Waldo is a man who looks to be somewhere in his thirties. He wears a red and white sweater, as well as a matching beanie cap. Blue jeans. Brown loafers. He sometimes walks with a cane, suggesting chronic back problems. His thick-framed glasses magnify his eyes to an unnerving size. His chin is abnormally large and he has three fingers (plus thumb) on each hand. And yet, despite his setbacks, he smiles cheerfully and always manages to find adventure in his life.
He is also somewhere between one and two feet tall, two-dimensional and laminated like an elementary school project.
I look at the Waldo in my hands, which David Vartanian ’12 has just handed me. He is much smaller than I expected. When I first learned that Connecticut College was experiencing its own, real life Where’s Waldo? game, I thought he would be life-size, allowing him to become hidden among students.
“The idea actually started with another friend who had a mini Waldo,” explained Waldo’s other guardian, Richard Worsman ’12. “[He] would hide it around his room and move it and it would just be a funny thing. Dave and I were walking back from his room… and we thought it would be a fun idea to make a Waldo for campus.”
For those of you unfamiliar with the book series, Where’s Waldo? was created by British illustrator Martin Handford (the character is known as Wally in his native England). According to Wikipedia, Waldo is “a world traveler and time travel aficionado.” The books feature mosaics of chaos through which Waldo must be found, as well as loading each page with games within games. Besides having to find Waldo, readers can also scour the pages for his possessions, which he proceeds to drop one at a time with each new location, or jump to the last page for checklists of other crazy sights. In the first book, these range from “a boy who’s not allowed any ice cream” on the beach to Dracula at an airport. The first American publication of Where’s Waldo? in 1987 sparked controversy when a topless woman was spotted in the beach location, placing the book on the list of “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books.”
He is often joined by a number of companions, including girlfriend Wenda and nemesis Odlaw. When asked about these secondary characters, Worsman quipped, “We might expand in the future.”
When the game started on February 7, Waldo was quickly spotted hiding in the greenhouse by Samantha Sgourakes ’12. “Heading to South Lot, my friend and I were walking behind New London Hall when I spotted a striped figure attached to the greenhouse,” explained Sgourakes. “I’m not going to lie, I got really excited. I immediately pulled a Michael Johnson and sprinted towards it hoping it was Waldo. And, indeed it was.”
When Waldo is discovered, he comes equipped with a code word and a phone number. The code word is to ensure that players don’t lie about actually finding Waldo, while the number belongs to Vartanian’s cell phone. Although the two haven’t been bombarded with people asking for clues, “One time after I gave the clue [that Waldo was hiding] in the tunnel, I got three texts within ten minutes about it,” Vartanian said. “There is a little nice anticipation.”
The two rely mostly on “faith in the Connecticut College community,” as Vartanian calls it, for Waldo not to disappear prematurely. However, the game very nearly ended early after a misunderstanding with the custodial staff. After his greenhouse excursion, Waldo was moved to his next location on the second floor of the library. Although he was found within eight hours, Vartanian returned to the hiding spot the next day on his way to class only to find that Waldo “wasn’t up on the bookshelf where I had put him. I was on my way to class so I didn’t have any time to really do anything about it.”
After class let out, Vartanian scouted down a custodian and learned that that area of the library was being refurnished for the Board of Trustees visit. “She asked again what exactly it was and I said that it was a little cut-out of Waldo from Where’s Waldo? and she said, ‘Oh, I saw that in the trash in the other room.’ I asked if there was any chance it would still be there and she said, ‘No, they took that out at four o’clock this morning.’”
Vartanian quickly set out to find his beloved Waldo through eleven bags of trash sitting at the library loading dock. After digging through roughly nine of the bags, he was soon joined by Worsman. “Richard shows up and I explain the situation to him… And all of a sudden, Richard opens up one bag and says, ‘Oh, here he is.’ We had to give him a bath.”
Participation for Waldo has been exciting as well as diverse. “I think at first we just thought it would be people we knew on Facebook and a couple of other people,” said Worsman. “It’s really nice that by the second or third [round], anyways, the person that found it I didn’t know, which was kind of cool.”
By the time I was introduced to Waldo, he had already been hidden in the greenhouse, the second floor of the library, the KB-Larrabee tunnel and the Lambdin Game Room. The last two were found after a clue had to be sent out, following to a day’s worth of inactivity. However, according to Vartanian, “The two times we’ve given clues, he’s been found within hours after.”
None of these locations seems like they would be passed by during an average school day. “I think that’s one of the things that is nice,” said Vartanian. “Until we give out the clue, you kind of have to be passive about it. I kind of like that.”
“One of our friends sent us this thing on Facebook that said, ‘So I was in the game room the other day and I was playing ping pong, and it was great, I just looked over and there’s Waldo!’” said Worsman. “It was this great little surprise.”
The two have promised that the hiding places will get progressively more difficult. “Our ambition, if we can, is to put Waldo somewhere in plain enough sight so that you can see him but you can’t tell what to text in order to get credit for finding him,” said Worsman, clearly excited about this possibility. “We want to put it somewhere really high up or really difficult to get to or impossible to get to on foot so you have to utilize the telescope in the Olin observatory.”
Adds Vartanian, “There’s at least one place I think we would want to do soon but we would need permission from a certain someone in order to do that.”
Towards the end of the interview, Vartanian and Worsman were given the opportunity to add anything else. “Tell people not to take him down,” Worsman said. If anything is certain, it’s that the game can only continue if people remain honest when encountering Waldo.
Where’s Waldo?: Connecticut College Edition is an enjoyable experience for the school, as it not only provides scores of exciting hiding places, but also provides an outlet for students to act out a much beloved book from their childhoods. “I heard that one of my friends, when he was taking Waldo down from one of the locations for me, encountered a campus safety officer there,” Vartanian said. “Apparently he said, ‘It’s good, clean, wholesome fun.’” •
