#[ also the reality is that its near pow wow season and I can hear and feel everyone starting to get ready for the season so I actually

[coldjustness]

who would have thought the day would come when I, would be tired around 1am. anyway, I'm continuing with my planned replies.

[teamgoatsgoatsgoats]

Inside the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt, David Pogue - Yahoo Finance. A great piece on GISHWHES from 2016 - with some past Goats! clips!  

Video and text compiled and reposted here for preservation as some of the links have broken on a few of the pages.  The links to each part are here:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

David Pogue, Tech Critic, published April-May 2017

“It’s a tampoodle,” she told me.

She made this, uh, artwork as an audition piece—to showcase her creative skills, as a tryout for an elite team in some kind of national scavenger hunt. (She made the team.)

I thought the tampoodle was cute. I thought it was great fun that Tia was joining some kind of scavenger hunt.

I had no idea what kind of ride was ahead.

Meet GISHWHES

When most people think of a scavenger hunt, they probably imagine the list of items includes, you know, “Get the dean’s signature” or “Find a dog with a curly tail.”

GISHWHES is not that.

It stands for the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. (Its creator acknowledges GISHWHES may be the Ugliest Acronym the World Has Ever Seen.)

Teams of 15 have one week to complete about 200 extremely difficult or hilarious tasks. They prove they’ve completed each item by submitting a photo or video of it; their $20 entry fees go to a charity, and the winning team gets a trip to some exotic location with Misha Collins, the hunt’s founder.

Sample items from past GISHWHES lists:

• Do a dramatic reading of your grade-school report card.

• Find someone you love and butter them up—literally. Cover them in butter and then give them a big hug.

• Glaciers are melting—so act accordingly. Pose at a major glacier wearing a swimsuit with floaties.

• Have a tea party with a pediatric cancer patient, where you’re dressed as a character from “Alice in Wonderland.”

• Tour a sewage treatment plant dressed in formal attire with an accompanying violinist or flutist.

• Get a child to write a letter to the universe. Launch the letter into orbit.

• Film an erotically charged conversation between a housewife and pizza delivery man. The actors can ONLY talk about grammar and fonts.

What astonished me is what a big deal GISHWHES is. Last year, 55,000 people registered to participate—not including all the friends and family members who lent favors, assistance, and props. (Registration for this year’s hunt opens this week.)

GISHWHES holds seven Guinness World Records, including Biggest Media Scavenger Hunt, Largest Online Photo Album of Hugs, Longest Chain of Safety Pins, Most Pledges for a Charitable Campaign, and Largest Gathering of People in French Maid Outfits. (Why is there a Guinness record for Largest Gathering of People in French Maid Outfits!?)

But in the end, GISHWHES is an event that does good in the world. Over the years, GISHWHES list items have persuaded players to a) raise over $1 million for charity, b) donate hundreds of thousands of pints of blood, c) volunteer at soup kitchens, d) register thousands of citizens to vote, and e) register to become bone-marrow donors. (That last item has already saved two lives, according to GISHWHES producers.)

And the 2016 hunt raised $250,000 to buy homes for five Syrian refugee families.

So yes, GISHWHES is a do-gooder enterprise. But it’s also brilliantly clever, gut-bustingly funny, and positively unforgettable.

So my question is: Why haven’t people heard of GISHWHES? Why isn’t it a cultural thing?

Why isn’t it, at the very least, a reality show? It’d be the most entertaining show on TV.

Well, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. With the tolerance of my superiors at Yahoo, I decided to make my own darned reality show. Above on this page is Episode 1 of a five-part series.

GISHWHES was created, and is run to this day, by TV actor Misha Collins, a costar of the CW series “Supernatural.” (His heartthrob status helps explain why GISHWHES participants are predominantly female.)

“I went to the University of Chicago,” he told me. “The University of Chicago has a scavenger hunt that we call Scav, that has been running about 30 years now. It took place over the course of a long weekend. We would completely abandon our academics and our sense of decency for those three days, and go all-out for this scavenger hunt. And I loved it. I actually think that it was one of the most educational aspects of my college experience, and infused with the most joy.”

Years later, after a decade of struggling as an actor in Los Angeles, Collins finally landed a show. “I got on this TV show ‘Supernatural,’ and I developed a little bit of a fandom following, and I started to notice that there was a high level of creative engagement from our fans. That got my wheels turning. What can I do with this? How can I have fun with it?”

Collins’s first side project with his fans was a charity called Random Acts. “We’ve done some pretty big projects. We built an orphanage in Haiti; we’re finishing building a high school in Nicaragua right now. But we also do myriad smaller projects all over the world—as small as bringing roses into a senior citizen home.”

Then, in 2009, as a lark, Collins ran a little scavenger hunt from his Twitter account. About 300 people participated; they were instructed to photograph their submissions and send them to an email address that Collins set up.

“People engaged in it with an enthusiasm and a committedness that I could not’ve anticipated,” he says now. “I remember sitting in my apartment, looking at the submissions that had come in, and thinking, ‘This is amazing!’ The art people were creating, the tasks that I thought were impossible that people were pulling off—! I remember, ‘This is what I wanna do for my life’s work. This is awesome.’”

And so, in 2010, GISHWHES was born.

For the 2016 hunt, I embedded myself with my daughter’s GISHWHES team for the week. I filmed their efforts and followed their frustrations and joys. In the coming episodes, you’ll get to meet them—and you’ll get go to inside world’s biggest scavenger hunt.

Part 2: The hunt begins

At 7:30 am on a bright Saturday morning, five members of Team Raised from Perdition gather near San Francisco. (The team name quotes the first line of dialogue ever spoken by Misha Collins on the cult hit show “Supernatural,” now in its twelfth season. He’s GISHWHES’s creator and organizer.)

The other 12 members of the team join by video conference, via Google Hangouts, from their homes in Florida, Connecticut, Illinois, Hawaii, Tennessee, and Brazil.

Although this is the team’s third year in the hunt, most have never met in person. They’ve never been all in one place. That’s typical for teams in this hunt, which is very much a creation of the Internet.

Jason Sarten, an opera singer, reads off this year’s list, which includes items like:

Get dental work done while a string quartet plays live music in the room.

Enjoy some green eggs and ham (sunny-side up) on a boat with a goat.

Provide evidence of having helped at least 10 eligible United States citizens to register to vote.

Paint a portrait of a live model while both you and the model are scuba diving.

Get an Amazon senior executive to order a small item from you, in a timestamped email. Using a drone, deliver the item to the executive (who must be waiting outside the office building) in less than one hour.

Over 3,000 teams sign up to play GISHWHES each year, and there are nearly as many styles of running the hunt. On some teams, there’s nobody in charge. On others, there’s a captain who organizes but doesn’t actually perform any of the items. Flake-outs—people who say they’ll participate, but are no-shows when the hunt begins—are a common problem.

Team Raised from Perdition is run by a pair of co-captains, Nina Mostepan and Geoff McAnally, who also perform tasks. (In real life, Mostepan teaches at an Early Start program for the deaf and hard of hearing, and McAnally is an American sign language interpreter.)

The corn-husk gown

One reason Raised From Perdition starts off the week with a group pow-wow: To let the team members claim the items they’re good at.

For example, in Vancouver, Rob Fitz-James and Shiane Gailey live together and compete together. (He owns a tree stump-removal company; she’s a children’s entertainer.)

They have radically different skills. “We work well as a team because I’m outgoing and I’ll go and do stuff in person; she’s able to manage social media, uploading, and photo and video editing,” Rob says.

Shiane, fortunately for the team, is also wildly creative. After the hunt-launch meeting, she jumps on item 23: “Make this year’s must-have fashion statement: the Corn Husk Evening Wear!”

Rob persuades a local thrift shop to donate a Justin Bieber bedsheet. (“Thankfully, someone grew out of a horrible phase in their life,” he says.) Shiane duct-tapes corn husks to a hoop skirt—well, the front half, the part that would be visible in the photo. “Then we spray-painted it red and yellow to make flames, and then we went downtown,” she says. “I assembled that thing onto myself in a fancy part of time, and took the picture at the Convention Center. (We got permission, of course.)”

There were funny looks, she says, but she checked off item 23 as completed on the team’s master Google Sheets spreadsheet.

The space balloon

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, Tia is struggling with item 153: “Secure a legitimate contract with Space X, NASA, etc., to send a message into space, addressed to the universe and written by a child. You must submit evidence that your payload was successfully launched into orbit.”

It sounds impossible. Like NASA is going to carry a scavenger-hunt player’s note into space on short notice?

No wonder item 153 is worth more points (314) than anything else on the list.

Frantic, Tia Googles until she comes across a British company called SentIntoSpace.com. They sell near-space helium balloon kits to schools, hobbyists, marketers, and filmmakers, including everything they need to send small payloads into near space. Incredibly, the company responds to her email and agrees to donate a balloon to the cause.

The launch goes well; the landing, not so much. Upon its return from space, the balloon blows off course and becomes ensnared high in the treetops of a dense, mountainous forest.

Tia and her team of friends search until nightfall, following the signals of the satellite tracker in the payload box—but can’t find the thing. And without recovering the two GoPro cameras in its payload box, she won’t have the footage of space she needed.

And without that—no credit for item 153, and little chance of winning GISHWHES. Deeply discouraged, she returns home.

When things go wrong

Item 153 isn’t the only GISHWHES item that’s ever gone wrong. Almost every year, an item or two disappears from the list after the hunt is under way. That’s when GISHWHES mastermind Misha Collins realizes too late that he’s created a dangerous or foolhardy challenge.

“There have been people who have been arrested and court martialed and injured during the course of various GISHWHES over the years,” he says. “The second year, we had an item on the list that was, ‘Wrap yourself up in Christmas-tree lights. Plug them in and stand on the roof of a house.’

“And the very first day of the hunt, some of the submissions came in. And one of them was a photo of somebody standing on the peak of a three-story house, right at the edge, on the eave, completely entangled and ensnared in Christmas tree lights. And I immediately thought, ‘WHAT HAVE WE DONE?! There is no way that we can run this scavenger hunt and have somebody not perish from this item!’

“So I immediately sent out an e-mail saying, ‘Do not do the Christmas-tree lights on the roof item! Terrible idea.’

“And so that was sort of an ‘Aha!’ moment for me when I realized, ‘Oh, there are a lot of people who are doing whatever I say. I can’t just come up with whatever pops into my head and have them carry it out.”

The hunt is on

In 100 countries around the world, teams are sacrificing sleep, health, and me time as they scramble to knock off items on the list.

More or less simultaneously, they’re all discovering what Team Raised from Perdition has learned: that it’s very hard to get an item into orbit on short notice, that goats don’t much enjoy floating in boats, and that Amazon.com has no intention of permitting its executives to participate in item 161.

Join us for Part 3 of this series, which dives into the charitable side of GISHWHES—and documents the biggest water-balloon battle ever staged.

Well, in San Francisco.

In Dolores Park.

That we know of.

Part 3: GISHWHES for Good

Each August, as the world’s largest scavenger hunt is under way, the general public is usually unaware—except when teams perform their tasks in public places. Recent tasks have included:

Hug someone you love, motionless, in a very crowded location, for 20 minutes without moving—and time-lapse it.

Stand in a crowded public place. Ask people to sign a petition to Save The Endangered Unicorns.

Get everyone on a subway, bus, or train car to sing “Over the River and Through the Woods.” There must be at least 8 passengers (random commuters, not your friends).

But each year, the list also includes challenges to perform acts of kindness. For example:

Write and mail a thank-you letter to a teacher or mentor from your past that you never sufficiently thanked.

Have a tea party with a special-needs child or pediatric cancer patient, dressed as a character from “Alice in Wonderland.”

More than 10% of veterans returning from war suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome. Post an image of you next to an armed serviceman, with you holding up a sign with a message of gratitude to them and soldiers worldwide.

But for hunt creator Misha Collins (a star of the WB series “Supernatural”), neither GISHWHES nor acting were part of his life’s original master plan.

“[After college,] my objective was to go to law school and somehow try to make a positive impact on the world,” he says. “I thought probably the best way to do that was to go into politics. This was, you know, my 20-year-old brain.

“I was interning at the White House, but I just didn’t love the machine that I saw. I was very naive. I was exposed to this weird environment of, like, nepotism and yea-saying that I wasn’t inspired by.”

So he switched paths.

“I had this great get-rich-quick/make-an-impact scheme: ‘I’ll just go to Hollywood and I’ll become an actor and I’ll get famous enough that I can then leverage that celebrity into doing things.’”

Off he went to Los Angeles. “I thought, like, I’d be the next Leonardo DiCaprio in a couple of months. It took me 10 years to get on a TV show.

“And once I’d achieved a certain modicum of, you know, C-list celebrity, that desire to try to use my celebrity for some other purpose resurfaced.”

GISHWHES was born: a list littered with acts of kindness that tens of thousands of players attempt to fulfill every August.

Crowdsourcing for refugees

In the most recent hunt, item 175 is a perfect example:

“#175. According to the United Nations, 4.8 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Many of these families are living in tent cities with few resources and difficult lives. Let’s change the lives of one family that’s in particularly dire circumstances. The GISHWHES Item is to create a fundraising page for your team, where family, friends and others can donate.”

“We identified one particular family with a heartbreaking story. The mom had been shot in the spine tending to her garden. She was paralyzed, she’s been in a bed in this tent for two years. And we said, let’s just change this one family’s circumstances,” Collins says. “Let’s get them a house, and let’s get her medical care, and let’s pay for the kids’ school. And I woke up the next morning to see, oh my god!”

By week’s end, GISHWHES teams had raised close to $250,000.

“So we added another family, and another and another—by the end of the hunt, we materially changed the lives of four different families. We’ve been getting photos from these families, like them moving into their apartments that we just paid for. It’s just such a lovely thing to be a part of.”

The space balloon, continued

For Team Raised From Perdition, though, there are 174 other items to complete if they hope to win.

My daughter, Tia, also participated in GISHWHES. Several days have passed since she launched a weather balloon into space, bearing a child’s note to the universe. It came down into a nearly inaccessible Connecticut forest; she’s unable to retrieve it even after hours of searching. Item 175 is worth more points than anything else in the hunt; for her team, it will have to be marked “incomplete.”

But teammate Christine has no intention of giving up on the balloon’s precious footage. She tells Tia that she’ll just drive over to the forest to help look for it.

From Chicago.

Fifteen hours later, she, her husband Vince, and their children arrive, laden with gear. After hours of shaking, throwing things at, and yanking at trees, Christine’s 13-year-old son Josh climbs the tree. After an hour and a half, he dislodges the balloon. Item 175 is in the can!

The Haves and the Have-Nots

Not everything on the GISHWHES list is as exasperating as lost space balloons. Item 15, for example, sounds like fun:

#15. This is the final showdown between the Haves and the Have-nots. Show up at Dolores Park in San Francisco, dressed either as executives or in blue-collar apparel. At exactly 12:10 PM, the ultimate water balloon battle will ensue.

Nearly a thousand Gishers show up. They stand in two long lines, facing off across the park. They’ve taken the day off from work, driven for hours, even flown to San Francisco for this battle.

At the stroke of noon, GISHWHES volunteer Tone Rawlings raises her megaphone, ready to announce the open-fire.

But at that moment, a San Francisco park ranger runs onto the field.

Ranger: “Hold on! Hold on! You can’t do this! Not without a permit! Anytime you have X amount of people in a park, you have to have a permit.”

“This is like a 10-minute situation for charity,” Tone pleads. “It’s a flash-mob type situation.”

“Yeah, you guys can’t do it without a permit.” (A CBS News camera picked up the audio.)

The two armies can’t hear this, but they see that there’s a problem. It’s not the first time that GISHWHES stunts have tested the patience of society’s overseers.

Will they be deprived of their balloon battle because of paperwork?

Suddenly, a second park manager arrives.

Incredibly, he’s persuaded. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “You have enough people to get this cleaned up?”

“I will personally guarantee it,” Tone says.

“You should have a permit. But if you can make an announcement like that, and get everyone to agree, then OK.”

Tone lifts her megaphone.

“I know and you know that you guys are going to be responsible for these pieces of balloon when this fight is over! Is that right?”

The crowd roars in agreement.

“This can’t happen…unless you guys repeat after me: I solemnly pledge to pick up every last piece of balloony plastic thing on the ground! And I will throw it all away in the proper receptacles!”

The crowd roars.

“Haves and Have-Nots… Commence the water-balloon melee!”

The battle is on.

This time, at least, the forces of merry mayhem win the day.

Part 4: How to Win GISHWHES

In the early years of the world’s largest scavenger hunt, when you signed up to enter, you’d have to answer only one question: Have you put together your own team of 15 people? Or would you like us to add you to a team?

But sometimes, the team-building system failed—because people came in with different expectations.

Florida State University students Nat Jones and Kira Sullivan, for example, had a rough ride during their first years competing. “In our first years of the hunt, we were on teams that weren’t as competitive as the one we’re on now [Team Raised from Perdition],” Kira says.

“We were in it to win it, but no one else on our team was,” Nat adds. “They saw us as too competitive: ‘Why are you guys so obsessed with GISHWHES?’”

(Lots of people join just for the hilarity of it, without any intention of completing all 175 items. Some, for example, choose to execute only a few, but in spectacular fashion. GISHWHES offers two showcases for such masterpieces: an online Hall of Fame, and a hardbound coffee-table book that’s published after each year’s hunt.)

That’s why, nowadays, when you sign up to enter, the site asks which kind of team you’re interested in. Do you intend to play competitively, or are you joining just for fun?

Tips from the Pros

If you do intend to enter GISHWHES competitively, Team Raised from Perdition—a runner-up last year, and the team we’ve been following in this miniseries—offers some tips.

“Fill the team with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Spend some time bonding before the hunt.” —Suzanne Simpson

“You can’t win if everyone’s not 100% committed. I’m talking, no work for the whole week, no school for the whole week, no anything but GISHWHES for the whole week.” —Nina Mostepan, Co-Captain

“Another really essential skill to have in GISHWHES is the ability to not sleep for long periods of time. This year, I went for three and a half days on less than four hours of sleep.” —Christine Gervais

“A lot of teams struggle with keeping communications going. We talk to our team all the time [using a system like Slack or Google Hangouts]. Even all year long, we talk to them. We do a lot of practices, too.” —Shiane Gaylie

“Strategize in advance. You can look at past years’ item lists, and items created by top teams, for inspiration.” —Suzanne Simpson

“A good strategy is to have more than one person in a town. You have to have someone modeling, and someone taking the pictures. And someone to bounce ideas off of, or talk in the car on the way to the place you’re going to.” —Nat Jones

“Recruit a friend or family. Gishing is very social, so it’s always more fun if you have someone to do it with.” —Kira Sullivan

“We have a spreadsheet [a Google Docs sheet] full of all our items, and we claim them on the spreadsheet, so that everyone on the team knows who’s doing what.” —Shiane Gaylie

“We make up a laminated list of the items. So when we’re talking to someone about helping us with one of the challenges, we start by handing them the list, show them which item we need help with. It has explanations of everything that’s going on. A lot of the time, they’re like, ‘Hold on, I need five minutes to read this.’ (Laminated versus not laminated makes a miraculous difference. You don’t want to hand someone a piece of paper that’s floppy and has stains on it.)”—Rob Fitz-James

“We’re fortunate that we have a good camera, but some of our team members just use their phones. If you pay attention to composition and lighting, the results can be just as good.” —Kira Sullivan

The week winds down

So far, for Team Raised from Perdition, it looks like those tips are paying off; as GISHWHES week draws to a close, only three of the 175 tasks seem unattainable. Unfortunately, one of them is worth a lot of points:

#127.  Do the “airplane” with an astronaut—you know, like your parents used to? Lie on your back with your feet in the air while an astronaut lies face-down, hips on your feet, hands in yours, pretending to be flying. This must be a real, official astronaut or cosmonaut, wearing appropriate flight garb.

NASA’s official response to team requests for an astronaut for this purpose is, of course, “Um, no thanks.”

(Overall, though, NASA has a good relationship with GISHWHES. “One year, we put an item in the hunt that was to get one of the eight astronauts on the space station Mir to hold up a piece of paper that said ‘GISHWHES’ and your team name written on it,” says hunt creator Misha Collins. “Which resulted in all of the people on the space station having their social-media feeds bombarded. And so NASA posted, ‘Please leave our astronauts alone. They’re doing serious work.’ So the next year, I put an item into the hunt that read, ‘Last year, NASA asked us to leave them alone. We know that they’ve been kicking themselves all year for this. So here’s your second chance. Get ‘GISHWHES’ written in space.” NASA ended up naming a mountain on Mars ‘GISHWHES,’ maybe just to shut everybody up.”)

Things are going more smoothly for item 41:

#41. Treat a Vermont dairy cow to the most pampered milking session in human/bovine history. At least three attendants must milk the cow. One person must be feeding her clover by hand, as another milks her wearing satin gloves, as another massages her gently. The attendants must be dressed in semi-formal attire. The milking must take place in a well-appointed living room.

By a stroke of good luck, Tia’s step-grandmother Janet Watton lives in Vermont—next door to a dairy farm. By a stroke of bad luck, the farmer informs the team that you can’t bring a cow indoors. Cows don’t respond well to new environments, and even Paula Deen, the sweet-natured cow he has in mind, might balk—or, worse, rampage.

Janet devises a plan B: In her small barn, there’s a space that she can dress up to look like a living room. She sheetrocks the walls with posterboard, hangs curtains and a chandelier, brings in furniture, books, flowers, paintings. It’s not an actual living room, but it’s close enough for GISHWHES work.

On the last day of the hunt, the attendants, including a violinist, arrive in formal wear; the farmer sets up to do the milking; and Paula Deen takes her place. Distracted by the bucket of delicious fresh-picked clover, she performs like a champ as the camera rolls. “She didn’t even relieve herself,” the farmer marvels.

The cow is in the can; now all the team needs is an astronaut.

They have six hours left.

Part 5: The Hunt is Over

It’s been an exhausting week for the 15 members of Team Raised from Perdition. In their fourth annual attempt to win the world’s largest scavenger hunt, they’ve taken the week off from work, palmed off children to relatives, and tested the limits of society’s tolerance for disruption.

They’ve also made personal sacrifices. “Sleep deprivation. Junk food all the time,” says co-captain Nina Mostepan. “Working out? I don’t know what that is right now.”

“We eat a lot of pickled eggs and chili in a jar while we’re driving,” adds Shiane Gaylie.

During the heat of the hunt week, “we get short with each other,” admits co-captain Geoff MacAnally. “Nina and I bicker about, like, how things should be running. And then we’re like, ‘I need to breathe.’”

As the deadline approaches—Saturday midnight—it’s clear the team won’t complete all 176 items on the GISHWHES list. (In the six-year history of the hunt, no team ever has.)

In the end, though, the team managed all but three tasks. They’ve pampered a cow in Vermont, played badminton in a food court, persuaded two old men to play chess in a movie theater, sold bottled air on the street, registered 10 people to vote, built a spa for a mouse, panned for gold in a public fountain, sculpted a life-size dictator out of maxipads, built a working rowing scull out of trash, wrote a phone app for dialing a rotary phone, and played a human piano.

The judging process

“Months pass between the end of the hunt and the actual winner’s announcement,” Christine says. “We spend that time obsessively combing over all the other teams’ entries and beating ourselves up for what we could have done better.”

In general, though, Raised from Perdition was feeing confident. “We figured there was pretty much no way we wouldn’t at least be a runner-up,” says Rob Fitz-James.

“Because we were runners-up the year before, and we did even better this year,” Shiane adds.

Rob agrees. “Better video quality, better photo quality. And submitting items before the deadline problem helped.”

According to hunt creator Misha Collins, the judging takes so long because, well, there’s a lot to go through.

“We take it very seriously. We have stages. We have lots of people that help judge in the first round, and then we narrow it down to the top 50 teams, and then down to the top 10 teams, and then down to the top three.”

Every year, some teams try to get by with “interpretive” items. “Sometimes, people will come up with a creative interpretation; they’ll do a cardboard cutout version of the real thing, or something like that. 19 times out of 20, they don’t get points for that, even if they put a fair amount of creative work into it. Our directive is very specific: you have to do the item as it is stipulated, and not some creative re-imagining to make it easier.”

Nowadays, his team actually employs Photoshop experts. “Because people cheat! One year, there was a team that would have won, but they’d Photoshopped a really big-ticket item. It was very convincing, and we were like, ‘Wow, they did it!’ But they didn’t. They had cheated, and we caught them.”

The GISHWHES judging process isn’t just long; it’s also opaque. Each item on the list carries a certain point value, but “there’s a high degree of subjectivity in the judging,” Collins says. “Like, we give bonus points.”

But the teams themselves will never know.

“GISHWHES never tells the competitors what their point total is,” Christine points out. “We don’t even get a cumulative point total, and we’re never told what the individual items are awarded. And it drives us crazy. Because it’s difficult to know how to improve from year to year if you don’t have a metric for what the judges are looking for.”

“That’s by design,” Collins says. “We don’t want people to get involved in petty arguments. So we don’t give them enough information to fight.”

The big moment

The contest wrapped up on August 6, but weeks—months—went by without any word as to when the winners would be announced.

“Sometimes GISHWHES can be a little disorganized, I find,” says Shiane. “They just kind of surprise you a lot. You don’t know when the winner will be announced, for example. You don’t know when anything will be announced, until it’s there.”

But then, one day in October, there it was: a tweet that Misha Collins would be making an announcement on Facebook Live.

Christine: “I’m sitting in my dark hole of a basement. We gathered over Google Hangouts and held our breath.”

Shiane: “He did the runners up first, and he did it alphabetically. As soon as he skipped R, which our team name starts with, we knew that we’d won. We were all freaking out before he even announced it.”

Geoff: “And then the moment: ‘And the winning teammmm is…’ That’s exactly how he does it.”

In fact, that is how Misha Collins said it. “And the GISHWHES 2016 winning teammmm… is… Raised from Perdition!”

Christine: “Everyone erupted.”

Kira Sullivan: “We were all freaking out. It was pure joy. I screamed. My roommates thought something really bad happened to me!”

Shiane: “I hit my head on the ceiling. I pushed Rob over a table. We yelled and screamed for, like, 20 minutes.”

Geoff: “I cried.”

Nina “Ugly crying! You can see it in the video. I’m like, ‘Waauuuugh!’”

Kira: “In that moment, we really felt like a team. We didn’t know each other beforehand, but we came together and we won.”

Suzanne Simpson: “It was the most surreal experience of my life.”

Geoff: “After three years of working hard, it was a euphoric feeling.”

The prize for winning GISHWHES is a trip to some exotic spot. This year, it’s Iceland. (For the 2017 hunt, which begins in August, the trip will be to Hawaii.)

Raised from Perdition arrived in Iceland today, in fact, to begin their five-day adventure, orchestrated by the GISHWHES staff and attended (at least for one day) by Misha Collins.

“Well, Misha’s pretty cool,” says Nat. “But the best part of the trip is meeting our teammates! We don’t know the people in San Fran, or South America, or Chicago, or Tennessee, or Connecticut, so we’ll get to meet them all! It’s all going to be great.”

Why GISHWHES

For many GISHWHES players, the greatest reward isn’t the trip.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say things like, ‘I was suffering from agoraphobia. I hadn’t left my house to do more than go to the grocery store in two years. My friend coerced me into participating in GISHWHES, and it somehow broke things through for me,” recounts Collins. “Or, ‘I did GISHWHES and I changed my major in school to art,’ or, ‘I did GISHWHES and I decided to go back to school because of it.

“I mean, I don’t want to be too grandiose about it,” he adds. “I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all about that touchy-feely stuff. It is just a scavenger hunt. But people do have some remarkable experiences.”

Of course, there’s something in it for Collins, too. He’s proud of his seven Guinness World Records. The million-plus dollars raised for charity. The five Syrian refugee families housed and fed. The lives saved from bone-marrow donations. The mountain on Mars that NASA named after GISHWHES.

And he’s especially proud of the 2011 hunt item that required launching a fully decorated Christmas tree into the air with helium balloons.

“There was something just magical about that image, of watching Christmas trees float away. It was one of those ephemeral, magical moments,” Collins says.

“But we didn’t really think it through all the way. Because what happens if untethered is, the Christmas tree just floats away! And there were some regional airports that were closed due to, ‘Christmas trees in the airspace!’ I love that item, even though people’s flights were delayed because of it.”

Over the years, GISHWHES has grown from an impromptu game that Collins ran on Twitter for 300 fans to a truly international competition with 55,000 participants. And in that time, he’s had to add lawyers, and insurance, and a staff, and a website. Is there a danger that GISHWHES might become so Real and Official and Regulated that it loses its sense of chaotic, spontaneous, hilarious fun?

“We want the tone of GISHWHES to remain irreverent and free spirited and kindhearted and challenging and humiliating,” he says. “But at the same time, we want it to grow to something that more people participate in. In my grandiose scheme, people all over the world dread the first week in August, because that’s when GISHWHES happens. That’s my ambition for our enterprise. And you know, we’ll see. If it keeps growing at this rate, by the year 2300, we might be a well-known outfit.”

Thank you for doing this piece, Mr Pogue!