This year, the class of 2023 added a game of Senior Assassin to their agenda of springtime activities here at Marriotts Ridge. Senior Assassin is a seniors’ only game, where students compete to eliminate an anonymously assigned target using a water gun before the end of a round.
Most schools play Senior Assassin differently, and each is unique because the seniors running the game decide the rules and other special elements to customize gameplay. The rules are created to establish how to play, where the safe zones are, and what the daily safety gear is.
Marriotts Ridge’s game started in early May with 45 seniors playing. The game listed the following rules in a post on its Instagram:
1. No assassinations within the school
2. You can only assassinate the person you are assigned
3. Only water guns or water balloons are permitted (balloons must break on contact not splash)
4. If you turn off your location after one warning a bounty will be placed on you
5. Someone wearing the daily safety clothing is safe for that day
6. All eliminations must be recorded and sent in to be validated
7. Safe zone cannot be played within. If caught doing so it’s an immediate disqualification
8. If you don’t get anyone by the end of the week, you are disqualified
9. Purge days will be posted on the MRHS senior assassin Instagram. No safety on these days. ALL OTHER RULES STILL APPLY
Posting the elimination videos on an Instagram account provided an efficient way to update who was still alive, and let everyone see the kills even if they weren’t a part of the game. It was also a good way to coordinate sign ups, communicate information with players and give them a platform to ask questions.
The game this year was run by senior Andre Duroseau, who had seen the game played by other schools and thought it would be a fun tradition to start at Marriotts Ridge.
“At first I didn’t want people to know it was me in case the game got shut down but then I realized people didn’t trust an anonymous person, so I chose to just reveal my identity,” Duroseau said.
Duroseau also had help from fellow senior, Luca Obitz, who wrote code that automated target assignments and sent text blasts to notify players of their assignments each round. Obitz had to cycle through a few different application program interfaces before he could find one that worked for personal use.
Even though there were so many components to put together, it took Obitz roughly an hour to write the code.
“I think the code worked great, the one thing I wish was different about the game would be that more people should’ve signed up. I definitely heard a lot of people tell me they wished they had [played],” Obitz said.
Students who participated in Senior Assassin were excited to play the game they had seen all across social media. They especially liked the touches that Duroseau and Obitz put together to personalize the experience and thought they did an outstanding job organizing the game.
Both players and spectators believed that the game was well organized, especially for it being the first time the game had been played at Marriotts Ridge.
“The texts sent out were cool and the whole [game] was a good idea. Overall it was put together well,” player Ethan Luke said.
Along with the text blasts, Duroseau came up with the idea for immunity tokens, which could either bring someone back to life or grant them immunity on purge days, which are days when safety gear doesn’t apply. These tokens would be hidden in a secret location that could only be found by solving a riddle posted on the Instagram page and sent out by text.
Despite the praise from peers, Duroseau still had critiques and ideas to improve the game in following years.
“I think that the game has more publicity now, but I definitely should have started signups earlier to get more players. Once people got really involved, the game did start to live up to my expectations, but never [quite] got there because there [weren’t] as many people as I truly wanted playing,” Duroseau said.
While involvement was high at the start of the game, the Marriotts Ridge 2023 game of Senior Assassin lasted no more than three and a half weeks as students claimed that players gave up too quickly.
The winner of the game was senior Bella Virden. She heard about the game from her friends and decided to play after learning that another friend, Duroseau, was the one running it.
Virden also added, “I wanted to play because I wanted to win something. I never played sports in high school and the game seemed like a really fun, friendly competition. I am so happy that I did it because whether I won or not, I really made a lot of friends, and it was something you could talk about with anyone.”
From the start of the game, other players speculated about her victory because of her ambition and determination to win.
Virden said, “My determination for success and talking skills definitely helped me the most. Assassin is a mind game, where target and assassin could interact everyday without the target having a clue; what’s important is bending words and making schemes, that’s what helped me win.”
This year’s competitors had loads of fun playing Senior Assassin, and they made memories that will stay with them. They also left a piece of advice for future players: wear safety gear. The players who made it to the final rounds felt that wearing the protection at all times contributed to their successes, and recommend that anyone who plays in the future do so as well.
It is now up to the class of 2024 to continue Duroseau’s new tradition, hopefully with customizations of their own.