Finana Ryugu Plays Eight Hours as a Rookie Officer Through an Election and Server Crashes

NIJISANJI — Finana Ryugu of NIJISANJI EN spent an eight-hour stream as rookie police officer Cloverfield on the District V2 role-play server in Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), working through repeated server trouble, a mayoral election and the shooting of the police chief. She finished the night out of character, saying she was not giving up on the connect button no matter how often the game crashed.

Cloverfield began the shift newly promoted from cadet to officer, the change the stream title called taking the yellow highlighter vest off. The department had moved to a new in-game police computer and dispatch system, and early on officers found their old tablets no longer worked and some robberies never appeared on their dispatch lists. In the morning meeting the chief said the force would stop going easy on crime, and leadership announced a pay raise and a new fleet of cars. Later, in a long pursuit of a van across the city, her unit took over as the lead car before the group called it off and headed back to the station ahead of an in-game storm. She called it an intense chase and said she had been so locked in that she never looked at chat.

“I’m not giving up on that connect button.” — Finana Ryugu, on the night’s server problems

The department then provided security for the election, held at an amphitheater, where the candidates included the social media figure Mr. Yeast, a dog running for mayor and fast-food executive Bob Burgerweather. Voice problems left most of the crowd unable to hear the speeches, so candidates repeated them over a Discord voice channel. Weasel News, an in-game outlet, put questions to the final two, the dog and Burgerweather, while officers searched the surrounding hills and bushes after reports of people hiding there; detectives took one person in for questioning. Burgerweather’s character was hit mid-debate and blamed a sniper in the hills, and he was named mayor.

Soon afterward Chief Shelby was shot near the racetrack during a chase and taken to a hospital, where he was reported to be unconscious until morning, and officers sought one of the election’s candidates in connection with the shooting. Server trouble ran through the night: players were repeatedly dropped from the game, which the players call head pops, and vehicles stuttered in other players’ views. Around the midpoint of the stream the game froze her PC, with the cursor crawling and the audio cutting out, until she restarted her broadcast software and waited out a server restart. Her character’s car was later blown up when a pursuit ran into an explosive barrel, sending her to the hospital, and a mechanic had to revive the wreck. Other officers found a laundromat with a hidden room and stacks of cash.

After logging off her character, Finana said the first half of the night had been the most fun and that the second half stopped being fun for the department as head pops and stuttering vehicles pushed several members offline. She asked viewers frustrated with the police department to lay off, said the server’s moderators were friends working hard in voice chat, and said she was well aware of the lag. She said she had made flashcards to study for the role, planned to apply to the department’s high-speed unit because she usually volunteered to drive, and hoped the department could hold a day out together, perhaps a beach episode. She said there would be no members stream the next day. Viewers had praised her driving during the night, and as she signed off chat filled with goodnight wishes and hearts.