Teaching Teens to Solve Problems With Pretend Violence
When teens ambush and "eliminate" others as a graduation "rite of passage."
So, I guess I’ve been living under a mushroom. I just learned about a “game” called Senior Assassin that’s played by graduating high school students as “stress relief.” It’s apparently been around for more than a decade and is known by other names in other areas, so feel free to move on if this is old news to you. If you’re not familiar with it, the Wikipedia description and some of the reference links there describe the lengths participants can go in various versions of this “game.”
Some police authorities and other adults have concerns about it. For instance, this is part of a recent article from the CBC:
”Police in parts of Canada are warning high school students about the risks of playing a game that may have the public mistaking their water guns for real weapons. In one Ontario community, police are investigating students who appear to have targeted an unhoused Indigenous man.
The trending game known as ‘Senior Assassin’ has become popular among Grade 12 students — stress relief as they’re writing exams and preparing for graduation.
The goal is to eliminate an assigned target by squirting them with a water, nerf or pellet gun. Goggles and pool floaties give players immunity. There are several apps that collect video evidence and have a leaderboard.”
On my social media feeds, I’m seeing many parents defend Senior Assassin as a harmless pastime, a rite of passage even. They claim that critics are overreacting and that these students should be allowed to have their fun. School administrator and police warnings are being laughed at as “outrage bait” and “fear mongering.”
But I don’t agree that concern about this so-called harmless pastime is fear mongering. I don’t see it as just a game. The warnings and criticisms I see involve the danger of a water gun being mistaken for the real thing, which is serious enough. But I have to wonder about the health of a society that encourages young people to stage sneak attacks in order to shoot (“eliminate” is how the jargon goes) other people for fun. Does this game normalize the use of guns to solve problems, as happened in this 2024 incident in Kansas? Do people not make the connection between school shootings and such “harmless” games? Have we become so tone deaf that a game with the name “assassin” is even acceptable? (My mushroom wasn’t so large as to shelter me from the myriad violent computer games, but my question stands.)
The cynic in me wonders if the existence of this particular game, let alone its seeming acceptance and normalization, is part of the numbing we’re experiencing right now. We live increasingly surrounded by violence, openly expressed racism and misogyny and other sorts of hatred, wars, genocide — and it’s hard to take it all in on a daily basis without becoming numb to it, or at least normalizing it. All of it is highly visible on social media, of which young people are big consumers. They’ve also been exposed to years of the pressure, coercion, and bullying that are part of the school environment. When a “game” of pretend violence and competition is touted as a relief mechanism from all of that, I think we need to assess our collective morality, ethics, priorities, parenting principles, and education systems.
I think it’s past time that we question why we’ve created a situation where kids need a stress relief mechanism; move beyond violence as a problem solver; and begin to model a more peaceful, just, and accepting society.
I think this connects to something much deeper in modern society. We increasingly immerse children and teenagers in competitive, coercive, and conflict-oriented environments, then act surprised when violence becomes emotionally normalised as a way of relating to the world.
From very early childhood, many children are surrounded by entertainment built around fighting, domination, revenge, humiliation, coercion, explosions, warfare, pursuit, and physical conflict. Characters strike, imprison, threaten, shoot, injure, eliminate, or destroy one another while audiences are encouraged to experience these behaviours as exciting, heroic, humorous, emotionally rewarding, or simply normal background entertainment. At the same time, affection, vulnerability, intimacy, emotional openness, and embodied human connection are increasingly moralised, awkward, hidden, or psychologically charged.
What strikes me most about “Senior Assassin” is not simply the game itself, but how socially acceptable and emotionally familiar it already feels to so many adults. That normalisation says something important about the broader emotional atmosphere children are growing up within.
I also strongly agree with your broader point that we should be asking why teenagers increasingly need these kinds of stress-release mechanisms in the first place. Many modern systems seem designed around pressure, surveillance, performance, competition, fear, and behavioural control rather than emotional development, trust, autonomy, meaningful community, or healthy human connection.
I talk about many of these themes on my own Substack as well, particularly around modern social fragmentation, childhood, institutionalisation, and what I describe as the “sex–violence inversion” within modern civilisation — an essay I’ll be publishing soon.