The Last Man game, an annual competition of intentional ignorance, began on Sunday, February 1st, at 10:06 P.M. A hundred and fourteen million Americans had just watched the Super Bowl, more than had ever watched before. Somewhere north of a hundred—no million needed—had decided, instead, to play Last Man, a loosely organized contest that began in the late aughts, when Kyle Whelliston, a blogger who didn’t care much for football, decided to try to be the “Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl.” Soon, his readers started to play, and the group grew, until this year enough people joined to require a Web site and an unofficial commissioner tracking the events on Twitter. The game runs on the honor system—pride is the only prize—and deaths are self-reported on Twitter. Those who play refer to themselves as “runners,” and the thing they are running from—the fact that New England beat Seattle—is known as “the Knowledge.” The only real rule is to stay in the country.

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No problem, you’re thinking. I hate sports, and didn’t even watch the game. Well, did you watch “Broad City”? Amanda Upson, a film producer in Denver, went eight days without discovering who won the game, but when she rewound a Tivo’d episode of the Comedy Central show a little too far, she landed on a commercial revealing the result. Her loss was declared a “death by poor remote usage.” You may not remember obtaining the Knowledge—perhaps it arrived via an NPR story in which a Republican compared Obama’s decision-making to Pete Carroll’s ill-fated final call—and may have since forgotten it, but that doesn’t mean you never had it. Last Man is a game in which, eventually, everybody dies.

This year, eight runners died in the first thirteen minutes. The list of casualties, recorded on the Web site, is long and varied. There was death by jewelry-store junk mail and by Rob Lowe meme and by Yelp review of a bowling alley. (“Came here on a Sunday night after my Seahawks lost...”) Eluding the Knowledge meant avoiding not just ESPN and Deadspin but, for at least several days, pretty much the entire Internet. Google Now, Google Calculator, Google AdWords, and Google’s homepage all claimed victims. There was one death credited to a local TV news segment about pizza consumption during the game, and another to a pizza commercial. (“Congratulations New England Patriots, from Papa John’s!”) Televisions at gyms, airport terminals, chiropractor offices, and a Walmart gas station knocked off a dozen people. One man, who suffered an accretion of enough detail about the game to fill in the blanks, including an “uncharacteristically humble” tweet from Richard Sherman, diagnosed his defeat as “death by a thousand cuts.”

The Super Bowl is the only annual event with media coverage widespread enough to make such a game a real challenge. This year, US Weekly had stories about Katy Perry’s performance, while Yahoo! Parenting hosted a heated debate about the morality of Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach, kissing his adult daughter on the lips during the postgame celebration. (The latter knocked off two runners.) But Last Man is not the only game of its type, a genre that lacks a name, giving us the opportunity to dub them Tests of Obliviousness. Kate Schroeder, a stage manager in D.C., was playing Last Man for the first time, but is a seasoned veteran of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge: see how long you can go after Thanksgiving without hearing the song. She once lasted until December 23rd, when an upbeat, contemporary rendition piped into a room. “The David Bowie/Bing Crosby version is considered an especially horrible way to lose,” she said. For Last Man, she had planned to go without TV and casual Internet browsing for two weeks, and added a plugin on her computer that replaced every image—to avoid, for instance, “death by Facebook pictures of winning quarterback”—with a photo of Nicolas Cage. (Why Nicolas Cage? “I love Nicolas Cage.”) All for naught: moments after the Super Bowl ended, a drunk friend, who knew that Schroeder was playing Last Man, texted her the result. Death by betrayal. Schroeder thinks that next year she might go on vacation and leave her phone at home.

Monday is the most difficult day, and within twenty-four hours, half of the runners had been eliminated. Just getting to work was a problem. (Did you glance at the Captivate screen in your office elevator? You died.) “I think the slushercane helped,” John Carney, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a Last Man competitor, said, of the wintry mix in New York the day after the Super Bowl. “I had to keep my eyes down, watching my step. No danger of accidentally seeing a newspaper.” Survival, he said, requires “intense eye discipline.” Getting to his desk near the Journal sports department required passing innumerable copies of the day’s paper, which had the result printed across the top of the front page. He recruited nearby coworkers to alert him to possible danger—the newsroom has enough televisions to make a Best Buy manager envious—and when an editor from another desk walked by wearing a Patriots jersey, a friend warned Carney not to look up. At one point, Carney had nineteen unread text messages and eighty-six unclicked e-mails. (A Journal colleague writes, “Are you making clear there’s no way Carney could have been doing his job effectively while avoiding all news services?”) On Tuesday, he was looking at the Pragmatic Capitalist, a Web site that typically offers “Practical Views on Money & Finance” but that day had an article titled “Game Theory Cannot Rationalize Seattle’s Super Bowl Loss.” (“It all makes me wonder if Carroll wasn’t suffering from a severe case of recency bias.”) Death by game theory.

David McDowell, a democratic operative in Mississippi who sat out this year to serve as a pseudo-referee, said that Last Man “at its core is about learning the difference between deliberate consumption of information and accidental.” Speaking charitably, the behavior adopted by the game’s competitors requires self-discipline. (“Out of habit I clicked on the Facebook app on my phone and first post someone made reference to who won [frowny face].”) Put less kindly, they begin to resemble shut-ins. “I’m starting to think that #DeathByGirlfriend is becoming a reality as she gets more fed up with me being anti-social,” one runner wrote on Twitter. A doctor feared going to the hospital, where he would have to make small talk with patients. A stripper in Los Angeles slept through the Super Bowl—most of the clientele was watching the game—but found the rest of her work week difficult: “Starting every conversation with ‘Don’t tell me who won the SB!’ is hilarious but not the best way to make money in a strip club.” Brendan Loy, a lawyer in Denver who helps run Last Man, spent Monday listening to movie soundtracks (“Last of the Mohicans,” “Return of the King,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “How to Train Your Dragon 2”). He said that the game required “a delicate balancing act between running hard from the Knowledge and being too much of an ostentatious weirdo at the office.”

The unpredictability of social media made Twitter and Facebook particular danger zones; forgetting to turn off iPhone notifications was a rookie mistake. LinkedIn and Snapchat proved deadly, as did “browsing Reddit hopped up on flu meds” and “a half naked fan of the winning team on my Facebook timeline.” (Death by voyeruism?) A number of casualties were credited to someone who created a Twitter handle @Pats28Hawks24—the final score—and started sending messages to people still in the game, including the stripper in L.A. (@Pats28Hawks24 did not respond to requests for comment.) One woman lost when a Tinder match spoiled the result after she told him about the game. (She did not respond to requests for comment on whether they went on a date.)

Last Man is thus something of a Luddite’s dream. Martin Miller, a priest and competitor from Pittsburgh, sees a potential spiritual benefit. “The notion of voluntary reclusion has Christian roots, as a way of leaving all the popular opinion and culture for a moment,” he said. “It’s good for the soul.” Or at least for efficiency. One college student, who sat in the front of class so as not to spy Super Bowl-related stories on the laptops of less studious classmates, noted that the game had “brought me to productivity levels I’ve never seen before.”

Most of the runners, however, found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.” Several players eventually said that they couldn’t take it anymore and quit. “I’ve spent way more time avoiding the Knowledge than I’ve ever spent thinking on it in the past,” one said, committing seppuku with Twitter as his sword. David Hines, a “news junkie” who described his self-imposed blackout as “absolute hell,” died when he couldn’t resist any longer and read an article about the measles outbreak: in it a Seahawks fan hoped that the Patriots players came down with disease on their celebratory trip to Disneyland. (Several people lost after seeing Disney commercials in which several Patriots declared their intention to make that trip.)

As the week went on, some runners started to reënter the world. They took their headphones off, went out to parties with trusted friends, and ate at restaurants that they thought would be Knowledge-free. (Mexican was a popular choice.) The quality of the play in the Super Bowl, and its controversial finish—not to mention Katy Perry’s Left Shark—kept the game in the news, and stories about the celebratory parade in Boston brought further danger. Brendan Loy, a weather nerd, survived until late Wednesday night, when he found out that the parade was postponed due to the frigid temperatures, which he knew were descending on the Northeast. Death by cold front.

In Last Man history, only one person had made it past the Thursday after the Super Bowl, but this year a dozen made it to the weekend. There were many more people playing than ever before, for one, and Loy speculated that the game might have started to attract competitors to whom the reclusive lifestyle comes more naturally. “I usually last pretty long because I know so little about football anyway,” Abigail Drozek-Fitzwater, who teaches creative-writing workshops at elementary schools in Texas, said. She had taken the precaution of skipping a weekly round of drinks with friends at a bar filled with televisions, but thought that she would be safe Wednesday morning, when she was running a workshop on haikus with a group of second graders. “The theme was nature, so most of them were about waterfalls,” she said, of the students who presented their work in front the class. Lilly Jones went last, and read a poem (she’s still mastering the syllable requirements) about her brother, Sam:

Sam went to the Super Bowl

The Seahawks lost

He was sad

Drozek-Fitzwater was sad, too.

On Thursday night, her husband, Jeffrey, was one of seven people still running. He holds the current Last Man record: three years ago, he claims to have gone the entire year without learning the Knowledge. (Last year, he lost during a discussion about Black History Month, when a friend mentioned the fact that a black quarterback had won the Super Bowl. Drozek-Fitzwater knew that meant Russell Wilson and the Seattle Seahawks.) He works in an elementary school, and oversees recess, but said that most of his students are more into soccer. He’d stayed off Facebook and Twitter, and most of the Web sites he usually visited, and answered only work e-mail. Then, last night, he decided to watch “Last Week with John Oliver”—a show whose title should have made the risk obvious. Oliver began a segment on pharmaceutical companies by declaring, “Prescription drugs—the only thing that can bring people in the Seattle area joy anymore.” Jeffrey didn’t seem too upset. “It is nice for a few days,” he said. “But after a week you start wondering what’s going on out there.”