At present, there is an on-line game by the Royal Dutch airlines KLM with a world traveller. This traveller is called Mr. Miles and he flies damn fast around the world. If you catch him, you register for a draw for some nice prices. It’s not a difficult game and yet many complain that it’s “too difficult” or even that it’s ‘fake’.
What is this ultimate laziness? I don’t know whether I win something big, but what I know is I already earned a few hundred miles. And it’s not a very difficult game either: follow his twitter account: @FlyingBlueMrM, and you’ll have your first miles in no time!
Mr. Miles travels quickly. Very quickly, which means he is in a ‘place’ for a very short time: a few seconds to a few minutes. If he tweets a riddle, it’s necessary to act as soon as possible by clicking the right location at the Mr. Miles-site. How hard can it be?
Hidden puzzles
It should even be possible to figure out where he stays between the tweets, but I’ve not succeeded in doing that. Perhaps the hidden puzzles – if any – are just too difficult for me.
Nevertheless I caught the guy a few times now and it’s not very difficult. No, even very simple: in your Twitter options you can switch on notifications for when a user tweets something. Very easy. You hear ‘ploing’ and immediately go to the site and click the right location. It’ll cost you 45 seconds or less.
Nokia Game
When I started this game I hoped it would consist of difficult riddles and puzzles. Finally a real tricky on-line game again! Something like the legendary 1999 Nokia Game.
The Nokia Game was called an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and very hard, especially the first one of ’99. I believe I even finished as one of the final 800 players. I ‘finished’ at position 249. But back then it was a very different story: a dial-up modem, hints in real world newspapers, magazines and TV programmes. You even had to play online between certain specific time frames! (Oh please computer-with-windows-98 or modem or both: don’t lock, crash or whatever!)
Unfortunately Mr. Miles doesn’t even come close to the Nokia Game. It’s just a regular lottery, although you have to catch Mr. Miles at least once to participate in the draws for the prizes, like the coveted platinum card or 500,000 miles. But even that seems too difficult for many, if I may believe the Twitter and Facebook comments.
This game by Flying Blue/KLM/Air France really isn’t that hard. In fact, I think people found it so easy that now Mr Miles has stopped offering clues that lead to miles (instead only to finding him for a chance in the grand prize). I’ve been playing the game all nine days so far, and within the first couple of days I won a good chunk of miles simply by watching out for the clues like a hawk and acting fast. It seems, however, that Mr Miles is no longer feeling so generous. The people that complain on twitter & facebook probably haven’t read the rules, or… they simply haven’t figured out how it works. Overall though, it’s been a real fun way to participate in a sweepstakes, and I like that eager players who put some effort into it have been rewarded with miles + extra chances at the draw. I hope Flying Blue does something like this more often!