Senior Assassin, a student-run game played by senior classes across the country, has taken over the Trinity Prep campus. Starting on Feb. 17, 95 students have competed for a prize pool worth $1,440, creating a place for competition, controversy and community.
The battle royale-style game provides a two-week time period where participants are assigned a target and within that time have to shoot their opponent while avoiding getting shot themselves. If the player is unable to eliminate their target, they are eliminated. The game, which is played with water guns, is unaffiliated with the school and run by senior Ben Demetriades.
“A lot of work happened in the preparation of it all,” Demetriades said. “It took a while getting everyone to sign up, and collecting money was a big pain because I had to do it through Zelle, Venmo, cash and some people did it through Apple Cash, which I thought was interesting.”
Each participating student paid $15 to join the game with the opportunity of earning nearly 100 times their investment. The breakdown of the prize pool includes 10% to Demetriades for hosting, 80% to the winner and 10% to the individual with the highest number of eliminations. The game has already featured 47 eliminations, including long chases in a Home Depot parking lot and numerous deaths in the Chipotle line.
“I think that it’s a mix of people who are taking it seriously and people who are taking it like it’s not serious,” Senior Assassin participant Elizabeth Carlin said. “I definitely was taking it really seriously, but I just got unlucky, and the person assigned to me was the only person taking it more seriously. We were both just trying to out-crazy each other. He would show up at my house at 5:30 (a.m.), so I would leave at 5:00 (a.m.), or he would follow me home, so I would go somewhere else.”
Player actions are constrained by rules designed to prevent unsafe circumstances and ensure that the game does not interfere with school activities. These rules have been a source of conflict, leading to controversies, including whether jumping through a sunroof to turn off a car was allowed and a frame-by-frame video analysis to see whether water had actually hit a player. Demetriades serves as the sole juror for these disputes and reviews them in accordance with a rules document.
“I feel like there’s a lot that goes unsaid that kind of crosses an imaginary line, and people should really just use their best judgment instead of depending on entirely sticking to the rules,” Carlin said. “I feel like as 18-year-olds, we’re old enough to know what’s right and what’s wrong, both morally and legally.”
Judgment is also an important consideration, as students carrying water guns in schools, neighborhoods and public spaces pose a potential risk to student safety.
“We had an incident two years ago where a student brought a water gun on the campus, and it looked in the security cameras like something was happening, and we had a little mini freak out there for a while,” Assistant Head of Upper School Sebastiaan Blickman said. “You can understand why there’s a heightened sense of sensitivity and fear when it comes to that, so I think kids just need to be smart … because not everyone understands that Senior Assassin is a game that’s being played by Trinity Prep students.”
There have also been concerns that the game, by nature, is isolating, in a time when seniors are supposed to come together. However, Carlin, Demetriades and Blickman all found this to be overblown.
“I’ve heard of more successful plans that come from teamwork and utilizing your friends to gather intelligence, and I just think it’s a lot harder to do on your own, so I actually think it drives teamwork,” Carlin said. “Yes, it might cause division, but I think that it’s a necessary facet of it.”
The game has become a conversation starter on campus and a source of commonality for the senior class.
“I think that there’s a lot of good attempts at trying to bring the grade together and the school together, but honestly, this has been one of the most successful mechanisms of doing that in my time at Trinity,” Carlin said. “I’ve never gone to school where it’s all anyone will talk about, and it has just been a lot easier to talk to people since Senior Assassin started. It has kind of formed a sense of community and that we are all in it together.”
With 48 students left, only time will tell how the game ends, and what the final student experience will be.
“I think the most important thing for students to get outside of an excellent education and all that stuff from high school is core memories,” Blickman said. “If Senior Assassin can be a fun memory for kids to look back on, then that’s a huge win, so long as we don’t have something that clouds it.”
