Love it or Leeve It: No Doubt, Assassins is a Sport

For one week, the highest priority game takes place right here on Harvard campus. Forget the start of baseball, with cries of “This is the year!” echoing around Boston. Forget the Stanley Cup playoffs, with pucks and blood and teeth bouncing around on ice together. Forget the race for NBA seeds, with no-look passes and jaw-dropping dunks making the highlight reels.

For once, just once, a Harvard activity gets higher priority. It’s that Assassins time of year.

As a resident of Eliot, I can safely say that for a large fraction of my fellow housemates, the game of Assassins dominates all activity for one week. The paranoia, the conspiring, the mad dashes to and from the dining hall—all of it adds up to quite the sporting event.

While the weather gods tease us with two glorious days of sun, only those already eliminated from the game (or those holding the almighty immunity peanuts) can lie around lazily in the courtyard without fear. Yes, I said “immunity peanuts.”

Flip-flops are stashed away in favor of speedier sneakers, and enormous waterguns appear from boxes stored under beds. One hand is always on your weapon, and people constantly check if they’re being shadowed while en route.

Cell phone bills skyrocket with constant updates between family members before class, during class—bathroom break!—and after class. TFs look quizzically at watergun-toting students who rush into the room panting for breath, only to creak open the door slowly, peering nervously outward, after section comes to an end.

Seniors appear to have remarkably few hours of class and strut about the safe zones, supersoakers in tow, just hoping to look menacing. Juniors, wizened by a year of experience, plot within families, between families, against families, above them and below them. Sophomores usually fall into two categories—the immediate hardcore following and the immediately appalled by the game.

To all those who scoff at characterizing Assassins as a sport, listen up.

There’s physical exertion involved. People sprint around the house and across campus, racing up and down stairs, scaling the occasional fence and, yes, jumping out of first-story windows.

I’m not lying about the windows.

My own legs can attest to the hardship of crouching out of sight in a little ball for 15 minutes while waiting for a target to roll towards me. At least when you’re trying to hit a round ball with a round bat, you’ve got full circulation in your lower extremities.

Just as in other sports, those with speed and quick reflexes prevail. Stunning your attacker is a fine art of dodging a shot and firing in reponse—a ballet of lightening quick reactions, if you will.

Pacing is crucial as well. You’ve got to decide whether it’s more advantageous to maintain a high profile with an all-out attack or to play it safe and possibly become a sitting duck in turn. Each family must decide its most valuable player, the one person who has the most potential to carry the franchise, and those who must take one for the team when necessary.

Since there’s no bodily force involved, the mental game makes Assassins all the more a true sport. Trapped inside a safezone or cornered by your hunters, you’ve got to think like you’re breaking down a zone defense. Do you call for backup or do you shoot your own way out?

Even after strategizing and mapping out alternate routes, you’ve got to make adjustments to the other team’s game plan. Thinking on the fly and knowing how to stretch the limits of the rules are the necessary smarts for success in any sport.

When offered information about your targets’ whereabouts, questions of reliability and motive arise. Ambushes are the norm during the game, and the revealing of turncoats always comes too late.

I don’t think that nervous twitches and permanent suspicion are a health hazard. You could even argue that Assassins is a health benefit by motivating competitors to be in top shape. I do think that it’s safe to say that Assassins is a sport in the truest sense, since in the end it’s all a game.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu.