“All right, class, Answer this: in the term ‘assassin game.’ which word describes the actual nature of what is being described? No seriously, help me here, because I can’t figure it out…”
Montgomery County Maryland’s Blair High School is embroiled in a controversy over the popularity of a student game known as “Assassin,” a role playing elimination game where players “kill” competitors using fake weapons, or, as in the Blair version of the game, their fingers. The game in various forms—it is also known as Gotcha, KAOS (Killing as organized sport), Juggernaut, Battle Royal, Paranoia, Killer, Elimination, or Circle of Death—has been around for decades. Proof: I played it in college, and had a blast. If you like that sort of thing, the game is fun, and whether you like it or not, it is harmless.
Ah, but some kinds of fun are no longer acceptable in large swathes of post-Newtown, thought-controlling, anti-gun, hysteric-dominated America, especially liberal enclaves like the Maryland suburbs. As a result, you get sentiments like these:
- “I don’t think a game called Assassin is appropriate in schools. I want kids to be social with each other, but not in a ‘Gotcha’ . . . sort of way. It’s just inappropriate in our society.”—Blair Principal Renay Johnson
What’s “inappropriate?” Fantasy? Role playing games? Games that evoke entertainment and fiction portraying conflict and violence? Fun? Thoughts and attitudes that you don’t agree with or approve of?
- “I think it’s an adolescent brain at work — not understanding the implications of what an assassin is.They’re not thinking of what those words stand for…It’s almost as if this was a video game being played off-screen.” —Therese Gibson, president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at Blair.
Students who play Assassin know exactly what the word means, they also know the meaning of “game,” and unlike the delays quoted in the Washington Post article, the difference between fantasy and reality. It is the hysterical adults who project upon the game real matters that the game does not involve at all that don’t comprehend what the students are doing. By the way, Ms. Gibson, the video games are also harmless.
- “School should be a ‘safe’ place where games like Assassin should not be played and probably should be forbidden.” —Susan Burkinshaw, co-chair of the health and safety panel of the county’s council of PTAs.
What is “unsafe” about a game where students pretend to “kill” voluntary game participants using their fingers? Safe from what? Not weapons, but the thought of weapons? Not violence, but the idea of violence? A school has no right, business or legitimate power to regulate thought.
- “We go to such great lengths to protect kids, and to have a game where you’re playing around with that idea, it doesn’t make sense to me.”-—Blair English teacher Jeremy Stelzner.
This is because the phobia post-Newtown hysterics have about anything relating to violence isn’t sensible.
I can see a very good and responsible reason to ban games like Assassin on a high school campus. It can be a major distraction to students (it’s a nerve-wracking game), and interferes with their concentration on what they are there to think about. I’d ban it, not that I could stop the game from flourishing anyway. The message such a measure would send, which would have to be clear and explicit, is worth making: the school day is not a time to be playing games.
The message Stelzner, Burkinshaw, Gibson, Johnson and their fellow Sandy Hook phobics in the Blair High community want to convey, however, is unfair and impermissible, an abuse of power, political indoctrination and is, to be blunt, stupid. This is, however, the same community that suspended a six-year old for making a “gun” with his fingers, so our expectations for reasonableness are suitably low.
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Facts: Washington Post
Ethics Alarms 
This is my “surprise” face…
I suspect the complaining parents and administrators may be engaged in “magical thinking”. Some people, through history, have thought that a stone statue of a god was a god. Today, many people treat a picture of a gun as if it were a gun, including the TSA on more than one occasion.
The same kind of people confuse play with reality.
Yet, is there some kind of play that should be condemned on ethical grounds? I might have found myself agreeing with the people above if, hypothetically, it had been a game of “Turks and Armenians” or “Hutus and Tutsis”.
At least the Armenians and Tutsis would have an even chance at defending themselves this time.
My preliminary and rather harsh assessment is that because these people are at the moment more or less incapable of entertaining thoughts that they don’t like (or being entertained by thoughts they don’t like), they don’t see how anyone else can think about horrible things without being repelled, and therefore, anyone who does think about horrible things and isn’t repelled by them must approve of those things.
For example, assassins, by definition, kill people. School administrators dislike thinking about assassins, because they dislike it when people are killed. Students also dislike it when people are killed, but they are not bothered by thinking about assassins. I would go so far as to say that in most cases this is because their minds are in general still strong and independent, before they are taught that that sort of thing won’t fly in this society.
However, the school administrators think that the students are not bothered by thoughts of assassins because the students are not bothered by people dying. Since this state of affairs would be legitimately bad, they try to get students to learn to be repelled by anything related to killing. In other words, the school administrators apparently derive their system of morality Clockwork Orange-style, where bad things are bad because they’re icky and good things are good because they’re warm and fuzzy. Therefore, they resort to indoctrination to attempt to foster morality in their students because it is literally be the only method they have to instill any values at all, philosophically bankrupt as they are. It may be the only way they see the world and the only way they can understand the behavior of other people.
Granted, I may be selling these administrators short by a wide margin. They may be pandering to parents who they assume think in the way I describe above. I actually hope what’s going on is mere spinelessness rather than philosophical bankruptcy in the people teaching or raising the new generation, though I fear the worst. In either case the strong and independent minds of the students will be repressed by the administration’s reprehensible reasoning. Anyone want to give me some more hope by offering a plausible and less dire hypothesis?
I don’t have any hope to offer, but I believe it is spinelessness pandering rather than philosophical bankruptcy. Many school teachers and administrators choose spinelessness when confronted with the possibility of outraged parents and/or community. It’s a product of being a publicly funded institution.
Gibson’s quote is even funnier if you’re familiar with the Assassin’s Creed series, which certainly doesn’t shy away from showing what an assassin does.
Oh, good God, it’s a GAME. A game with a title that raises hackles nowadays, but a GAME. My teen plays this at the ymca family camp that I played it at when I was a teen. It involves stealth, strategy, alliances, alliance betrayal, and elimination. There’s your tie to the knee jerk banning of an activity. By calling an elimination game “assassin, ” it is now and forever tied to killing, blood, suffering, pain and sorrow. Change the damn name off the game. Call it a life skills bee. Maybe someone will offer a scholarship. And FTR, Jack, I agree that this can get so consuming that it does create a distraction to the players.
Agree!
Oh for Pete’s sake. The next thing you know they’ll ban playing tag at recess because it involves unwanted touching.
Sorry- tag’s already banned.
Omg. I was kidding but now I just googled “playing tag banned”….
We have lost our minds.
Welcome to a brave new world.
Ditto to your arguments about LEGIT reasons to ban Assassins at the High School level, though- it’s distracting, time consuming, and renders the late-game survivors paranoid wrecks. It’s also fun as hell.
You’re just goading to start writing again, right?
(Grades are due on the 18th… lots–I hope–of new pieces shortly thereafter.)
Good! And the Curmies are coming up, right?
Yep. Fewer nominees this year, as I haven’t been writing as much, but still some good contenders.
Make sure you send them on as soon as they are ready, and I’ll ask readers here to vote.
I blame this stuff on the feminization of our culture in the USA. I remember seeing some dope at a “New Age” conference advocating a project where kids turned in their toy guns for teddy bears. This wouldn’t work so well in Texas but maybe in the Bay Area. Obviously realistic looking replicas of actual weapons shouldn’t be brought to a school. But using your finger to “shoot” somebody? Please!
Totally. Here in Texas our children’s toy guns are easily converted into real firearms by putting ammunition in them. Yee haw.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it feminization as much as ‘passivation’ of our populace. This ‘passivation’ process being a congruence of several forces in society — the over-comforting excesses of materialism, the rapid urbanization and associated collectivizing of attitudes, general collectivism and cession to central authorities of most powers, certain amount of hyper-feminism in the school system amongst other forces.