By Aja Griffin
The Harding Assassins Instagram account started Jan. 18 their annual campus-wide live-action social role-playing game. The game started with 105 players and 36 remain.
Harding Assassins selected seniors Katie Green and Halina Hunt as this year’s game masters. Green played Assassins the last three years, and Hunt played for the first time last year. As game masters, Green and Hunt revised the rules before the game started, clarifying phrasing to address questions from last year. Green said they legitimized an unofficial rule in previous games and made Wednesday night devotionals off-limits.
Green said the game masters’ role shifted after the game started.
“When the game began, like after collecting all the names, then I just keep it on a big spreadsheet,” Hunt said. “And [I] just like, worked through everything, keeping track of all the kills and to keep up with kill count, because that’s part of the game too.”
Green and Hunt created special challenges for players to earn advantages in the game. For one challenge, players had to find a small golden Lebron James statue in the park by the Searcy library. For another, Green and Hunt participated in the game and made themselves targets.
“We put a bounty on ourselves, and that was for anyone who’s playing the game, even if they were dead,” Hunt said. “The first person who killed both of us could get back in the game. Or once they did die in the game, it’s like an extra life.”
Green said the game was a fun way for her to meet new friends her freshman year when killing her targets and helping other players find their targets. She said she became friends with the player who killed her freshman year, and they applied to be game masters together the following year.
Sophomore Emma Gaskill said she played assassins to make friends.
“A lot of people told me it was a good way to meet different people,” Gaskill said. “It was fun because different people I didn’t know would come up to me and be like ‘I know who your target is, get out of here.’ It was a good way to get to know people and so I did it again this year.”
Gaskill said she did not make it far into the game last year but enjoyed playing and joined again this year. This year, Gaskill tried an offensive approach to no avail. Gaskill was eliminated on Jan. 23, five days after the game started.
This was senior Alyson Voigt’s fourth year playing Assassins and she has been successful so far, despite having an active social life around campus.
“I’m not going to like, change my schedule, to hide and not play this game and everything,” Voigt said. “So yeah, just still being aware of everything, but still being able to have my senior year.”
Voigt won the challenge with the LeBron statue and was safe in the first purge. She used the opportunity to eliminate as many players as possible. Voigt said she and her friends in the game drove around Searcy during the purge and she ended the day with a kill streak of 12. Green and Hunt said there may be future purges or advantages, depending on the flow of the game
“The best advice is just to, like have fun with it… and happy hunting,” Green said.
