The yearly senior tradition of a game of predator versus prey is back, and students have begun to ready their Nerf guns and track their targets.
Yes, Assassins is back.
This eagerly awaited annual event attracts many seniors, but an underlying question is whether this game’s ethics and safety will hold up among competition.
Assassins is a competition hosted and played by seniors this time each year. It is organized through an Instagram account and is historically not affiliated with Cal High. The game’s objective is for players to eliminate their target with Nerf guns within an allotted amount of time. To participate in the game, students must pay a registration fee of $15, partner up with someone else, and most importantly, obey the rules.
Each year, a long list of rules is enforced by the “Godfathers”, or the student hosts of the game. Some of these rules prohibit causing public disturbances, chasing someone by car, and playing the game on campus.
Players naturally do whatever it takes to seek what they gain. In this case, it would be to break the rules in order to win the prize money of up to thousands of dollars. Last year, the total prize money was $3,665.
Previous years of seniors have shown that students will go as far as buying people out of the game, staking out someone’s home, and allegedly putting trackers on people’s cars to follow their every move, according to now graduated Cal high students and rumors swarming campus.
A major difference between this year’s Instagram account, @calhigh23assassins, and previous accounts is that there’s no indication that this year’s game is not affiliated with the school. Past accounts for senior assassins typically had a “Not Cal high affiliated” in their profile. The official school Instagram account for seniors even endorsed Assassins by reposting a post from @calhigh23assassins to their public story for all to see.
This raises the question of whether Cal may be held responsible for any possible outcome from this year’s Assassins.
While the school may release a statement explaining that Assassins is not a school-sanctioned event, the fact remains that the hosts of Assassins put a target on Cal’s back by using “Cal high” on their own Instagram account and gaining an endorsement from a school-sponsored Instagram.
Though rules and safety cannot be expected to be upheld by students playing the game, what must be established is a proper consensus of what may happen and who is to blame when Assassins goes wrong as it has in the past.