There's a park behind the local basketball courts, where I like to go for quiet time. The other day, a group of thirty people arrived with a basketball as I was sitting down. One sat next to me, introduced himself as Marcel, and said he wanted me to watch the game his friends were going to play. For the next hour or so, he said, the other twenty-nine were going to pass the ball from one to another; he challenged me to count the total number of times each player passed the ball. 'Including passes to themselves?' I asked; he nodded. I set up my gif camera. The players' shirts were numbered from 1 to 29. Player 1 started with the ball and began by passing it to someone, and they proceeded to pass the ball for what seemed like hours; finally player 1 received a pass and the game finished. 'So I just need to count how many times each player passed the ball in total?' I asked. 'Well,' smiled Marcel, 'those numbers definitely have a meaning, but once you've done that, you'll realize you've overlooked some details in counting the passes...' and with that he got up and left. When I got home, I spent hours examining the footage, until I realized something quite amusing I'd missed in the game.
So I present the puzzle to you, friends, as I think it's amusing even if very simple: Can you find the secret in their game? I'll know you've found it, when you give me a seven letter word.
Here's the footage of the game; I've edited it to colour-code the players by their shirt number with (irrelevant) colours to make it easier to analyse:
A downloadable copy of the gif can be found here. In fact, because I'm not as cruel as Marcel, if you don't want to spend hours counting passes, I'll give you a comma separated text file (here) showing the sequence of players who had the ball (i.e. player 1 begins with the ball, passes it to player 15, who passes it to player 27, and so on). This CSV is all you need to find the game's secret.
