How would you win The Running Man (Stephen King's novella)?

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by an old The Long Walk thread.

Here’s the game show scenario, according to Stephen King’s novella (not the movie):
[ul]
[li]You must survive 30 days to win a billion dollars. That’s pretty much the only rule. The countdown does not stop for anything. You cannot back out or quit. [/li][li]You have a large cash expense account. You can travel anywhere in the world, wear disguises, use weapons, hide, whatever, for those 30 days. You do have a one-day head start before they announce you to the world.[/li][li]There is an elite tracking team, called the Hunters, who will kill you once found.[/li][li]The TV-watching world is looking for you; they get rewarded for spotting you and alerting the Hunters. [/li][li]Law enforcement is looking for you; but you can kill them legally for bonus money during the 30 days. You won’t be punished for any criminal acts occurring in those 30 days. If caught, though, the cops will turn you over to the Hunters.[/li][/ul]

No rules-lawyering. The game ends with you dead or the 30 days are up. The government is a 1984-style crapsack dystopia. You are the masses’ bread and circus, and the biased media are not on your side. You cannot plead with the powers-that-be over the sanctity of life. You will not find groups protesting this barbaric game. You cannot find refuge over state lines or internationally. You cannot hire an attorney to find loopholes or stop the game. You can find allies, but you’ll put them at considerable risk. In the book, those harboring or helping you will be put to death.

You’re thinking, “I’ll just hide somewhere remote for 30 days. Find a cave and stock it with supplies”. Yep, you can, so long as you follow one teeny-tiny corrollary: You have to send two videotapes of yourself daily. They can only be sent through the postal service. If you do not, you forfeit your reward (but not the hunt).

A major plot point in the book, both negative and positive, so you COULD read the book or wiki summary. But that’s no fun.

Don’t totally despair! The book was written in 1982, so internet, smartphones, message boards, and round-the-clock news channels weren’t huge. Your progress is updated only during the (nightly?) show, and the tapes have the usual postage delay. Don’t be a chicken, it’s only 30 days and you do have a good travel & expense budget (in cash) and legal immunity.

You win, and you get a billion dollars. “The only winning move is not to play” Naturally, but for this exercise, you’ve already started.

Minus 100 and counting…

2

You said no looking for loopholes.

I’m looking for a loophole.

I have to send 2 videotapes daily. Must I MAKE two videotapes daily, or can I make them all at once in advance?

I mean, no question, I’m gonna die.

3

They give you a lightweight video recorder and tapes and pre-paid envelopes. You have to film 10 minutes of yourself and physically mail them to the network. The content isn’t important, you could record them all at once. But you must mail two tapes daily. Not all sixty on the first day.

I didn’t say you couldn’t look for loopholes. :cool: But no changing the terms above.

4

On second look, I did say “can’t use an attorney find loopholes”. I meant it more like “Upon advice of my attorney, we have an injuction to suspend the 30 days. Unless you can show in the rule book where monkeys cannot kick a football”.

5

Okay. Given those rules, I’m doing the following things:

  1. Make all the tapes in advance, so I don’t have to worry about giving myself away via location.
  2. Buying an extravagant number of disguises. I’ll burn most of them, keeping only enough to outfit myself maybe in 3 different ways.
  3. Putting on a disguise and using cash to travel to a country with white people, multiple large cities, and an inefficient postal service. Maybe somewhere in the former Soviet bloc, if it’s former; otherwise maybe Australia (depending on how inefficient their postal service is). I’ll make the trip in several legs, and I’ll change disguises a couple of times during the trip.
  4. Hole up somewhere with a month’s worth of groceries and a mailbox that I can approach, unseen, in the middle of the night.
  5. Hope.

My hope, of course, is that none of the tapes make it to their destination before the end of the 30 days. NOthing in the rules says they have to show up before the end of the contest.

6

This is one of King’s better stories. To sum up some other points:

  1. King’s protagonist is told that the Hunters aren’t permitted to use the postmarks on his videos to track him. The protagonist, Richards, believes this is a lie, and he’s probably right.

  2. If you are The Running Man, much of society is out to get you; the middle and upper class has been brainwashed to assume you’re a criminal scumbag who deserves death. There’s money in it to turn you in, too. So you can’t trust anyone.

  3. As Richards himself puts it, “they won’t be looking for a running man, they’ll be looking for a hiding man.”

  4. And as the producers of the show himself advises Richards, he needs to stick with “His people.”

So I’d suggest

  1. Learn the art of disguise. The first thing you should do is show up to the show clean shaven and with a thick head of hair, and immediately upon getting your head start, shave your head and start growing a beard. It’s exceptionally hard to recognize someone with the hair situation reversed. Note that the rules do not require you to show your face in the video.

  2. Keep moving.

  3. Stick with people you can trust whenever possible, but not relatives or close friends.

  4. Find a way to fuck with the videos. Richards, IIRC, pays people to mail them from other locations. That’s a good plan.

  5. Don’t cross a border, you’ll get caught. Don’t do ANYTHING traceable.

If you have survival skills your best bet is probably to figure out some way to spend a lot of time sleeping in the woods, coming out only to drop your videos in a lonely PO box. Other people are your enemy, and the Hunters will be expecting you to move from city to city and stay in urban areas. Don’t. And for God’s sake don’t go anywhere you’ve been before.

7

Do the hunters get access to travel records from the 24 hour head start period?

8

Looks like the film of this novel was pretty much made In Name Only.

9

How much time do I have to prepare before the thirty days start?

At any rate, my goals would be:

Set up a shelter in a very remote area, one within about a one to two hour walk from a driveable road.

Have a trusted accomplice, whom I agree to split the winnings with afterwards.

Shack up in the shelter for the month. Have the accomplice mail the tapes, preferably from different places. The accomplice would have a fleet of cars, all bought second-hand, which we would store somewhere near the desolate road. He would be in charge of mailing all of the tapes.

Alternately, I could have a lot of accomplices, each with a bunch of tapes, all in different locations (which you would divy up at the start). It would be even better if they didn’t know where I was going to hide. The tricky part is getting from wherever I give them all the tapes to the shelter… haven’t thought that one out yet.

10

It was. For those of us who enjoyed the story, the movie was a disappointment. King wrote an exciting, edge-of-your-seat thriller that explored a number of themes and physically covered a lot of ground; the movie was just a vehicle for Schwartzeneggar and his wrestler/athlete pals to show off in a series of stunt-filled scenarios in a small area. It was an entertaining action picture, but nothing more; it didn’t begin to touch King’s original story.

I think a good approach would be to never stop moving, and to always think a few moves ahead, to borrow a chess strategy. Disguises would be important. Pre-prepared and plausible backstories and other untruths for when one must interact with the locals would help a great deal. Knowledge of transportation systems and infrastructure would be necessary, and an intimate knowledge of a number of cities would be necessary.

There would be a lot of advance preparation necessary, but I don’t think Richards got a lot of time for that. If there was a reasonable amount of prep time, though, it may be possible.

11

Moving to Cafe Society (from MPSIMS).

12

No, they’d spot you crossing In My Humble Opinion and set up an ambush in The Game Room.

13

I’d pretend to be a mailman.

14

Rich folks smoke Dokes.

This was my favorite novel in grade school. They *would *look for a hiding man, but I’d try to hide in plain site anyhow. I’d kill some random prole and assume his identity.

15

I’ve only ever read the version by Richard Bachman. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

Based on RickJay’s observation

I’m going to suggest something from an episode of Monk. A plot so cunning, even Blackadder himself would nod in agreement.

[spoiler]In the episode, a man is suspected of mailing letter bombs. But the guy has a seemingly airtight alibi: he’s been in prison for the entire time period the bombs were mailed! During the course of the investigation, Monk checks out the suspect’s home and finds a number of ketchup bottles attached to the ceiling. Some others have fallen to the floor, leaving behind a glob of goopy substance.

Monk eventually figures out that the suspect has been testing to see how long his bombs, which are about the same weight as a ketchup bottle, will stick to a surface without falling from the goop. The suspect then attached his bomb with goop to the inside roofs of maildrop boxes. The bombs didn’t fall into the box removed by postal workers until after the suspect, who knew he was going to be in custody for another offense, went into prison.[/spoiler]

So here’s what I do. I tape a whole mess of extra tapes. A bunch of them I use the Monk technique outlined above on. The others, I mail from other locations using RickJay’s excellent suggestions. (They say you have to mail two tapes a day, but there’s nothing about sending more than two a day.) In case of winning, blame postal service delays for the fact that some of my tapes seem to have postmarks from opposite sides of the country on the same day.

17

That’s pretty clever. Also an important plot point in one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.

18

FYI,

Here’s an interesting Wired story from about two years ago where one writer basically attempted to do The Running Man (sans death, of course)

19

Yep, they’re pretty much separate things. About the only thing the film had in common with the book is that a protagonist named Ben Richards is competing on a game show for his life (in the book it’s sort of like an Amazing Race/Most Dangerous Game hybrid, while in the movie, well, I assume you’ve seen the movie).

Having said that, though, I actually did the like the movie for what it was - which is a goofy, over-the-top, Reagan-era action flick. Not great cinema mind you, but a fun, turn-your-brain-off-for-90-minutes, blow-shit-up-real-good romp. I don’t really consider it a Stephen King story, though.

20

I’d probably go the “hiding man” route too. Hole up in a mail processing center, probably in Memphis (it is the busiest). Live in the ductwork. Pretty much literally “drop” the tape packages anywhere and they will get mailed.

Barring that, find a highrise apartment somewhere, move in (disguised), and figure some way to gain direct access to the mail chute from my place. In some of the impersonal large city apartments I don’t think they would notice the new, antisocial, tenant. Or at least not jump to the “must be the Running Man!” conclusion.