Written by Prachi Kale
Introduced to Gunn this year, Elimination is a game based on the game Assassin. The objective of Elimination is to be the last person remaining with a beach ball. Players must follow a strict set of rules, one of which states that a person may not be eliminated during class or during an after-school activity such as a sport or club. The eliminator must tap the target with the beach ball in order to eliminate them as throwing the ball is not allowed. Balls cannot be stolen and must be inflated in order to count as part of the game.
297 students signed up for the first round and 125 were left after the first week was over. A new rule states that the ball can only be held in the target’s right hand to be considered safe and that the ball must be above the target’s head. The rules will change again when there are 20 people left in the game.
Special Events Commissioner senior Mara Greene first learned about the Assassin game during her freshman year. “Everybody in Student Executive Council (SEC) has an impact project that we do; I heard of this game freshman year from other schools, and I really wanted to make it happen at Gunn,” she said. “This year I ran for SEC and I talked about how I really wanted to make a game like Assassin happen. We decided to use mini beach balls because they were a small, easy thing to use and were fun.” Many of the rules remained the same; Greene states that the principle difference between Assassin and Elimination is the name.
According to Student Body Vice President senior Cole McFaul, one of the objectives of the event is to make students more enthusiastic during the so-called third-quarter slump. “[Mara] had the idea and she wanted to bring it to Gunn to put it on a larger scale because we all found it really fun and it pumps people up,” he said. “The goal of the event was to break up the monotony of the third quarter and fourth quarter middle-of-the-semester grind.”
Greene also believes that the game provides opportunities to meet new people. “We hoped the game would relieve stress and add a little spark to your day, and also to meet new people,” she said. “I actually know people have become friends with their target just talking about it. You also reach out and talk to other grades, and I know people were spending lunches on other quads trying to find their people.”
Junior Moriah Meyers believes that Elimination provides a way to de-stress at school. “It’s so much fun because it’s a chance to be competitive in a non-school way and it’s a great distraction from school,” she said. “It’s also a fun way to connect with people around campus because you have something in common with everyone who’s carrying a ball around.”
Though both Greene and McFaul believe that the game has been going well so far, there are some aspects of the game they would plan differently for the future. “We made the rules kind of loose at first, and then people started tying the balls to their hands and we wanted to get rid of that,” McFaul said. “The rules have been kind of fluid throughout because we’ve seen things that people do which are illegal, and then we make a post about it saying, ‘All right, you can’t do this anymore.’ It’s really been a trial-and-error process.”
Greene agrees that the loopholes proved to be a challenge at the beginning of the game. “Now we have the rules updated and we can get out of the loopholes,” she said. “We might use something different than the beach balls just because a couple of them broke and those people weren’t able to play. It was easy to fix, but it was still frustrating.”
No plans have been made currently to carry the game on to next year, but both Greene and McFaul hope that Elimination will continue at Gunn. “I think it’s going really well,” McFaul said. “There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for the event and it’s been a fun event so far.”
