There’s this game called Assassins that’s popular in certain circles at my school. I’ve never played myself, but it sounds pretty fun. The game involves “weapons,” “stalking,” “killing,” “dying,” and an elaborate real-life circular linked-list that shrinks until only the winner remains. Games can take weeks and often benefit from the stalker’s best friend, Facebook.

My friend runs campusassassins.com, which administers games. He and his website are in USA Today today, which is pretty exciting. But the focus of the article reduces that excitement.

Students urged to stop playing ‘Assassin’ game.

April 25, 2007 USA Today

Students are being urged not to play Assassins so that they won’t be mistaken for someone like Cho. I suppose this is a legitimate stance to take. It sure would suck if a kid with a watergun was mistaken for a kid with a gun.

But taking a step back, I ask myself “why does a fun and harmless game suffer because of the recent massacre?” Well it’s probably because the game involves “weapons,” “stalking,” “killing,” and “dying,” which are being mistaken as weapons, stalking, killing, and dying. The latter are unfortunate parts of our reality, but the former are strictly all fun and games.

Mistaking “killing” for killing reveals to me that our thinking about this issue is flawed. Telling Assassins to stop deals only with our aural experience of the bloodshed. “I don’t like to hear about violent or “violent” or whatever stuff, so please don’t do it.” Instead, the right place to look is to the oral experience of the bloodshed. Who is uttering those words and why did they pick the ones they did?

It’s understandable that the aural perspective would be mistaken for the oral one, similar as they do sound. But one is superficial and the other is substantial, and we all need to fixate on the substantial.