wand motions starting on page 43 of our Hogwarts textbook (5MB PDF download). (Photo by David Lindes)



And a couple of photos from the grand finale on Sunday, when every team had to cast the same spell simultaneously to defeat our villain. Not surprisingly, the bad guy turned out to be the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, played by Sean. (Photos by Team Snout)





For more information about the Hogwarts Game, check out Larry Hosken's "Hogwarts Inside Out" write-up and our GC wiki.

Next: Superheroes!