GISHWHES

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The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen

The GISHWHES logo as of 2013
Genre Scavenger hunt
Frequency Annually
Location(s) Worldwide
Inaugurated 2011
Founder Misha Collins
Most recent August 11–18, 2013
Participants 14,580 (2012)
Website
gishwhes.com

The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES, pronounced gish-wes or gish-wishes)[1][2] is an annual week-long competitive media scavenger hunt. Competitors earn points for submitting photos and videos of themselves completing prompts from a list they receive at the beginning of the week. Actor Misha Collins officially founded GISHWHES in 2011 after a publicity stunt to help the television series Supernatural—on which Collins appears—win a People's Choice Award. The competition holds a world record for being the largest media scavenger hunt ever to take place.

History

Collins, a man in his late 30s with medium brown hair and stubble, faces to the left where a wired microphone partially enters the frame.
Collins in 2012

Actor Misha Collins, known for playing the angel Castiel on the American television series Supernatural, officially founded GISHWHES in 2011.[3] Before that, in 2010, a publicist for Warner Bros. named Holly Ollis asked Collins to engage his audience to help Supernatural move from second place to first in the People's Choice Awards voting.[4] He posted to Twitter, declaring that if the show won, Ollis had promised him a rhinoceros and that he would share it with everyone who helped by voting for it. Supernatural did go on to win and Collins asked his followers to send him self-addressed stamped envelopes into which he put scavenger hunt prompts[4] on the backs of jigsaw puzzle pieces from a puzzle depicting a rhino.[5] He soon began to receive images in response, such as a photo depicting firemen wearing nothing except kale just as his prompt had requested.[4]

Collins enjoyed this exercise so much that he officially created the scavenger hunt and gave it its name, the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, which he acknowledged spelled out GISHWHES, "the ugliest acronym the world has ever seen".[4] According to Collins, the primary reason for developing the competition was that he "loved the idea of thousands of people from all over the world connecting to create incredible things".[6] He also hoped to use GISHWHES to encourage participants "to do good in the world".[6] The event, categorized by Guinness World Records as a "media scavenger hunt", broke the record for being the largest scavenger hunt of its kind in 2011[6] and then again during the 2012 competition when 14,580 people participated,[7] representing a total of 69 countries.[2]

Contest

 Yearly GISHWHES participation
Year Dates of
competition 		Participants
2011 November 19–26[8][9] >6,000[5]
2012 October 30 – November 4[5] 14,580[7]
2013 August 11–18[10]
—

As of the 2013 contest, signing up to participate cost $19 per person.[2] Participation fees go towards Random Acts, a non-profit run by Collins with the aim of encouraging random acts of kindness.[11] Teams consist of 15 members who may come from different countries.[2] Individuals may prearrange teams or sign up individually, in which case they are randomly grouped into appropriately sized teams.[3]

On the first day of the week-long competition,[12] a list is posted on the GISHWHES website with over 150 different tasks for competitors to complete during the course of hunt.[2][11] These tasks have been previously devised by Collins and his friends.[6] Teams then submit photos or videos of themselves competing the tasks to the contest's website where they are given points for each item.[11] Past prizes for the team with the most points at the end of GISHWHES have included a trip to Scotland for a slumber party with Collins[3] and a trip to Vancouver for a "Viking surprise".[2]

Challenges

GISHWHES challenges vary widely in focus and sometimes attract media attention. The Los Angeles-focused OC Weekly reported on a local ice cream shop's response to a GISHWHES team that asked them to create a custom ice cream flavor for the 2013 challenge "Get your team's new ice cream flavor on sale in an ice cream parlor".[13] Shanghai Daily reprinted a collection of "outrageous" challenges from the 2011 and 2012 contests prior to the 2013 hunt.[14] Écrans, a French website run by Libération, noted a challenge in which competitors were told to get astronauts on the International Space Station to take a photo holding a sign with their team name, an effort that was headed off by NASA on its official Twitter account, saying that the astronauts were not able to participate.[1] According to Collins, most challenges are completed successfully by at least one team.[6] During the 2012 contest, for example, only one item saw no successes: coating a commercial blimp with fall leaves, a challenge that Collins speculated failed because of the physical limitations.[6] During the 2013 hunt, participants were asked to dress up as the DC Comics character Flash and have their pictures taken next to a functioning particle accelerator. The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and Fermilab received numerous emails from GISHWHES participants and set up special tours for the visitors. Dean Golembeski reported in Symmetry, the official magazine of Fermilab and SLAC, that the visits were welcomed and seen as an opportunity to educate a wider audience on the goals of and research done at national laboratories.[15] A further challenge involved participants using and spreading the word abnosome, Collins's portmanteau of abnormal and awesome.[16]

Gallery

  • 2012, № 95: "Kilt made entirely of sliced cucumbers. Must be worn by a man."[1]

  • 2012, № 117: "Play 'Duck Duck Goose' with real ducks and geese."[1]

  • 2012, № 124: "Shoot an erotically charged scene. (No nudity! This is just the erotically charged foreplay). The film must involve a pizza man and the actors can ONLY talk about grammar and fonts. Please use at least three of the following terms, 'kerning,' 'serif,' 'gerund,' 'participle,' and 'imperfective.'"[1]

  • 2012, № 148: "A picture of you and a loved one kissing. Here’s the catch though - you must have at least 11 food items between your lips and the lips of your loved one."[1]

  • 2013, № 25: "Do a stealth act of kindness for someone in public or at work like leaving a flower on their windshield, or a 'kindness note' at their desk, etc. Film them discovering it."[2]

  • 2013, № 114: "Let's see a portrait of Chris Hardwick from the Nerdist.com made from dried fruit."[2]


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References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Gindensperger, Sophie (August 13, 2013). "« Gishwhes » : un stormtrooper dans ta laverie et 149 autres défis". Libération (in French). Retrieved October 20, 2013. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Hayes, Molly (August 14, 2013). "Wanted: Rooster costume and Russian colonel". The Hamilton Spectator. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Mandy, Chaos (October 11, 2012). "GISHWHES – International Scavenger Hunt". Wired. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Prudom, Laura (July 26, 2013). "'Supernatural' Season 9: Misha Collins Talks Castiel's Human Side, Sex Scenes, Random Acts And GISHWHES". The Huffington Post. Retrieved October 20, 2013. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Romano, Aja (October 22, 2012). ""Supernatural" star’s Greatest International Scavenger Hunt attracts 10,000 contestants". The Daily Dot. Retrieved October 29, 2013. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Barrett, Dan (March 7, 2013). "Misha Collins and GISHWHES: the world's largest media scavenger hunt!". Guinness World Records. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Largest media scavenger hunt". Guinness World Records. 2012. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  8. ↑ Fiesler, Casey (November 21, 2011). "GISHWHES: Epic Scavenger Hunt Underway". Geeks Are Sexy. Retrieved October 29, 2013. 
  9. ↑ Brennan, Laura "Winter" (November 21, 2011). "GISHWHES: Misha Collins Now The Leading Cause of Insanity". Affairs Magazine. Retrieved October 29, 2013. 
  10. ↑ Ajax, Janus (August 21, 2013). "International Scavenger Hunt Breaks Records". WKBD-TV. Retrieved October 29, 2013. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Campbell, Amber (August 30, 2013). "TV actor sends teens on wild chase". The State Journal-Register. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  12. ↑ Recorder staff (August 16, 2013). "Just try to find a stranger scavenger hunt than this". The Recorder. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  13. ↑ Goei, Edwin (August 15, 2013). "Strickland's To Unveil Mystery Flavor Tonight For International Scavenger Hunt". OC Weekly. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  14. ↑ "Outrageous tasks from Gishwhes 2011 and 2012". Shanghai Daily. August 3, 2013. p. B2. Retrieved November 1, 2013. 
  15. ↑ Golembeski, Dean (August 23, 2013). "The Flash invades Jefferson Lab". Symmetry. Retrieved October 19, 2013. 
  16. ↑ Guzmán, Mónica (November 24, 2013). "Seattle contestants go wild for world’s largest media scavenger hunt". The Seattle Times. Retrieved January 4, 2014. 

External links

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