Death of a Supreme Commander

The end of Streetwars London 2014

People who have been following my Facebook for some time may have noticed a dramatic, almost suspicious uptick in the number of public posts I've made full of selfies and easily recognizable landmarks. Friends, I have a confession to make. You have all been unwitting accomplices in a massive misinformation campaign.

For the past four weeks, I have been participating in StreetWars, an assassination game from the makers of Rental Car Rally. At the start of the game, each player received a target (another player) to locate and "assassinate" with a watergun. At the same time, each player is someone else's target. It's a fully immersive, deadly game of cat-and-mouse that runs 24/7 with the entire city as the playing field.

Obviously in this game of stealth and deception it is advantageous not to be seen. So in preparation for the game, a month before it started, I began shooting random selfies around town in front of recognizable things.

Once the game began, I shaved my head, grew a beard, and started wearing brown contact lenses whenever I left the house. I stopped being Marcus Alexander Hart and assumed the identity of my StreetWars alter ego: Agent Candy Crotch Saga.

Whereas most other players made an effort to delete or lock down their online presence, I chose to exploit mine. Rather than hiding my Internet face, I just kept showing it. But I was showing it *wrong*. Through the game I kept posting shots from my file of old selfies in an attempt to throw my assassins off.

I knew other players wouldn't be dumb enough to say, "He just posted a picture at the John Snow Pub! He's there right now!" But I suspected they would not catch on to the hidden double misdirection of seeing my default face, red glasses and all. I like to think that every time my pursuers' conscious minds disregarded a fake clue, their subconscious minds became more focused on a face that they would never find.

Apparently my ruse worked to some extent, because after an exhausting 26-day war of attrition, I was one of the last six players standing out of the original 96. I had personally shot six assassins, eliminating eight players due to team play rules.

At this point my final target in the game was a team of three: The Fatal Femmes. I had managed to eliminate one of them (Mandy Slick) earlier in the week, and Lucky Belmont regrettably had to go out of town in the final days of the game. That left only Lillian Fog. Early in the last day of play I managed to botch a stakeout of her house, resulting in her delivering two watery shots to my chest.

By StreetWars rules, if you are shot by your TARGET, you are not eliminated. You are merely neutralized from shooting them for 24 hours. Since we all knew the game would be over before 24 hours elapsed, there was no longer any chance that I could ever assassinate her. She was totally safe.

At this point in the game, I was fully committed to assassinating the Supreme Commander (the final objective to win the game), but I learned that Fog had a different agenda. A player by the name of Dacx was her target, and after a week of exhausting stakeouts (including a full night spent cramped in a recycle bin outside his door), she was ravenous to eliminate him. Since I was tied with Dacx for "most kills" at six a piece, I was happy to help her take him out before he could make another. I didn't think I could win the game, but I at least thought the "most kills" award was within my grasp. An alliance made sense.

Following the clues toward Supreme's heavily guarded final hiding place, we ran across Agent Steamy. Outside of Lillian Fog, Steamy had been the only target I had in the entire game that I actively hunted who managed to survive.

I had made some deductions about the final kill order, and I truly believed that Steamy was Dacx's final target (As it turns out, I was wrong.). Fog wanted to kill Dacx, and (we presumed), Dacx wanted to kill Steamy. If he stuck with us and we ran into Dacx, Fog could kill Dacx before he killed Steamy. It made sense for him to join us for his own protection.

We now entered Supreme's Barbican Thunderdome of rogue assassins as an unlikely alliance of three.

We entered a platform-shooter-style purgatory of running and watery gunplay that seemed to last another full week. The place was crawling with rogue assassins, and every time we got shot by one of them we were neutralized for 15 minutes. And shot we were. Constantly. I swear, I spent the entire time looking at my watch and telling the next rogue, "Cease fire, dude. I'm still down for 11 more minutes..."

We also learned at this point that, due to sudden-death rules, if PLAYERS shot each other it ALSO was only a 15 minute neutralization, not 24 hours as it had been during normal play. And that this rule was retroactive to the morning. Meaning I was now free to assassinate Lillian Fog. But by now we were friends. I didn't even *want* to shoot her. I know this isn't technically Stockholm Syndrome, but it is definitely a related condition from the same section of the psychology textbook.

The rules clearly state a "no truce" rule. If you have a target, you must shoot your target or be disqualified. But at the same time, the Sudden Death rules stated: "Your targets are still active and can be killed. However that is not the main goal. The Supreme Commander himself is your final target."

I decided that if this went to StreetWars Court, the second rule superseded the first. It was not a truce. It was following orders to disregard my original target in favor of Supreme.

Through the night, Fog tried her best to eliminate Dacx, but he was just too damn good. He was too fast. Too stealth. He had superior firepower. Every time she had a chance to shoot him, he would get her first, knocking her out of play for 15 minutes.

By this point our shenanigans (which included Agent Sierra2 racing around on a motorbike like the fucking Terminator) resulted in us being thrown out of the Barbican complex by angry residents. We put the whole game on pause and regrouped on a random street corner, players, rogues, and commanders alike. By this time day 26 had rolled past midnight into day 27, and we all agreed that we just wanted this fucking game to be over, if at all possible, before we all started collecting our pensions.

So in the end, the whole thing came down to a sudden-death overtime game of high-stakes, middle-of-the-night hide-and-seek. The remaining assassins would give Supreme a ten minute head start to wander off into the city. First one to find him and shoot him dead wins.

Soon the assassins were released back into play, and we all started sneaking around, peering down alleys and into doorways, and what have you. But while the rest of us were doing this, I noticed Dacx take a look at his phone, look up at the street sign, and then bolt off in one direction with absolute deadly intent. My first thought was, "WTF? It's like he's got a tracking device on Supreme or something." Then I thought, "No, you're paranoid. We're not MI6, we're just a bunch of douchebags playing watergun war."

So I just watched him run off, blocks farther than what I presumed was the active play zone, and I just kept looking around. Due to my notoriously bad sense of direction, somehow I thought I was walking in a straight line and I ended up circling back around to where Eevil Midget and the rogues were. I found Lillian Fog nearby, and she had hatched a magnificent plot.

She knew that she was back in play and I could assassinate her, and she knew that if I did, Dacx would become my target. So she told me to go ahead and shoot her, then go and take out Dacx, surprising him with a new assassin he wasn't expecting. She was that committed to his demise.

Since this was super-final-double-sudden-death-overtime-round-two-extended-play-remix, I figured it was anything-goes time rules-wise, and went along with this plot. I shot Fog right in front of Eevil Midget and the rogues. Fog turned around, handed me her superior gun, and said, "Go get him."

I should say here, with all honesty, there is no earthly reason why Dacx should not have won this game. He was smarter than me. More cunning. He had better guns. He had superior technology. He was better looking than me. Better dressed. He smelled nicer. Bigger, more robust genitals. It was a classic preps vs. nerds finale showdown.

And everyone knows how that movie ends.

As it turns out, my insane theory was right. Somehow Dacx ACTUALLY DID place a GPS tracker on Supreme. But at approximately 1:20 AM Saturday morning, the unit somehow failed at the worst possible moment, causing him to lose lock on Supreme when he was literally seconds away from victory.

Meanwhile, in the emotion of the moment, I'd totally forgotten about Supreme and now felt like the most important thing in the world was shooting Dacx as a favor to my new best assassin friend Lillian Fog. I ran off as fast as I could in the direction I saw Dacx run before. And as I paused to look both ways before crossing a street, who do I see half a block to my left?

The Supreme Commander.

It was a total Marsellus-Wallace-spots-Bruce-Willis-mother-fucker moment.

As soon as he saw me see him he made a run for it. Seeing the opportunity to finally end this living hell once and for all, I bolted after him. But he had a hefty head start. It took two full sides of a city block to catch him, but catch him I did. Even after he was wet and stopped running, I did not stop shooting until Fog's gun was completely empty, hearing my own voice echoing off the buildings of the abandoned street screaming, "YOU'RE DEAD! YOU'RE DEAD, MOTHERFUCKER! DEAD!"

In that moment, I became the champion of London StreetWars 2014. At present, I am the only person to have won both a Rental Car Rally AND StreetWars, and the only person to win a Shadow Government game on two continents.

In the end, the commanders ruled that, although it did not violate any rules, Lillian Fog's death was collusion and did not count as a legitimate kill. Which is absolutely true and uncontested. Still, I felt completely terrible that I had failed to eliminate Dacx for her. She thought I was insane. I had won the game, which was an alternate outcome she was happy with.

So after four weeks of lies and deceit, when it came down to it, it was loyalty to a new friend that won the day. StreetWars pulls dark things out of your soul that you never knew were there, and it fills me with joy to know that a last minute heel-face turn caused the hand of fate to choose me as the champion.

For all you future StreetWars players, that is the lesson to be learned here: You will do things during this game that you are not proud of to survive, but to win, you need to keep your humanity.