58 With two iphones and four girls crammed in a Pontiac Grand Prix, my roommates and I cavorted through the paved areas of Bethel, shouting at our driver to “Take a left!” or “Slow down!” What had started as an innocent trip to Sufficient Grounds had turned into a full out war. In an attempt to promote StuCo’s new mobile app, the club put on a little contest. A mobile game of capture the flag, free for all. The rules were pretty simple. Steal and be stolen from. Stay in the boundaries. Don’t run over the longboarders, even if they WERE riding down the middle of the street and trying to steal the treasure back from us. Last person standing at 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning wins. And we weren’t just playing for glory—no, there was an impressive Kindle Fire at stake. To be honest, we were mostly playing for the heck of it. To win would require mass amounts of time and effort (and an actual smart phone on my part) and we had homework to do. Still, seeing the look on those boys’ faces when we drove right past them with the treasure was a reward in itself. We never expected much from it. So on Friday night, a quick trip to the Acorn was just that—a journey to use swipes. But after seeing students literally running around, chasing each other, my roommates decided to check in just to see where the treasure was. My roommate Rachel recounts: “After getting the swipes we had about ten minutes of the game left so we decided to head towards where the treasure was located and we thought it would be far enough away that we wouldn’t be able to steal it. But the closer we got, the more we realized that we had the opportunity. I stole the prize and then nonchalantly walked away. At that point everybody was confused because they didn’t know we were playing, so it worked. And then it was stolen so I had to wait another minute until I could steal it back. I stole it again and there were 30 seconds left in the game and I had it a full 20 seconds before someone else stole it.” We didn’t really lose anything as we hadn’t planned on winning. It was exciting and disappointing to be ten seconds away from last person standing, but that’s the way the game goes. Everything leading up to those last seconds doesn’t really matter. As Rachel said, we came “so close, but yet so far.” 
Print
