This one's over my head

Should've Hired Me

AX Quest

One evening in spring I was at the Yardhouse in Irvine discussing Comic Con when I mentioned an idea to dress myself as an MMORPG Quest Giver and not just look the part (had done it before), but play the part.  The only problem was that I wasn't interested in doing it alone.  Steve-- having had a few drinks in him by then-- quickly agreed, and we just as quickly forgot about it for several months.

Sometime later we decided that Anime Expo was going to serve as our beta test of the NPC project.  NPCs, or NonPlayer Characters, are usually computer-controlled entities within computer/console Role Playing Games who usually serve specific functions, such as providing information, buying or selling equipment, or assigning jobs-- or as they are more commonly known, quests. Quests usually consist of doing favors for the NPC like finding his glasses or protecting his livestock or rescuing his daughter from cave imps.

The ubiquitous symbol for a quest-bearing NPC has become the exclamation mark, and since our goal was to provide convention goers with quests, that was what we set out to build.  (Steve will be providing a detailed account of how the marks were made, so I won't go into that here.  I haven't got the patience for it anyway.)    With those props prepared, Steve and I set out for Anime Expo Thursday morning with very low expectations.

We showed up with a small bag of hard Japanese candies and lychee jellies and four copies of twenty different photograph-based quests (80 total for each of us).  To our surprise, we had our first quester within minutes of walking to the main lobby.  The effect of providing quests was totally viral as convention goers slowly started to realize that our marks weren't just for show, that we actually had quests to be performed and delicious rewards for said quests!  I remember the disbelief from the very first person that approached us as I handed her a quest page: "The world is plagued with villains, but these are just lost souls in need of understanding.  Warm the heart of any villain with a nice big hug."

Questers were asked to photograph their deeds then return to either me or Steve for their candy reward.  Amazingly, we both found ourselves mobbed with people waiting to receive or turn in quests, and ultimately we were both clean out of quest pages within just two hours of playing NPC.  We maintained the exclamation marks over our heads so that we would remain visible throughout the day, but it meant that we had to turn down a lot of people asking for missions.  It affected Steve more than it affected me, but we both vowed to return the next day with more quests and better quests because it had become abundantly clear that demand was high and our questers were capable of completing some pretty difficult tasks.

With the help of friends Kim, Michelle, Allen, Eric, and Christian, we wrote twenty more quests, these more difficult than the first batch, with some requiring multiple cosplayers: "Anime is famous for the merging of multiple genres.  Capture a battle between a robot, a swordsman, and a schoolgirl all in one photograph," some requiring video capability: "Haruhi Suzumiya is famous for her synchronized dance moves.  But why should she have all the fun?  Perform the Haruhi dance with Haruhi herself!" and three demanding that questers seek out the other quest giver for a special task (more on these later).

We arrived around 1pm on Day 2 with 10 copies of each quest, now numbering around forty and significantly more difficult.  Despite the increase in pages and complexity, we were both drained after four hours of activity and again turning people away.  Some chose to perform quests even when we were out of candy, and still more asked for quests that they might be able to complete and turn in the next day when we would be restocked.  So again we vowed to be there Day 3, with more quests and the hardest quests we could possibly think of.

As the standard for quests got higher, the more difficult they became to write, and I found myself working into the early hours of the morning trying to come up with sufficiently difficult but entertaining jobs for people to do: Organize a fifteen person wave.  Start a conga line and get at least twenty people to join you.  Find someone dressed as a wizard or other magic user and get him to perform a real magic trick on video.  Line up four crossdressers in a gender-alternating row.  Locate a kid and an adult dressed as the exact same character.

Guess which ones were completed?  All of them.  That's not to say they were easy.  I watched a quest party attempt the conga line several times, even enlisting the help of a bassist with a built-in portable amplifier and an acoustic guitarist to provide music, only to fail, sadly.  Indeed, several quests we assigned to our most motivated adventurers were never finished.  Still, I'd say it's quite a feat that any of them were achieved at all.

And now, on to the meta quests. We wrote exactly three quests in which the players had to seek out the other quest giver.  They are summarized as follows: convince Steve/Cang to dance, give Steve/Cang a hug, and-- the most important one of them all-- gain Steve/Cang's trust then assassinate him with a deadly weapon.

It became a kind of game between us, seeing how often we could have the other killed and, perhaps, in the most creative and hilarious ways.  We owe all these great faux-kills to our questers, though, who showed enormous ingenuity not only in methods of having us "killed" but in having us killed when we least suspected it.  Steve won in terms of kill count (7 to 5), but I think I earned more surprise kills on Steve, and I'd say we were pretty even on unusual weaponry: he was killed by The Master Sword and a flute while I was killed by a six-foot cannon and a cardboard box with the words "Deadly Weapon" scrawled onto it with sharpie.  I'll recount some of these tales of faux-death when the official website for the NPC project goes up.

Note: Our one disadvantage is that we don't have the photos taken by the questers, some of which are nothing short of fantastic.  We set up the quest pages such that our email address was included so that we could have images and videos sent back to us for online publishing.  So far we're still waiting for most of those images to come in.

6/24

Change of Venue