PART III
One of the things to know about Santiago is that telling the old part of the city apart from the newer sections id fairly easy. Once you cross a street with automobile traffic, you’ve left the old quarter. I actually circumnavigated it in this manner until I came to an arcade across the border from the old section. It is near the park and is both an arcade in the sense that the entrances featured a series of arches and a video arcade as well. I decided to go in and take a look at the city’s youth. One gift I have and one that I think will do me well as this trip goes on is that I have no problem walking up to strangers and talking to them. I call it a gift because I don’t think it has anything to do with me being especially bold or intrepid. More so I think there is something lacking in my brain or perhaps in comes from the way I was raised; nature versus nurture I don’t know which is the culprit. The point is that I lack any inherent fear, distrust, or timidity towards strangers.
Anyway I took a lap around the arcade. I am not a big gamer but I could tell most of the games were outdated. I recognized a lot of them from my younger days. I pulled up behind two fellows playing a soccer game, one had a mullet but it was well kept. Imagine how a Guido would go about having a mullet. He wasn’t uncouth at all. He was couth more than anything else. Having a mullet in itself was still ridiculous but it wasn’t like he had a redneck vibe. The other kid had normal hair; they each wore right jeans and low top sneakers. Anyway I pulled up behind them to watch. After a couple of minutes of endless back and forth I wondered what the attraction was. The game didn’t seem to fun, all they did was take turns trying to dribble all the way and score without passing, this of course only possible by picking the teams with the best individual players.
So I asked them (in Spanish obviously) "Isn’t this boring?" They gave an ephemeral twist of their heads to look at the crazy guy standing behind them and make sure he wasn’t a mental case. I must have looked normal enough; they quickly returned their stares to the screen. The mullet kid answered, he must have been the more assertive of the two “Don’t you like football (soccer)” I said that I did, the kind with actual grass under your feet and a real ball. The other one, now noticing my accent, intervened. “But you’re not from here are you.” I decided to yank his chain a little. “I’m not from here but I am Spanish. I’m from a small colony Spain still has in New York.” I promptly whipped out my Spanish passport and stuck it under their noses, distracting their gaze from the screen. My Spanish passport has an American address, seeing that they didn’t laugh as I expected they would. “Really? How many Spanish people live there?” Apparently these kids were gullible and historically ignorant enough to believe that Spain still had a colony in America and on top of that in the Northeast when the Spaniards never made it past Florida in regards to the east coast. Majorca, Canaries, and a piece of New York ladies and gentlemen.
I snuffed out their false belief quickly by saying “I’m kidding my parents are from here but they emigrated.” I quickly followed it up by saying “I could make a better game than this.” I don’t know why I said this, I have never had intentions of designing video games, and I hate programming although I definitely think I could come up with good ideas. Anyway the mulleted boy challenged me by saying “So do it.” Clearly he had approached victory in the argument because I wasn’t going to pull out a new game out of my pocket. I wouldn’t back down anyway so I said, “What kind of games would you like more of?” He answered, “Well espionage would be cool.” Here I had a bit of an epiphany. Within a matter of seconds a game based on previous thoughts manifested itself. I have always loved manhunt, the militarized version of hide and seek, and have often daydreamed of different ways and places to play it. It took a bit of arguing and convincing but these two young Santiago residents came around to this crazy Yankee’s idea. I also needed them to recruit friends and acquaintances to them game. Luckily Santiago has a healthy population of youth; many come here for high school and university.
The game I came up with was an espionage version of manhunt. The basic rules I came up with were these (although later on we found improvements). I set up a lone individual as the target, the person to be found. Then I set up three teams, two were meant to find the target the “seekers”, the other was meant to keep him obfuscated, the “shadows”. The target is responsible for making the teams in order for them to maintain anonymity. Each team only knew who was on their team and what their objective was. By having three teams, if someone saw a person in the game from another team, he wouldn’t know their objective, it could be someone from the other seeker team or it could be someone on the shadow team trying to throw them off through artifice and deception. The stranger could say they are also there to help find the target but could really be from the opposite team and feed him false information. We set up the old quarter as the field and crossing any streets with cars on them was prohibited. We had the perfect natural boundaries. We also incorporated cell phones in to the game, where long distance communication and pictures, whether authentic or meant as deceptions, could also be sent out. Another rule we set up was that there would be no running or yelling allowed, we were spies, drawing any “civilian attention” meant disqualification. Only Jason Bourne runs around European city streets like madman and he would rather move unseen when he can. We started the game with a fixed target, by surreptitious communication, namely a member of the shadow team getting a text from the target, a stationary point was chosen by the target and the ensuing mission was to find him. Later on we decided the game had more depth if the target was allowed to move. This created some conflict when targets would walk as fast as they could when they were sighted by seekers. At first we settled on a visual confirmation as enough for a victory but then we decided that visual conformation would be used to organize a cutoff point with team members. If the Target then had seekers both in front of him and behind him in a street, he was then “caught” Running around and trying to tackle each other would have just brought about angry people complaining or calling the police. Some of the younger players had to be reproached and reprimanded on this point.
Ultimately I can’t describe how enthralling it was. Kids were buying maps, they were coming up with code language. There were ruses and double-crossings. I actually took a turn at being the target and I sent out a picture of myself inside a small museum standing next to a coat of armor. They had no idea where I was, their own city and they had never stepped foot inside this location, eventually a bunch of them figured it out and ended up having to spend a few euros on entrance passes.
I honestly can’t believe how much fun I had, the day was well spent but I was still missing my bag. I invented a game! I tried back at the hotel at night, hoping to see my friend walk in; I didn’t know the last name so once again the concierge couldn’t help me but I tired anyway just in case. It was worth it in order to avoid waiting. He then asked me for my name and when I gave it, his face lit up with understanding. “This was left for you” He led me to a small storage room where my bag was. Relieved and overjoyed I strapped on my bag, thanked the concierge and walked out.
Soon after mullet boy called me asking if I wanted to go out a bit for food and drink, of course I obliged. It was a good time and during the night he asked me where I was sleeping that night, knowing I wasn’t from there, I said I didn’t know. He said I could stay at his house, he said he would tell his parents, of they even noticed, that I was a friend from school. Apparently he lived in house in the new part of the city and his parents were both very busy.
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