“The dining hall lady who checks us in says the game makes her sick every year,” says Jonathan A. Gatto ’07. “But we armed her and now she feels better.”
Gatto is one of the organizers of this year’s Quincy House game of assassin, in which Nerf-gun-packing Quincy residents try to “assassinate” other participants. Versions of assassin have been played at Harvard since at least 1981, when three freshmen organized a game.
The rules of the game vary, but participants generally form teams, each of which is assigned to hunt the members of another team. The last team standing wins.
“You stop sleeping in your bed, you stop sleeping period,” says Matthew D. O’Brien ’07, who also organized Quincy’s game. “Last year we slept in Adams dining hall for a couple nights.”
In the past, participants have targeted not only each other, but actual intruders.
In 2000, a Pforzheimer resident used a dart gun to hold up a stranger he found outside of his suite, believing that he was participating in the House’s annual game of “Gotcha,” according to an article published in The Crimson.
Harvard University Police Department spokesperson Peggy A. McNamara told The Crimson then that police and college administrators strongly discouraged Gotcha and Assassin.
“The whole game in its entirety is very dangerous,” McNamara told the Crimson. “It’s very dangerous with the weapons looking as real as they do now.”
Let’s be careful out there.
