So a little while back we watched a film called La Decima Vittima aka The Tenth Victim. This film was silly but fun to watch. It is set in a world where licensed contract killings was a legitimate job and the best of them were held up like rock stars. The idea was that anybody with violent tendency could join and get a licence, then periodically they would receive the name and photo of another licensed killer and their task was to assassinate them, thus focusing the violence on other violent people and not on innocents, knocking down the violent population and I'm also assuming making lots of money via broadcasting etc in the process.
The film itself sparked off a whole heap of games known as Pervasive games. These are game that cross over into every day life. One populate such game is the game of killer. It has its players role playing as an assassin taking contracts on other players in the game. Anything can be used for assassinations such as Nerf guns, balloons as bombs, springs to represent traps etc.
There are a few books out there which explain in great detail this game and I highly recommend it if you have enough people to play with. I am currently trying to rally enough of us to play an extended game over several weeks :)
Do you think that geo-caching/treasure-hunts/letter-boxing type activities, which started with "Letterboxing" on Dartmoor in the mid C19th, in can also be deemed examples of pervsasive games?
ReplyDeleteThere are copies of Steve Jackson's Killer in the UCS library, which may be useful if you are thinking of setting up a game, or even establishing an Assassin's Guild (guilds exist at several HE institutions in the UK, including Cambridge, Sheffield, Warwick and Durham): http://bit.ly/1l9B18P