At 6:05 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 22, the first shot emanated from a squeaky water gun in the densely populated Broadway computer lounge. Ian Crone, CC ’10, was dead.
As water spread across the back of his clothes, the sad implications of his death became clear to those around him—trust no one, and watch your back at all times.
Crone was the first victim of this year’s CUAssassins, a game organized annually by the Engineering Student Council. In the game, teams of four are assigned a target team to eliminate within a 72-hour time frame. Their weapons of choice—plastic water guns issued by ESC—are used to “assassinate” victims by shooting them in the back in the spirit of stealth killers.
“I guess I wasn’t prepared for the insanity of this game ... I didn’t expect to encounter an enemy three minutes into the game,” Crone explained in an e-mail. Crone had just finished printing his badge, which every player is required to have at all times, when he walked out of the computer lounge and was brought to his demise by opposing team member Anthony Kelley, CC ’09.
Ironically enough, Kelley, confident from his recent success, met his end minutes later.
In an e-mail, Kelley detailed not only his tragic death but also boasted his ingenious strategy for finding his first target—employing the knowledge that, shortly after the game started, people would rush to print their badges out.
While many were eager to share their tales of betrayal, other victims were busy looking to others still in the game to avenge their deaths.
Annie Tan, CC ’11, was watergunned down while sitting with her back to a wall, studying for her psychology midterm. Approached by two Asian girls she claimed in an e-mail were EcoReps “spewing all their environmental distractions,” she introduced herself after one of the girls gave her advice about the psychology professor’s tests.
“My back was still against the wall, but there was the tiniest opening of 15 degrees on my left side, and she took the shot.” Tan, code-named “Seamus Finnigan,” e-mailed the game’s administrators, who are ESC members, to challenge the kill, but in vain.
Some agents laud their strategies and the naïveté of their targets in their kill reports, descriptions submitted by assassins of how their victims died. Kill reports are posted on the CUAssassins Web site, which can be accessed at secure.cuengineering.com.
Theresa Starck, SEAS ’09, code name “Xinsuide,” was shot Monday night in her McBain room by her roommate’s cousin, whom she thought was a friend. “She [the assassin] waited for an hour and half in our room. We watched a TV show together, I helped her with work study stuff. I offered her juice!” Starck exclaimed during a conversation in a lab class. “Then I went to put my chair back and bang. It was cold as ice! I’m living with this girl next year!”
Starck’s assassin wrote her an elegy in the form of a kill report on the CUAssassins website: “And she [Xinsuide], virtuous amazon, while in gentle trust of the serpent she harbored, turned to offer noble hospitality, the fiend, cruelly, struck her from behind.”
Most players went to great lengths to take precautions, such as deactivating or removing information from Facebook profiles, removing information from LionLink, an online undergraduate student directory, and removing information from the Columbia directory. Others tried their best to disguise themselves by taking off their glasses or showing up with full-grown beards when they had their pictures taken during registration. “I bought supplies. I bought a whole ton of ramen so I wouldn’t have to leave my room,” Starck added, having thought about CUAssassins all of last semester.
Despite these precautions, many agents died well before the first 72 hours of the game had passed, after which the first wave of agents were put on the “disavowed list.” Any agent put on the disavowed list is fair game not only to all agents in the game, but also to the police force, a branch of the administrators who have the luxury of coming back to life after two days of death when shot in combat.
Thus far into this year’s game, 81 agents have died, 84 are on the disavowed list, and 19 are active. In the past, CUAssassins has been known to last for weeks. When this year’s winning team will seal its $400 victory remains uncertain.
Tan warned remaining players to watch their backs: “Your friends and hallmates will betray you, whether you like it or not, and those who seem too good to be true are. Pay attention, or you’ll end up bitter and disillusioned by the system like I now am.”
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