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Games

META-Assassins Turns The Web Into A Battlefield

If surfing the web is becoming a bore, add the thrill of being hunted by an stranger to your daily browsing.

Shoot ‘em ups are such a popular gaming genre because there’s nothing more satisfying than blowing a digital character to smithereens. The dollar-book psychology behind it goes something like this: we enjoy these games for the same reasons we enjoy amusement park rides and horror films, because we get the thrill of being scared crapless by having our lives threatened when we’re in no real danger whatsoever.

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Online game META Assassins takes the thrill of the shoot ‘em up and gives it a social media RPG twist, placing you into a combat tournament situation where you’re an assassin who must hunt your prey over the digital terrain of the internet. Follow your target across the web pages that make up their virtual trail, tracking them like you were primitive man chasing your dinner across the vast plains of the Mother Land. Or like a virtual Dan Aykroyd and John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. It all seems deadly serious and there’s a prize to be won—at the end of the tournament the player with the most points from killing opponents gets some airplane tickets to anywhere in the world—so, it’s not just about the thrill of online stalking then. Interestingly, the game also leaks into real life, assigning you tasks like drops offs and pick ups. Just make sure you don’t get arrested creeping around someone’s driveway.

Here’s the lowdown from their site:

While hunting down the assigned target, another real player in the game, the assassin keeps his life afloat by checking in to health sites around the Internet. To aid in his kill, he purchases weapons and tools from the 'Blackmarket', where sophisticated scripts enable one to narrow his search instantly on his target, no matter where on the web. Jobs that fatten the purse come in 4 virtual varieties: Check ins—where a player is required to visit a certain site for some minutes, Surveillance—where a player finds answers within Google Streetview maps to a question, Dead drops—where a printed code is physically hidden, and Pick ups—where the code is physically retrieved.

So you get to stakeout and trawl the web in what is pitched as a kind of running game played simultaneously as you go about your online life, completing the above jobs to aid in your Kill Mission and earn extra cash to tool up. When you and your Kill Mission come cursor-to-cursor on the same website, a shoot out begins where you can fight or flee. If you win, you get the points and sign up for another target.

The game itself starts like all worthwhile online stalking does, via Facebook, and then all the action takes place in your browser using the META plugin, which tracks your activity so you can be hunted. The whole experience will no doubt add an element of fun and unexpectedness to your daily browsing routine, turning the act of browsing into one big video game, and probably making your surfing habits that much more jittery as you ponder who’s watching you and when they might pounce.

[via LostAtEMinor]