Mobile Assassins


'Ran Tao Ran Tao / 'Jenny Chowdhury Jenny Chowdhury

Mobile Assassins is a mobile/updated version of the traditional big game Assassins (also known as Assassin, Paranoia, or Killer), where camera phones are used as both the means of assassination, and also as the vehicle of deploying information about your targets.

The classic game of Assassins, which was popularized on college campuses in the early 1980s, is a live-action role-playing game where a player’s goal is to “kill” the other participants and be the last assassin left standing. According to Wikipedia: “Assassins is a game where each player has a ‘target’ that they are trying to kill, and each player is in turn the target of another assassin. Players are assigned their targets by the game’s coordinators, but do not know the identity of the person assigned to target them.”

In the past, you may have played Assassins during your college orientation, or maybe amongst a large group of your friends, aiming squirt guns or water balloons at your assigned targets. However, in the age of the technology, we thought it appropriate to update this game by bringing it to a mobile platform. Since the majority of cell phones are now equipped with cameras and most people carry their cell phones everywhere they go, it seemed apparent that using camera phones to “shoot” your target would put an exciting new spin on the game of Assassins.

Thus, we’ve brought the traditional live-action role-playing game into the mobile arena by re-purposing the camera phone as 1) the means of target deployment and 2) the means of assassination. The rest of the rules remain the same. You are assigned a target that you must ‘kill’, while avoiding being killed yourself by an assassin of whose identity you are unaware.

While Mobile Assassins is a game, it is also a valuable tool for icebreaking and team building/ bonding. It promotes interaction among groups by introducing a social and emotional exchange between pairs of people on a large scale. We envision the game being used in the following scenarios: big game tournaments, college orientation, conferences, and corporate and group bonding exercises.