Blog: Boston

During each day, you first have to arrange for a credential to attend the convention that evening. To do this, you work your connections to find someone who has an extra, such as elected state party officials and lobbyists. At first you have a few friends but not people important enough to have their own extra passes. Through them, however, you can get a low-level pass, and over the course of the week make connections with progressively more important people who can give you better passes.

Also during the day, your connections can enable you to access various parties. When you start the game you can only attend the New York State Delegation breakfast (which isn't a bad thing to attend, actually), but by the end of the week you are going to the Dakota Party honoring the Dakotas' six-person Congressional delegation featuring the Bacon Brothers or a party at the Museum of Fine Arts with music by Natalie Merchant. Plus, there are trade groups holding lobbying parties each day. With the right connections you can get in and meet some Congresspeople and their staffers. Or perhaps you can just waltz right in since some of them aren't checking ID.

After finagling a pass each day and attending parties, you head over to the Fleet Center for the day's convention speeches. The passes come in several colors: yellow (perimeter, which only lets you past security and into the basement of the Fleet Center); purple (fleet, which lets you into the hallways on various floors); light and dark green (hall, which lets you into the balcony from the 7th floor and and upper loge seats from the 5th floor; dark green gives you access to more sections than light green); red (floor, which lets you onto the floor itself where the delegates sit); light blue (backstage, which lets you into the backstage area where really important people hang out); and dark blue (podium, which lets you onto the podium itself but only when you are supposed to be in the seats behind the speaker, a speaker him or herself, staff arranging the podium, or a press photographer during specific photo ops).

Early in the week you only can get a purple pass, but your friends sneak you in to the hall itself by having one of a group come out of the hall holding their green pass and that of another, which you can then use to get in. Later in the week with better connections, you can also wait as bored delegates leave the building and ask them for their red passes. But of couse you need to know the delegates, or be with someone who does, before you can do this. By the end of the week the people you know are getting you backstage, and even an opportunity to have a podium pass, which just might give you a chance to meet the nominee himself.

You meet the bloggers, upstairs in section 320 on the 7th floor (green pass required) and find out that at the press office, any green press pass (which the bloggers have and you can borrow) allows you to trade for a red press pass for one hour to go interview delegates. But finding the press office is itself a challenge, since the Fleet Center is a maze as complex as any video game castle. Poorly marked escalators whisk you from the fourth floor to the seventh even when you are trying to get to 5, and force you to backtrack several stories on the stairs just to try again. And on 6 (accessible only from 5, of course, not from the main stairways or escalators) are even more special areas, including corporate boxes which require extra passes to get to beyond the main color-coded passes.

Once the convention ends for the day, your work is far from over. Once the speeches end around 11 pm there are still three hours until everything has to close. That means finding the hot parties around town, working your connections to get through the door, and even once in a while sneaking in by having a few campaign staffers tell the door people that you are one of them as they go in, counting on the fact that they are too busy to check the IDs of every person. You make it to the high-demand Barack Obama party, mixers from New Democratic Network, and the party in Charlestown honoring bloggers where you can meet Joe Trippi or Jeaneane Garofalo.

Then, staggering to bed around 3 am, you catch a few winks before getting up for the 8:30 New York State Delegation breakfast and starting the next round of the game.

One open question regarding this game: what should be the goal? Meeting John Kerry? That is a good reason to strive for a blue pass, though it's not that important in real life. Just having fun? That's the real life goal, but not so good for a game. Something else? Any ideas?

Anyway, the game I just outlined pretty much describes my week at the convention, except I didn't go to all the events described (I skipped the New York breakfast most mornings, and I didn't try to get a red pass, though others did), and I doubt it's really possible to schmooze so high as to get a blue podium pass in just one week. Personally, the highlight of the week, besides just hanging out with lots of cool people, was getting to talk to Daily Show correspondent Samantha "Sam" Bee and getting a picture with her and fellow correspondent Ed Helms.