'Soft Talk: Gamers win one for a good cause

The computer geeks at Microsoft Corp. used to play ``The Game'' only for bragging rights.

This year, they played it for a cause, turning what could be the world's most elaborate and technical scavenger hunt into a charity event, with dramatic results last weekend in Seattle:

From taking a ride in the Alaska Airlines flight simulator to walking on the roof of the Space Needle, the stunts were more daring, the clues more difficult -- and the image of the event a lot shinier.

The event -- a 24-hour clue chase for Einsteins -- is a private, 15-year-old tradition brought to the Redmond software giant in 1996 by Stanford University computer graduate Joe Belfiore.

Played in different cities over the years by Microsoft and other high-tech employees, teams of participants look for clue envelopes by driving around in vans, such as the one rigged with a global positioning system by this year's winner, ``Team Silver'' from Microsoft.

Last year, however, while Belfiore and crew were playing the game in New York, they got into a scrape when a maid at a hotel saw the word ``radioactive'' on a vial of green liquid left behind by a player. That led to a two-hour evacuation of the 14th floor of the Marriott Hotel at the World Trade Center.

Though the liquid was only dish soap, explained this year's organizer, John Tippett, a program manager for Microsoft Research, it was ``a really bad place to have any sort of terrorist-looking thing.''

So, to help out charity -- and the game's image-- Tippett decided to hook up this year's event with Vision Youth, a nonprofit that funds programs for at-risk teens in low-income areas of Seattle and Tacoma.

The agency's parent is World Vision, a Federal Way-based Christian aid group that is in its 50th year.

With the game renamed ``V-Quest'' in honor of the charity, 10 teams of high-tech players -- most from Microsoft, others from Amazon.com, Check Point Software, RealNetworks -- put up $25,000 per group to play.

They started in Seattle on Saturday at the Washington Mutual Tower and ended on Sunday morning with a dramatic photo finish at Pier 48.

For the second year in a row, the all-Microsoft Team Silver led by Kristina Belfiore (wife of game founder Joe Belfiore) won, by a scant 15 seconds.

When Team Purple -- a group led by the founders of Sucker Punch Productions -- failed to see the finish line as they drove by Pier 48, Belfiore said, members of her team jumped out of their van, stopping traffic on Alaskan Way as they dashed to the finish line.

Along the way, thanks to World Vision, all sorts of corporate doors were opened to the players. The techies got to hunt at Magnolia Hi-Fi, Nordstrom, Safeco Field, Totem Lake Cinema, and Tully's Coffee, as well as walk atop the Space Needle and ``cruise'' downtown Seattle in the flight simulator.

Among other notable adventures, which will be celebrated at a private party tonight at the Space Needle:

* At Magnolia Hi-Fi, players had to look closely to realize the clue was playing on a wall of big-screen TVs. It was a seven-minute fake newscast made by KING-5 TV. The weather map in the report showed fake cities with temperatures of 12 to 90 degrees.

Players first had to figure out the numbers represented chemical symbols, then they had to subtract the letters of that symbol (for instance, Si for silicon) from the name of the fake city shown on the tape in order to spell out the next destination in Seattle's Fremont district.

* Near Safeco Field, Seattle police pulled over Team Silver for a burned out turn signal on Saturday night. ``The rest of us in the van were bumming because we knew it was going to cost us time, plus the driver was going to get a ticket,'' Kristina Belfiore said.

When the female officer returned to the van, however, she handed the driver the next clue envelope. ``The entire van erupted in yelling and screaming in disbelief,'' Belfiore laughed.

* At a party in Rainier Valley, teen-agers were dancing to loud music when a man entered and started a fight. When the blows were over, he ended up face down on the floor -- with the next clue envelope sticking out of his back pocket.

Because it was a low-income neighborhood, and the party looked so real, one team got spooked.

``It was fun for us -- we went right in and started dancing,'' Kristina Belfiore said, but ``another team called us and said they pulled up to this house (where) kids were offering them drugs. They wouldn't go in.''

The participants in the fake party were teens from a program funded by Vision Youth, which pays for outreach workers in Seattle's Central District and Rainier Valley.

According to Kim Ambrose, the Vision Youth fund-raiser who managed the logistics for Tippet, the idea was to get the techies to meet the young people their money would be helping ``in a neighborhood where they wouldn't normally go.''

``It seemed like a great combination to expose people who play the game to some of the problems in our own area,'' said Tippett, who put up $25,000 of his own money to produce the game. ``It's pretty easy to think everyone is riding the technology tide along with you.''

``It made them realize,'' Ambrose said of the techies, ``how fortunate they are to even play the game.''

'Soft Talk runs Tuesdays and Thursdays. Cydney Gillis can be reached at cydney.gillis@eastsidejournal.com or 425-453-4226.