by: Robert Zacny

“I'm not sure the Bruins are going to make the playoffs,” Abe Stein told me when I dropped by his office. He was slouched against a beanbag chair, staring with glazed eyes at the projector screen on the back wall, where the Bruins were in the process of dropping their third or fourth straight game. "I think we're below .500 at this point," he added. The action on the screen vouched for him: bad shots, blown passes, and an absent defensive game from Boston were sending the Montreal Canadiens to an easy overtime win. Not that it was anything to brag about. The Canadiens hadn't just played fifty-seven straight games in 24 hours.

Stein and his team, "The Stickhandlers", were taking the Bruins through a complete season in NHL 10 on this final weekend of February. It was their contribution to the Complete Game Completion Marathon (CGCM), a fundraiser Stein had organized over the previous three weeks for Partners in Health, an organization that has provided medical aid to Haiti for over twenty years. Other teams here at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology) Game Lab and elsewhere were doing other challenges. Two GAMBIT alumni in California were playing through Doom and Doom 2, while another was grinding through Left 4 Dead in the lab's Murder Simulation Room. GAMBIT director Phillip Tan was taking part from Singapore with Hakune Mitsu, a Japanese rhythm game. Everyone agreed to complete a game over the weekend, although completion was up to the participant to define.

On the GAMBIT homepage, a special banner advertising the CGCM directed visitors to a website where they could watch the teams at play, learn about the participants’' personal marathons, and donate money to Partners in Health. A meter tracked the fundraiser's progress toward its goal, $10,000. On Saturday afternoon, donations came to about $4,000.

After losing to the Canadiens, Stein's teammate, Andy Bouchard, requested that they time the next game. After 24 hours they weren't even at the NHL's Olympic break, which meant they had fallen badly behind schedule. Between long load times, the fact that NHL 10 had to take a few minutes to calculate the rest of the season's games, and a large number of overtime periods and shootouts, each of the Stickhandlers' 15-minute games was pushing a half-hour. This was turning to more of a marathon than any of them had wanted. To top it off, they were sucking.

Gene Fierro, another participant in the NHL marathon, came into the room just as the puck dropped against the Canucks. "Can I buy in?" he asked, grabbing a controller and taking position next to Stein. For a moment he stared at the screen, a little confused. The characters were half the size they had been when he left the room.

"We're using a new camera angle," Stein said by way of explanation. "It's was Andy's brainchild."

Bouchard nodded and said, "I've been thinkin' about this aaaaaall day."