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I know I'm in trouble before he pulls out the hand gun. I push my shopping cart toward him and leap into the next aisle, ducking behind a mid-aisle display of Monster cans. There is a shot, followed by screams around the grocery store. Another shot. A bag of Cheetos a few feet away explodes. A disoriented woman rushing toward the display of cans takes a look at me, screams and runs in the opposite direction, abandoning pounds of cat food and litter in her cart. I hear another shot. Can't a woman go shopping anymore? I pull out my submachine gun and, using the cat litter as cover, rush my assailant, knocking him down with the cart.
American CIA, you can always tell. N00b.
"Never mess with a woman when she's shopping," I say before I knock him out with the butt of my gun. Even if it's only groceries.
My friend Laurie joins me at the register, with a cart full of champagne, strawberries and whipped cream.
"You know, they really ought to have an iPhone app for this game," I tell her. "Playing Spymaster in a browser on the iPhone is horrible. Someone just tried to take me out."
"Now?" she exclaims, pulling out her own phone and checking her Twitter direct messages to ensure she’s not been hit.
That's right, it's a game. And like most good games that feed the imagination, it's addictive as hell. Even as I write this, I'm completing tasks in another window.
THE GAME
Spymaster is a web-based espionage game. Using OAuth, the game is directly linked to your Twitter account, so there is no need to create another profile to play. You simply click through from an invite on Twitter and begin. The people who follow you on Twitter are part of your spy ring—whether they play or not. The more followers you can get to play, the stronger your attack and defense in the game.
When you begin, you can pick from a selection of intelligence agencies: the British M16, the American CIA and the Russian FSB. For doing tasks like stealing military weapons, assassinating an ambassador, and forging a passport, you get experience points and money--in the currency of the agency you have chosen. This money helps you buy weapons on the black market to increase your attack and defense sums, as well as safe houses around the world, which are another source of revenue.
You can also increase your attack and revenue by attacking other players in assassination plots. When you succeed, you get a nice chunk of their assets. If you fail, you lose assets to them. Multiple attacks can result in killing another player, which removes them from the game for 15 minutes and causes them to lose all assets, except those they have stashed away in a Swiss bank account.
The game has spread in popularity because of the use of notifications on Twitter, which bear a link to the game and the hashtag #spymaster. Players have the option of turning these notifications on or off, though leaving them on makes a player more money every time he or she completes a task. Savvier users turned most notifications off, fearing it would be perceived as spam by followers, but many more did not, causing #spymaster to trend quickly, drawing the attention of even more Twitter users.
As of this posting, 181 of my Twitter followers are playing the game. This number includes programmers, graphic designers, CEOs, journalists--all of us deep in our agencies and assassinations ploys, playing at work and long into the night.
THE CREATORS
"We all sat around one day, and decided we wanted to do something really fun on Twitter," says Chris Abad, CEO at iList, the company that created Spymaster. "Eston Bond has been obsessed with the whole spy genre, so we took all that obsession and random knowledge and ran with it."
"I've been interested in it since I was a small child," Bond, who also works at iList, says. "I just never grew out of it. All the espionage stuff, all the guns and all the gadgets were things I've always found absolutely fascinating, and I've grown up with all of it. I think watching MacGyver as a kid on TV is what really made it for me. The interest exists much in my real life as well; so I'm really only half in-character at any given moment. I still have plenty of gadgets. I now also have plenty of guns."
"Is your last name really Bond?" I ask.
"Yes, it is. And my
