People who know me know that I am a huge fan of the Joystiq Podcast and especially Justin McElroy. The whole JP crew happen to also be some of my favorite bloggers but the Justin is my favorite on-air personality. I’m sorry Chris, I know how much that pains you.

Anyway, a few years ago I made a T-shirt mock-up of “I’m gonna kill you… wake up.” It’s a little JP meme taken from an on the street experience at GDC. At the end of the email I told Chris that he should add me on XBL. No shit, he actually did. This might have been right before the whole place blew up or maybe he was just getting rid of another person. To this day I am amazed he hasn’t deleted me. But that opened the door.

I thought I might as well go for the whole set and, with the recently added (at the time), ability to look through your friend’s friends list, I quickly found Justin and Ludwig‘s gametags. I opted not to send a friend request to Ludwig because I was young and naive and afraid I would never play him because he’s an ocean away. The time has passed and I know his friends list is full up now, whatever. I’m not bitter about it, really. So I sent the friend invite. Somehow he wasn’t completely thrown by the guy with 8 friends, 1 being his boss, none of the others being people he knew, and added me.

That was all a long and boring story to tell you an even longer and more boring story. Recently I got into a high score war with a friend of mine in Geometry Wars 2. This friend is the kind of guy that will annihilate you at Marvel vs. Capcom 2, frag you in CoD4 without even trying and beat you in Guitar Hero by about 4x your score. But I beat him at Geometry Wars 2. At first I didn’t want to tell him; I was worried he would just try harder, and being innately better at  video games anyway, just take all the top spots back and laugh. Then I caved. I bragged to him. He went home that night and took about half of them back but some scores stood out of his reach. The excitement was short-lived however since instead of a fantastic back and forth that would keep us constantly bettering each other he opted for getting a WoW account instead. Whatever.

But my friend was not the top of my friends leaderboard. Justin McElroy was. With nothing to strive for and my previous sparring partner busy tanking or whatever the hell you do in WoW I was left to play against ghosts. Who knows how long it has been since Justin had even turned on Geometry Wars 2? I can be creepy and look up in his play history to figure out approximately how long it has been but really it doesn’t matter. His friends list is packed with all 100 spots occupied. The lack of a nicknaming feature or clan support means he has to try to memorize who the 100 different pseudonyms belong to. I doubt even if I asked him to really try he would be hard pressed to notice who might have moved around on any of the leaderboards, let alone a specific Arcade title from a year ago.

So I am a lurker who has undeservedly snuck onto my idol’s friends list and now have a compulsion to make sure that every game I play I am playing against Justin. When I am doing Challenge Rooms in Arkham Asylum I check what Justin has and strive to beat it. Shadow Complex melees and head shots, I check how many Justin has. This is not as creepy as it sounds. For one, I don’t have many friends online. 8 people is not enough to build a friends list, especially when most don’t like the same games you do. Which brings me to another point, Justin plays a lot of games. More often then not he is the only other person on my friends list that has even played any specific game. I sometimes worry, since he’s now a game reviewer and frequently plays games on a debug system instead of him home console, if I am missing some of the higher scores to aim for.

So I am creepy as hell. These are the people I essentially want to be when I grow up and I sneak into their social net and lurk around for no reason other then to beat arbitrary scores they leave for me. I play against Chris a lot too but he doesn’t play nearly as many games. He does, however, usually do much better at the ones he does play. When I say “play against” I don’t ever mean it’s a multiplayer experience.  So far I have never heard them on voice chat or invited either of them to a game. These are the off-putting little trends that only an online people-watcher (see: e-stalker), can see. So what I am wondering is, am I alone? Are there any more ghost chasers or secret celebrity assassins out there?