The reemergence of the grade-wide phenomenon “Senior Assassins” was met with a fate of failure as the water gun elimination game was shut down a day after beginning, leaving seniors, such as this year’s game creator, disappointed.
Senior Assassins is a student-created game that a number of seniors participate in during the second semester. Teams of two are given a target that they must eliminate, and the teams go head-to-head collecting targets and eliminating other teams.
The game spans over multiple days and takes place anywhere applicable to the rules that an “assassin” may be found. Seniors must pay to play and, as a result, the game winners receive a sum of money for outlasting all others.
The mastermind behind the class of 2023’s Senior Assassins game is senior Kenny Padilla. Padilla spent time and effort striving to make this year’s tournament an entertaining experience, which was no simple task.
“I only started doing this entire thing at the end of March, but it’s still a pretty lengthy planning process,” he said.
Padilla had the task of personally designing a large part of this specific game, as the previous class deleted all evidence of their game’s planning process.
“I first spent a couple days trying to find anyone who might have had last year’s rules because no one did. So then I was like, ‘Well I don’t want to recreate an entire set of rules,’ so I used ChatGPT to create the basis of the rules and then built upon them,” he explained. “I had to keep changing the rules in order to clarify because some people found that some things weren’t clear.”
With a start date of April 17, Senior Assassins was shaping up to be a popular event.
“Last year had fifty teams of two, this year had one hundred and nine teams of two,” said Padilla. “There were a lot more [teams] than I was expecting. I was expecting sixty teams, maybe seventy. I didn’t think people would be so excited about it, but they were.”
As the games began, players slowly started to drop like flies, getting eliminated unsuspectingly with a spray from a water-filled weapon. On the second day, a problem emerged, setting the game on its quick downward spiral.
“Specifically, what I put is [no water guns] in the school,” clarified Padilla. “However, the parking lot was deemed safe at certain times, but not at others. I was not expecting a group of kids to skip school and circle the parking lot.”
Some participants of the tournament began to wait in the school parking lots during the school day, ready to catch teams off guard. This being against the rules, Padilla searched for a way to combat this. He put the game on hold and established a grace period.
“My original plan for the grace period was going to be that I was going to pause the game and then change the rules a little more to completely remove the school and the parking lot and all of the fields as a possible spot,” he explained.
Padilla got called to the office shortly after setting the grace period, and reevaluated Senior Assassins’ rules.
“We could’ve used Snapchat with Snap Map like [the class of 2022] did last year and have it completely outside of school. I would probably have added a couple of rules like, ‘you’re safe during school hours,’” said Padilla.
After careful consideration, taking into account game failures at other schools and the timing of his game, Padilla decided to cancel Senior Assassins 2023 on just the second day.
“I chose to cancel the game as opposed to pushing it back a week because I know for a fact people are stupid. I’m sorry, they just are. There is no possible way I could guarantee that everyone would follow the rules as they were written,” he stated.
Cut short, Senior Assassins’ fate for this year was put in muddy waters. Failed attempts to resurrect the game from other wishful students proved unworthy. Padilla looked to the future and contemplated how he would possibly retry the game himself.
“I have been considering trying to wait until the summer. Doing it over the summer for anybody who’s still here because at the end of the day, that should be a lot easier. There’s no way we will postpone it absolutely,” he said.
Amid a failed attempt for the Class of 2023, a lesson was born for upcoming classes wishing to carry on the legacy of Assassins. Interest was still high for a fun-filled competition.
“The rising senior and the rising junior class have already spoken to me like, ‘Hey, we were wanting to do this,’” Padilla informed. “They asked if they could have the rules and I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
A major collapse, Senior Assassins 2023 was shot down and drowned before it could even gain momentum, not put to rest forever, but waiting in a temporary state of discontinuance. An oversight sat in a quality of human nature: bending the rules to gain an advantage.
Looking towards next year’s possible game, Padilla expressed, “I think if they want to do what they have to, you cannot get somebody at school [with a water gun] in any way, because it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth the risk trying to turn around a legacy.”