I Declare Victory! No wait... what's the other one? Oh yeah, defeat. I Declare Defeat!

A while back I had a brilliant idea. It was to be an experiment using google that would appear to be what the searchers were looking for but was actually no such thing. Instead what they got was me screwing with their heads.


It took the form of a fake interview about the new release of a famous computer game. The targets of the exercise were the people who wrote the game and the people who played it. This particular game is an assassination game. Each level comprises a series of targets (as designated by a fictional 'agency'), which the players then have to assassinate by way of shooting, knifing, poisoning etc. I shan't name the game for reasons that will become obvious.

The nature of the game is such that if the creators of it aren't on the CIA's payroll, then they're idiots who are missing out on free money. This game is precisely to the CIA what those Death-to-Arabs army games are to the US military.

The plan was merely to leave the interview on my blog (complete with an unmissable title) and let the assassination obsessed fans find it via google. This strategy worked a treat. The fans arrived in droves. The next part of the plan, wherein I would screw with their heads by way of the developers explaining: the enormity of what they had done; their desire for atonement by means of a new different game; and how in the new game the targets would consist of the agency and other warmongers who'd previously been the bosses, was an abject failure.

Of the thousands and thousands who arrived and read it, not a single one got it. They were utterly unable to view their bent for assassination in an holistic fashion. Forget the wide-angle, the only lens in their head was a 500mm scope that, if it didn't have a target filling the viewfinder, couldn't see anything at all. Every single comment left was perfectly moronic. Okay, there was one fellow who got it, but he pretty much shrugged his shoulders and went back to the strangling etc.

Eventually it was all too much for me. Every day, every goddamn day, about a quarter of my arrivals here were these idiot gamers. It was a tsunami that never ended. This thing was just relentless.

I tried tweaking the experiment by going so far as to explain the point of the exercise, and it made no difference. They just didn't want to know. What they wanted was a new series of people to assassinate. And they just kept coming.

Rather than surrender I deleted the previous text and inserted a new piece. Brilliant. But it was pointless really. Nothing changed. The game's name was still in the address path, and the idiot legion of gamers seemed to stretch into infinity. Sure enough, no one got the new piece either. "This doesn't seem to mention ______ at all! Who am I meant to kill? What bullshit!" And every day my statcounter thingy gave me the depressing news. More fucking gamers.

And so, I give in. I wave the white flag and surrender unconditionally. Which is to say, I have deleted the whole entry. The gamers won. I declare defeat.


*Anyway, the second piece I wrote may be of interest to those small numbers of people who don't groove on assassination, and it is immediately below. Yoroshiku.