The Game of Assassin
Unlike SCA activities and improv theatre performances, a large number of Live-Action Roleplaying (LARPing) events specifically call themselves games, emphasizing a unique form of competition. LARP games often feature a postmodern streak where the players are have to scheme against each other, without knowledge about their opponent’s true motives or even the identity of their opponents. This is a marked difference compared to D&D, in which multiple players fight against a world designed by the Dungeon Master, or to wargaming, where players usually have some general understanding of each other’s objectives.
This style of gaming has its roots in activities such as Secret Santa and Circle of Death, which are designed to introduce people to each other through friendly competition. Such games require players to perform investigative work; in many cases, players may be given the names of other players and will need to find out who they are and what they look like before they can perform some sort of interaction. For Secret Santa, the interaction is often a presentation of a small gift. For Circle of Death games, however, players need to shoot their targets with a rubber dart gun or a water pistol.
With the media constantly obsessing over cold-war espionage in the 1980s, the spy-like Circle of Death activities became hugely popular in college and high-school campuses. A player that performs a successful “kill� in a Circle of Death game obtains the name of his target’s target, thus making his or her way around the “circle� until the player has “killed� everybody or has been “killed.�
In 1981, Steve Jackson, a well-known designer of roleplaying games and tactical wargames, published a rulebook for a Circle of Death game entitled Killer: The Game of Assassination with the tagline “The live role-playing game for any number of players.� Jackson’s introduction to the book emphasized the competitive nature of the game and traced the increasing identification of the player with the character from wargaming to tabletop roleplaying to LARPing. The afterword of Killer, written by John William Johnson of Indiana University, described Killer as “a ‘codification’ of an orally transmitted folk game which has been diffusing from one university campus to another for the past fifteen years � and traced the idea of the game back to a short story by Robert Sheckley in 1953 and a film by Carlo Ponti in 1965, although he also mentions 19th century examples.
Jackson’s book had a major impact on live-action roleplaying game design. It standardized a set of rules that allowed gamers to host their own games without writing their own. It provided guidelines for organizers and players of Killer games to make variations that would keep the game safe and interesting. Finally, it provided a range of roleplaying scenarios built on top of Killer rules to give characters interesting reasons for taking down their targets.
Today, live-action roleplaying games that rely on “the human hunt� as its core motivation are usually called Assassin games. These games may include political intrigue, historical events, economic wrangling, nonviolent interpersonal relationships or other complexities. However, if the game is live-action, involves roleplaying and the central goal of the game is to discover, identify and eliminate one’s opposition through simulated violence, the game is probably some variant of Assassin.
LARP games known as “Theater style� have grown out of Assassin games and have overtaken Assassin in popularity. Theater style games feature more open-ended goal definitions, emphasize character motivations and include nonviolent solutions to character conflicts. However, many experienced theater style game designers acknowledge their genre’s roots in Assassin and credit the MIT Assassins’ Guild as being one of the pioneers of theater style LARPing.
