Assassins.
From Wikipedia:
Assassin (also Gotcha, Assassins, Paranoia, Killer, Tag, or Elimination) is a live-action roleplaying game. Players try to eliminate each other from the game using mock weapons in an effort to become the last surviving player.[1]
Assassins is a game people play in college, to my knowledge at least. A student describes play at Stanford:Assassin is particularly popular on student campuses; several universities have a dedicated "Assassins' Guild" society which organizes games for their members.
Assassin is lifestyle-invading. Game-play occurs at all hours and in all places.[2] Since an elimination attempt could occur at any time, successful players are obligated to develop a healthy degree of watchful paranoia.
“It was really easy to kill people once you finally found them, thanks to a rule that a kill counts if the gun is hidden,” he said. “So we had people sitting down in dining halls and getting shot in plain view of everybody by somebody with binder paper wrapped around their water guns.”
Apparently, this game is not exclusive to the realm of the college campus. Chicago Assassins is Chicago’s premier water gun assassination tournament club and holds three-week tournaments throughout the year in the metro and suburban Chicagoland area, and the next one is scheduled to start 1 January 2008. In 2007, StreetWars came to Chicago. StreetWars began in New York City during the summer of 2004 and is a three week long water gun "assassination" tournament that travels to cities around the world. Created by Franz Aliquo and Yutai Albert Liao, the tournament is based on the college and high school game Assassin.
Here are a few of my favorite Chicago Assassins rules:
- All assassins must conduct tournament play within all applicable city and federal laws.
- Assassins are not allowed to act like terrorists, break into targets’ homes, eradicate targets in such a way that results in injury, or otherwise break the law during tournament play
- If an assassin breaks the law at any time during tournament play he or she is immediately disqualified and will forfeit all accumulated points and eligibility of tournament prizes
- Water guns are the on acceptable weapons to be used during tournament play
- A “water gun” is any apparatus that is designed to create a jet of water
- Water guns must not have ever held any type of liquid other than water. This includes using a squirt bottle that at one time held a cleaning product but has been “cleaned out really well”
- Water guns cannot have any type of medical connotation (ear wax bulbs, large plastic syringes, etc. are not allowed)
- Water guns can be modified, but can never be made to look like an actual firearm. This includes painting a water gun black. Doing this is illegal
- By using anything other than a tournament-approved water gun, the assassin’s kills are void and assassin is disqualified from tournament
If this game does, in fact, originate from Dorm culture its occurrence in cities certainly is an interesting manifestation of the shifting demographics of cities.
Oh but wait, now you are going to tell me more than ever people are going to college, including low-income, working-class people from cities with possibly an experience allowing them exposure to the organized crime/gang culture this game mimics in a sense -- I believe these populations are less likely to attend campuses affirming four-year degrees (where dorm culture is so salient) and primarily encounter higher education as commuter students in other institutions (where maybe they don't play assassins).
4 comments:
not that i like it or am happy about it but i am from chicago grew up there and mistakenly came back whet to high school (whitney young) and then went to college in new mexico i never heard of this game coming up and they may have played it at my college but i was not aware i
in terms of LARP, i was familiar with dungeons and dragons in my youth however and that game is stupid too
also stupid is that goddamn beanbag game they play in lincoln park and now apparently in logan square is that something they brought to chicago from university of iowa along with their finance or art degrees
this reminds me of that scene in "the giver" when all the kids are playing war because they don't know what war is, and the kid with the memories of war in him is like OMG STOP you shouldn't joke about serious shit like that. but it's funny because in the book it's like, look what happens in societies where everyone is completely ignorant to suffering, with the implication that if the kids knew what war was, they obviously wouldn't play it. but then like, of course that's not true, as we see here...
anyway, people not involved in gang violence imitating it and making a game out of it is a really interesting phenomenon...interesting to think perhaps about the desire of people living in what some may describe as "bubbles" to experience something they believe to be "more real," but rather than doing this by living their own real lives they try to imitate the real lived experiences of others. and of course in making it a game, you're not just imitating, you're mocking...you know.
they used to play a much more intense version of assassins at my high school, which you can read about if you scroll down here: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:Y7B7xa-T9lEJ:www.answers.com/topic/hunter-college-high-school+%22hunter+college+high+school%22+killer&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
the administration freaked out about killer on a regular basis and always threatened to suspend everyone involved, so it's interesting to me that cities are like, sponsoring their own versions of it. at hunter it was seen as a way to beat the man (by spending an a lot of money on cabs and sleeping at other people's houses all the time to avoid getting shot).
ok, the link keeps not working. ummm google "hunter college high school" "killer" and click on the cached version of the first thing that comes up.
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