This story starts, as so many great ones do, with a classified ad: "I will take bullets for you," it read. And he did.
Contact made, cash transfer confirmed, Londoner Toby Smith met me on a bluff overlooking the border between Iran and Turkmenistan on an early December afternoon armed with an M416 assault rifle. One minute and 15 seconds later he was dead.
He died the second time three minutes and 37 seconds after our meeting.
His third death didn't come for another five minutes or so.
While the deaths, the many deaths, weren't real, the money I paid Smith to protect me was. The 15-year-old high school student is one of several gamers who have begun to hire out their services as virtual bodyguards, digital guns-for-hire in popular military first-person shooter video games.
Earlier this month I tracked down and hired two of these in-game bodyguards, both teens who excel at Battlefield 3 and advertise their services online, charging other gamers 5 quid ($NZ10) for half an hour of in-game protection.
The services the two provided went far beyond just protecting me as I tried to kill other online players.
They offered tips, revived and healed me when I was injured and brought me to their favourite in-game sniping spots, like hunting guides.
Smith, a well-spoken high schooler from Southampton in southern England, said he came up with the idea of offering his services as a gun for hire after struggling to survive in matches of Call of Duty and Battlefield when he first started playing online.
"I used to think 'I wish one of my friends would go round the game with me and give me a hand'," he said. "And that's all it is really! It's been the trend for games at the moment to encourage personal gain versus good teamwork, so my service allows customers to feel like they are part of a well-oiled machine, not a walking bullet magnet."
Soon after, Smith discovered UK community site fivesquids.co.uk, a place where "people share their unique skills, knowledge and expertise for 5 [pounds]," and placed his first ad. Under the heading "I will take bullets for you for half an hour for 5," Smith summarised how his service works:
"I will be by your side the entire time and will fight for you, keeping enemies away from you, protecting you when you snipe, even SACRIFICING MY LIFE to save yours," he wrote.
"Essentially," Smith tells me, "I become the client's buddy in the game. I won't go for kills of my own, only when necessary to stop the client's `life' being cut short."
Both Battlefield 3 publisher Electronic Arts and Call of Duty publisher Activision declined to comment for this article or say whether using hired bodyguards would be considered cheating under their terms of service.
But as the popularity of video games continues to grow, it is inevitable people are going to continue to look for ways to invest more than time to improve at their hobby.
- Brian Crecente
