Assassination game.

Ther is a real life tournament called streetwars, where the participants are pitted against each other in assassination contracts using water pistols.

You sign up for the game with a small fee. Which goes into a pot.

All the names of the participants are randomised, and you are given one of the other participants as a target.

you get their name, picture, and home and work address.

You also promise to make at least one assassination attempt every week.

There are safe zones, such as bars and inside your house and workplace.

When you take out your target, you then recieve the details of your victims target.

Last man standing gets the pot.

Is it possible to do such a game within SL?

What would be its limitations?

And does anyone want to play?

Thanks.

We did this in college. Money went to charity. Good participation. Great fun in that environment. I would be interested, but it seems like there are issues that would need to be worked out.

1. Locations that are acceptable to play in. I'm sure everyone wouldn't want this going on their clubs, store, etc.
2. Technical mechanisms - guns, notecard info transfer, etc.
3. Making it look innocuous enough that it is clearly not mistaken for regular griefing/shooting to people who don't know what the heck is going on.
4. Probs with people that aren't on very often that keep the game from progressing.

The "original" (or at least, the first published) rules for this game refer to it by the title "Killer" and are available from Steve Jackson Games. (as for water guns... using a water pistol to kill is both easy and uncreative and wont net you many points. try a black pillow clearly labelled "ten ton safe" dropped from the third story instead, or even better, "poisoned" drink.) I actually plan on running a game of this in my First Life this summer. The rules are quite flexible and even modular but would take a lot of work to be made into something that would function in SL. IM me if you would like to discuss it.

I've been thinking of making a game like this for a while. Some 'weapons' I've thought of - a knife, a gun and a bomb. Knives and guns are worn. A knife registers a 'kill' if you walk up to your target and bump into him (collision detection). A gun could work by seding out a narrow sensor to look for the target. A bomb is rezed somewhere, and could go off when someone comes within a certain distance of it. So all of these would be sensor-only 'weapons', no push or damage, and sheilds don't matter. People sign up, they pay (a small amount) and get their weapons. A few days later, they get a hit list. As they kill people, they get new names in their hit list.

At least initially, the hit list can be managed manually, so the person running the game can send out notecards with names every evening or something. Scoring could be done by having the weapons email/IM the game organizer every time they kill someone. If you have people who aren't participating, you could put them on a global wanted list, so everyone gets their name. Maybe also have a penalty for collateral damage - kill 3 innocent bystanders (say you plant a bomb and someone else walks into the room first), and you're on the wanted list too.

I think all of this can be done and managed without too much dificulty. I'm pretty confident I can hande the scripting, at any rate. The bigger issue, to me, is the social side of things. How do you handle safe zones? Ideally, we'd want this playable across the grid. How do you find someone else? Check their profiles, see who their friends are, try and figure out where they hang out. So anyone playing will probably wipe their profile. Then what do you do? The scripts could take it to the other extreme - maybe have each player wear a 'GPS' attachment, which tells a central server what sim they're on, and you can use that to find out which sim your target is on. But that might make it too easy.

The difficult thing here, IMO, is finding the gameplay balance between making it so open ended that it becomes too difficult to find and kill anyone, vs. making it too easy. Also, you'd want pople more or less in similar timezones in the same game, or someone will have to log on at odd hours to find their targets.

So those are my thoughts so far. Yes, I have spent some time thinking about this I'd love to make this happen, and I'd love to work with anyone who's interested in doing something like this.

SOunds great. Id love to try the IRL version as well as an SL one. Im willing to help/participate if anything like this gets underway.

I am so happy to see people are interested in this idea.

Here is a link to the original site for your reference.

Streetwars Killer

I would love this game to be played with real damage guns and weapons. Mainly because I have spent money on some nice ones and would love to use them. However I think due to collatoral damage and griefing concerns that it might be a better idea to get guns made that only function amongst players of the game, as suggested. This stops stray bullets griefing bystanders, and stops people reporting you for griefing someone when they see you gun down your target. It also provides an automated mechinism for reporting kills.

I dont know much about scripting, but would it be possible to make a series of weapons, say sniper rifle, assault rifle, machine gun, grenade and pistol that work like Laser Tag? So every participant wears a sensor object on their body that responds to the weapons the games uses and registers a hit. When a hit is registered, the victim, assasin, and game organisers all recieve a notecard with the time, method and people involved. Maybe assigning points to each method too. High points for a knife kill. Low for assault rifle, etc.

If this were possible, would it also be possible to record things like the participants ping values, and positions? To clear up any arguments over lag.

As for permissions to play in certain places. If there is no live ammunition, and no actual death involved, then there is no need to worry about offending people.

I would like this to be a strategic game played over several weeks, not a crazy fragfest, so it wont be like we will have a bunch of people running around shooting. It is more likely you will sneak up on your target and take him before he even sees you. A lot more civilised

As mentioned some people might sing up and not log on, so we could make it a requirement of play that you must make a certain number of atempted hits every week. Say 2 or 3. Have this either in the form of a report to your controler, or have the sensor object inform the organisers of when the person is using it and when they are online. If that can be done. If they arent spending a certain amount of time wearing the sensor, or if they arent sending in short reports of their actions in the game, they are kicked from the game.

As for finding your target, I think that should be entirely up to the participants to use whatever means at their disposal to remain hidden and to find their targets. That to me is the whole substance of the game. The hit is just the icing on the cake.

Though timezones could be an issue as mentioned.

We should start a group for this if anyone is interested. We could charge a nominal subscription fee for the group and use it to pay a weapons developer to make us really good scripted weapons for this. Unless anyone involved has the skills already. I would be willing to devote as much spare time as I can to getting this up and running. Though I would also obviously like to play it too.

Thoughts?

Can't generate notecards from within a script, but sending an IM is trivial. And you would want that, because the target needs to know immediately when they're assassinated, or there'll be complaining later



That's doable. Not sure about the grenade though - how do you throw something in SL? That'll require some scripting and probably also some animation work. Would you model the weapons realistically? So longer range for the sniper, repeated fire for the assault rifle?



Not sure if LSL has anything like that...



Going back to the original game played on campus - there were safe areas, like if you were in class, it's not fair for someone to walk in and assassinate you. So this is more like a 'time out' feature rather than a griefing issue - not everyone wants to be playing every minute they're logged on. This could be managed by the sensor object - if you're not wearing it, you're not playing the game. But that also opens up the chance for abuse - if I see someone coming towards me who I think might be my killer, I take my sensor off, and I'm invincible.

BTW, it's possible for the weapon to detect a kill and instantly IM the assassin, target and game organizer, without needing a sensor object on the target. The gun can also report when it's been worn, as some kind of "is this person participating" check. The sensor might be one way to handle the "I'm not playing right now" issue. All of this needs to be worked out



If you're looking for weapons with damage, I'm not volunteering, but if you want fake weapons using sensors, I think I can handle the scripting

While all that weapons stuff with heavy scripting might be nice I think its overcomplicating things a bit. It would be simpler just to use a simple weapons variety that all it really did is left a mark of some kind or at most would register on the sensor you suggested. At that point it would ensure that the victim had been killed and they could not simply say 'Nah you missed me' every time. We could be waiting months otherwise or perhaps never see the idea come to fruition because we would be waiting on these highly complex settings to be worked out to everyones satisfaction.

This is what I was thinking. More to tone down any disruption factor than as anti-griefing measures. I have a number of meetings a week that I'm positive participants would not be thrilled about having interrupted due to my fun activities

As for the grenade, there are a number of these available, so the scripting could be gotten fairly easily from one of the creators. Check out some of the freebie boxes of weapons on slexchange. I know one has a couple grenade type objects and even the snowball (which you will see at the giant snowball fight upcoming for the Winter Festival type event) and I've seen knife throwing as well.

I agree that you should think about not over complicating, just to get the thing going. If first attempts are successful, more people may want to get involved and the project can evolve. People will want to create and integrate their own weapon ideas, etc.

OK. The only issue I can see with that is that it probably involves a moving physical object, and I'm guessing there are any number of shields that can counter that. I'm not up-to-date on current weapon and shield technology But I'm not sure if we want that arms race to affect a game like this. That's why I thought about making weapons that only use sensors. If the target is in range and you're aiming at him and there's nothing in the way, it will register a kill no matter what shields the target might be wearing.

And collateral damage is easy to manage with this too - the gun reports the first thing it 'hits' - a wall, an avatar, anything. If you end up hitting a non-playing avatar, that's an innocent kill, and counts against you.

And you're right, we shouldn't make things too complicated. We can start with a simple set of weapons, and build up from there.

Loki, you are a genius.

If only you hadn't tried to kill Balder...

I like the idea of the game, and I could probably help script any scrap Ziggy is uninterested in (excepting the physics engine, Havok does not like me).

As for safe areas, yeah, I think they need to exist. Anyone hosting or working an event would be a goner. The attachment to signify when playing or not is probably the right way to go, and would work to register when killed. There is the problem of detaching it though when feeling at risk. Perhaps each person when joining is allowed a certain number of safe areas that is broadcast to the assassin and the receiver. Having the receiver script know when over a safe area might be a bit tricky, unless the safe areas are sim-wide, then it's cake. Also, safe areas could have the benefit of suggesting the types of places the target might go to that aren't safe, or the target could use fake safe areas and throw people off track. A possibility.

Yeah, scraps is all you'll get, because I'm going to hog all the scripting, mwahahahaha. Err... something like that. In other words, don't be silly, the more people putting their heads together the better this should be. Hopefully

Are you guys up for talking about this tonight? I'll look for you when I log on after I get home from work. I'm on US West Coast time.

OK, I created a group so we can talk about this more easily. Assassins of Second Life. Feel free to sign up if you have ideas, want to help in making this game, want to play, are just interested, whatever.

Dang it. Posted under my wife's account again. This is Ziggy

Here's a question. If the game is proving too easy, do we want any Non-player characters in it to punch things up a bit? Say the server has an adjunct script that gets the same info as a player and can activate Hunter-Killer type dealies near players if the "kill rate" isn't high enough? Or as part of a "difficulty levels" in the game?

That could be fun to do, and would definitely introduce a new dynamic. Assassins and killer bots. I'm not sure that fits the "keep it simple to begin with" school of thought though

more of a "down the road" idea, I agree.

Tried? Succeeded. And they stuck me in this friggin cave until the end of the world for it. Well, at least it has broadband.


Yeah. Keep it simple seems to be the best idea.

How about we just make an acceptable list of agreed weapons that do small amounts of damage. We make an agreement to not use any other weapons, or shields for the duration of the game. Then we script an object to detect a hit.

The IRL version of this game have a set of rules that they are keeping secret. I am assuming that they probably spent a lot of time coming up with rules that will work. So I think we should follow the Killer Streetwars model as closely as we can, and work from the rules we know they use.

In their rules they dont have times when you are not playing. You are playing until you are killed.

But they have all bars/clubs, places of work and your home as safe zones.

This would stop people interupting meetings, housebreaking, and interupting your night out. Though I would propose a sub rule of getting the club owners permission if you want to do a hit in a club.

I am logging on now to join that group.

Let's discuss it further tonight. And if any oe the other group members are online, ask them for a notecard I sent out, that contains a summary of some ideas we kicked around last night.



That would be ideal, but could become difficult to manage in SL, I think. We thought of a couple of ways around it, to try and have a clear-cut way for everyone to know when someone is or isn't playing, and also to prevent abuse, so you don't switch from playing to not-playing (or vice versa) to make a kill or avoid getting killed. Take a look at that notecard, if you don't get a copy I'll send you one when I log in tonight (will be late), and then let's take it from there.

I am on GMT time and had a loong day, so not sure if I will be able to discuss tonight in SL.

I think all the players should reglularily report to a controler. It means that if for some reason you need to change your safe zones or want to be temporarily excluded from play for a particular reason you can tell your controler, and they will inform the controler of your target, if they arent the same person.

Timezones might be an issue tho. Maybe have everyone give their usual playing hours and match targets and assassins by prioritising according to the amount of overlapping hours. Though it is a game of elimination and the last two players may be on opposite sides of the world and never play at the same time, so we may need a system to deal with this.

We should have a meeting in SL asap to discuss this and keep our momentum going.

Post here a time that would be good for you.

Any time between 6am PDT and 6pm PDT. Any day but tomorrow. Would do for me.

I'm out for today, have a company holiday party to go to. Someone fill me in on whatever was discussed. If I log on, it'll be pretty late at night.

I looked through Loki's note from yesterday, and I think there are some good ideas in there. I didn't have the time to write up a response last night.

And I agree about the momentum thing

Same here. My schedule is pretty random. If I'm on it's usually late (late for US Central Time anyway).

I had to bolt the conversation last night...what was the concensus on where we're hosting this project?

Gone quiet all of a sudden.