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Here is a graph showing the amount of people that believe that video games cause aggression

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Here is a graph showing the amount of people that believe that video games cause aggression

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https://newsela.com/read/dream-job-app-developer/id/22988

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FCV002 Kids and Violent Video Games-What's a parent to do? - Guest: Rosalind Wiseman

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Video game content isn't a big deal to our tweens and teens (as long as they're fun), but how do you talk to them about games that are violent, sexist? Rosalind Wiseman is back and has tips for parents about influencing teens around game content. Annie also interviewed Rosalind in December 2009.

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Two events happened this week that many politicians and members of the media will link together.

The first: A mass shooting in Washington, D.C. in which an angry, mentally-ill young man shot and killed a dozen of his fellow citizens.

Second: The release of Grand Theft Auto V, the perennially controversial sandbox game.

The shooting has already sparked calls for censorship of video games, with members of the media claiming both that there must be a causal connection and that not enough research has been done on the violent side-effects of video games. I would dispute both these claims.
Blame Game
According to Media Matters, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski of the Morning Joe show said that "it's kind of hard not to make a connection [between games and the Navy Yard shooting] when you hear [the shooter's] friend saying that he would watch on a life size screen these violent video games for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours."

The Telegraph's Nick Allen described the shooter's "darker side" which "saw him playing violent "zombie" video games in his room, sometimes from 12.30pm until 4.30am." Is it odd to describe a mass murderer's "darker side" not as his killings or other unstable interactions with people, but as an activity he shares with millions of other people?

Quoth & Friends' Steve Doocey: "unfortunately you know it seems every time something bad like this happens we look at "is there a connection between video games and the shooter?" Well, take a look at some people who were described as addicted, from Columbine High School, Eric and Dylan Klebold, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Arizona shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, that Norway shooter who Anders Behring [sic], I think he shot 77 people. The Aurora shooter, James Holmes, the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, they're all described as essentially being addicted to video games."

His co-host, Elisabeth Hasselback, asked: "Is there a link between a certain age group or demo in this - twenty to thirty-four year old men, perhaps, that are playing these video games and then their violent actions? We have yet to find out."

In fact, numerous studies have been conducted and the results are mixed. Some studies have shown that video games increase aggression; others show the opposite.

No study has ever shown that violent video games result directly in actual violence, let alone mass shootings. That doesn't mean it isn't possible, though the numbers suggest it's very unlikely.

Analysts estimate 18 to 20 million copies of Rockstar's GTA V will be sold worldwide by the end of March, 2014.

It's possible that someone who buys and plays the game will later go on to carry out a horrible shooting. Should that happen, it will almost certainly occur in America, which boasts far and away the highest number of mass shootings (and shootings in general) while boasting no higher rate of video game consumption.

See this chart from the Washington Post's Max Fisher, which illustrates this fact starkly enough:

If and when this hypothetical shooting happens---and really, it's just a matter of when at this point---it will be terrifying and terribly sad, but it will pale in comparison to the reality of gun deaths in America.

Each day in this country, on average, 30 people are murdered with a gun, 162 more are injured, and 53 use a gun to commit suicide, according to the CDC.

In 2010 in the United States, firearms were used to carry out 11,422 homicides and 19,392 suicides.

But overall, violent crime is down in the US---indeed, as violent video games have become more popular, violent crime has fallen.

Each of the shooters Fox & Friends uses to bulwark their case for censorship played video games, but so do millions upon millions of other people every day. Games are a $70B industry, and violent games consistently top sales charts.

If there is truly a direct, causal link between games like Grand Theft Auto V and violent shootings, we will soon have 18 to 20 million killers on our hands, not to mention the countless millions more who have been playing violent video games for years.
Morality Play
In an article remarkable for its odd congruence of measured tone and hyperbole, The New Yorker's Simon Parkin argues that the "go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases." In other words, as games become more and more realistic, developers need to be more careful about their content.

Grand Theft Auto V can be viewed as a torture simulator (or strip club simulator) depending on which moments in the game you focus on. Parkin mentions a forum poster who hoped rape would be included in the game---it isn't---and imagines a future of games filled with such simulation.

"In a hypothetical motion-controlled video-game version of "Lolita," it would be possible to inhabit the body, as well as the mind, of Humbert Humbert," Parkin writes. "A virtual sex crime might elicit a very different response if, instead of pressing a button to instigate it, you were required to mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries-even if, as in Nabokov's work, it was included to illustrate or illuminate, not titillate."

We always worry about the decadence of our children, the dilapidation of our future society, the immoral nature of people who engage in activities we don't quite understand.

There will always be people who see great, calamitous moral failures just around every corner. Sometimes they're right; more often, I suspect, they're simply uncomfortable with a changing world. After all, we have a desire to explain why bad things happen, and often we blame and evoke fear in order to do that.

When it comes to video games, the loudest voices are very rarely gamers. Like film censors who don't watch film, or book censors who don't read, this creates a hollow sort of analysis.

Grand Theft Auto V does have morally reprehensible characters, but the vast majority of people who play this sort of game---hopefully the adults who play it, and not impressionable children---see this experience as one of virtual, temporary, and entirely fantastical debauchery.

We can drive through stop lights, mow over civilians, crash and die and start over, get in ridiculous gunfights and still walk away on two feet. Or even just go shopping, or play golf, or hunt. We are given a vast canvas of possibilities, and the freedom to pretend to break bad in a cartoonish, outlandish, alternative reality.

Most people can see this for what it is: escapism.

Then again, gamers all too often do the heavy lifting when it comes to painting the demographic in broad, ugly strokes. Game critics and developers have received death threats in the past for changing a game or panning it in a review. There is a small, but vocal, minority of gamers who do their level best to undermine the rest.
The Line
Not everyone can draw lines between fiction and reality.

There are those who almost certainly are influenced by violent media to act out violently. The Aurora shooter had an obsession with The Joker from The Dark Knight film. Would he have carried out his crimes without that film? Who knows. Probably. (Even with tighter gun laws, it seems likely he would have attempted a mass killing. His apartment was rigged with explosives.)

But the horrible actions of the few is no cause for censorship, and all too often the censors really only want to clamp down on other peoples' entertainment, not their own.

No, these shootings should point us to the elephant in the room, the other big common theme across all these mass murderers: untreated mental illness.

If there is a true culprit here, it is a society which allows so many of its mentally ill to fall between the cracks; it is the ease with which potentially violent, obviously disturbed young men gain access to firearms.

If it were as simple as saying "violent video games kill people!" then we'd really be in trouble. It's a silly fallacy, of course. (Homicidal maniacs kill people. Homicidal maniacs play video games. Therefore, video games cause homicidal maniacs to kill people.)

If it were true, millions of your neighbors, kids, and co-workers would be violent killers. So far as I can tell, this is not the case.

None of which is to say that violence in games doesn't matter, or that violence in games or any other media should be protected from analysis or critique. Gamers are rightfully fearful of censorship, but they too often mistake criticism for censorship, and that can make honest, amicable discourse on the topic difficult.

I believe strongly that the media we consume can and does impact our lives in other more subtle ways. "You are what you eat" is an adage that applies equally well to the images and experiences we code into our brains. It may not make us killers, but I find it hard to believe we are simply immune to the things we do on a daily basis.

Games like Spec Ops: The Line attempt to critique this violence and make us think about it critically, and even if we don't agree with the conclusion at least developers and writers are attempting to have the conversation on their own turf rather than on Fox & Friends.

Criticism and calls for censorship are two very different beasts. Video games are an easy scapegoat for a reactionary media and reactionary politicians, but that doesn't mean we should sit back and take an equally partisan, biased view of the ways our media might affect us.

Parents have a huge responsibility to understand and yes, censor, the media their children consume. Adult gamers have a similar responsibility toward their own cultivation of ideas and influences.

Thankfully, the US Supreme Court has made it very clear that the government has no such responsibility in limiting the speech of American citizens.

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Do Games Like 'Grand Theft Auto V' Cause Real-World Violence?

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Two events happened this week that many politicians and members of the media will link together. The first: A mass shooting in Washington, D.C. in which an angry, mentally-ill young man shot and killed a dozen of his fellow citizens. Second: The release of Grand Theft Auto V, the perennially controversial sandbox game.

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Scientists have long clashed over whether violent video games have an adverse effect on young people. Indeed, the conclusions of different groups of researchers are so contradictory they could give a tennis umpire whiplash.

The Supreme Court recently overturned a California ban on violent video games. The court said that video games, even offensive ones, were protected by the First Amendment, and that there wasn't clear evidence that playing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Postal really harmed people.

Playing violent video games probably will not turn your child into a psychopathic killer, but I would want to know how the child treats his or her parents, how they treat their siblings, how much compassion they have.

So what explains the vehement disagreements among scientists about the effects of these games? The irony is that scientists who think the games are harmful and those who think they're not are both looking at the same evidence. They just see two different things.

Most experiments into the effects of violent video games are done with college students. Researchers divide them into two groups. One group plays a violent game, the other a non-violent video game. Then researchers measure how students in each group feel and how they behave. You can't give young people guns and knives to see whether they'll kill each other after playing a violent video game, so scientists have come up with other ways to measure emotional responses.

Social psychologist Brad Bushman at The Ohio State University once showed students violent pictures: one of a man shoving a gun down another man's throat; another of a man holding a knife to a woman's throat.

"What we found is for people who were exposed to a lot of violent video games, their brains did not respond to the violent images," Bushman said. "They were numb, if you will."

Bushman also had the students blast each other with loud noises.

"We try to make the noise as unpleasant as possible by thinking of every noise you hate," Bushman said. "So like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard, dentist drills, sirens."

Students could make the sound as loud as a smoke alarm, if they wanted. Some students in the experiments got really mean.

"Everybody was more aggressive if they'd played a violent game than if they'd played a nonviolent game, and the more numb they were, the more aggressive they were in terms of blasting their opponent with loud noise through headphones," Bushman said.
Desensitization Toward Violence?
That sounds airtight. Bushman believes that violent video games desensitize young people. Compared to people in the real world who are gentle and compassionate, students playing these games seem to be mean and hurtful.

But Chris Ferguson, a psychologist at the Texas A&M International University, disagrees. He's conducted similar experiments and also sees similar behavior changes among students. But he interprets them very differently.

Compared to people in the real world who shoot and stab one another, Ferguson said the changes in behavior he's seen among students are transient and trivial.

"You know most of the debate now is really on to these minor acts of aggressiveness," he said. "You know we're talking about little children sticking their tongues out at each other and that sort of thing."

Ferguson says it's easy to think senseless video game violence can lead to senseless violence in the real world. But he says that's mixing up two separate things.

"Many of the games do have morally objectionable material and I think that is where a lot of the debate on this issue went off the rails," he said. "We kind of mistook our moral concerns about some of these video games, which are very valid - I find many of the games to be morally objectionable - and then assumed that what is morally objectionable is harmful."

In other words, if you define harm as getting in trouble with the police, violent video games probably aren't a risk. But if you're worried about lesser kinds of harm, they can be a risk.

"Playing violent video games probably will not turn your child into a psychopathic killer," Bushman said, "but I would want to know how the child treats his or her parents, how they treat their siblings, how much compassion they have."

So the dueling scientific studies aren't really at odds with each other - they just make different assumptions. Which may be why Bushman and Ferguson agree on one thing: as fathers, they've banned their own kids from playing violent video games.

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Dispute: How Violent Video Games Affect Kids

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Scientists have long clashed over whether violent video games have an adverse effect on young people, and recently the Supreme Court overturned a California ban on violent video games. It's unclear whether playing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Postal really harm people.

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or all their virtual accomplishments, gamers aren't feted for their real-world usefulness. But that perception might be about to change, thanks to a new wave of games that let players with little or no scientific knowledge tackle some of science's biggest problems. And gamers are already proving their worth.

In 2011, people playing , an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.

A year later, people playing an astronomy game called Planet Hunters found a curious planet with four stars in its system, and to date, they've discovered 40 planets that could potentially support life, all of which had been previously missed by professional astronomers.

On paper, gamers and scientists make a bizarre union. But in reality, their two worlds aren't leagues apart: both involve solving problems within a given set of rules. Genetic analysis, for instance, is about finding sequences and patterns among seemingly random clusters of data. Frame the analysis as a pattern-spotting game that looks like Candy Crush, and, while aligning patterns and scoring points, players can also be hunting for mutations that cause cancer, Alzheimer's disease or diabetes.

"Our brains are geared up to recognise patterns," says Erinma Ochu, a neuroscientist and Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow at the University of Manchester, explaining why scientists are turning to gamers for help, "and we do it better than computers. This is a new way of working for scientists, but as long as they learn how to trust games developers to do what they do best - make great games - then they can have thousands of people from all around the world working on their data."

The potential is huge. As a planet we spend 3bn hours a week playing online games, and if even a fraction of that time can be harnessed for science, laboratories around the world would have access to some rather impressive cognitive machinery. The trick, though, is to make the games as playable and addictive as possible - the more plays a game gets, the larger the dataset generated and the more robust the findings.

Zoran Popovic is the director of the Centre for Game Science at the University of Washington and is the co-creator of Foldit. He explains that while successfully entertaining the masses, these games are meeting a very pressing need: science needs more people.

"No matter what academic process we go through," he says, "we end up whittling down a huge population of middle schoolers interested in science to some small percentage that actually survive the PhD process and end up doing science. Considering how many open scientific problems there are, and how few scientists there are, it's clear that we're stymied in the progress of science simply by the number of able and interested people out there."

Through Foldit alone he estimates that the number of people working on protein folding around the world has increased by four times in the past two and a half years. Zooniverse, a website that offers a wide range of online citizen-science projects including Planet Hunters, estimates that, together, their volunteers give them a virtual office block of 600 people working around the clock on scientific questions.

If you want to join in and become a fully fledged citizen scientist, or if you just want to contribute to science on your way to work, here are 10 of the best games around. But be careful, because they're all pretty addictive. But that shouldn't be a surprise... they've been designed, by scientists, to be so.
Make patterns and research diseases
It's tough to know what to like more about Phylo, the colourful puzzles or the jazzy music. Either way, their combination makes the complicated world of bioinformatics, or more specifically multiple sequence alignment optimisation, incredibly accessible. By pushing around coloured blocks into patterns, you're actually aligning DNA from different animal species, helping research into genetic diseases by identifying disease-associated or mutated genes. Beat algorithms and other players by aligning the patterns and minimising gaps as much as possible.
Make a shape and understand proteins
A bewitchingly addictive puzzle game. Use shakes, tweaks, wiggles and rubber bands to twist and contort your protein into its most stable and thus highest-scoring shape. Each puzzle is a bit like a Rubik's cube in that there is only one perfect solution to each structure, but there are various intermediate or less stable ones in between. Work your way up the high scores tables by joining groups and sharing puzzle solutions with other players. En route, you'll help researchers discover more about the rules that govern the shape, and therefore function, of proteins, helping the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's disease and HIV/Aids.
Study organisms to assess man's impact
If you loved Monkey Island, this game, a visually beautiful point-and-click adventure game with a compelling narrative, is for you. You're a scientist with a secret past, trapped on a mysterious island where an explosion has destroyed the biology lab. Photographs of organisms are strewn across the island. Collect and answer questions about the photos to earn game money, which you spend on tools to help you progress and hopefully get off the island. Your classification of these real-life photos from around the world will help biologists to study the effects of urban sprawl on local ecosystems or to detect evidence of regional or global climactic shifts.
Align patterns to save ash trees
Think Candy Crush but with coloured leaves. To play this Facebook game, align different patterns with a reference pattern: the better the alignment, the higher the score. Tussle for ownership of a given pattern by beating other players' scores. In sorting the patterns to increasingly higher accuracy, you'll actually be helping to detect genetic variants that can protect Europe's ash trees ( Fraxinus excelsior) from a deadly fungal disease. Each pattern represents actual DNA lengths from the trees and the fungus, from which scientists hope to identify genetic variants that either confer resistance or increase susceptibility.
Make shapes to understand genes
A similar concept to Foldit (it was made by some of the same people), but this time you're trying to get RNA into a target shape. RNAs, which have an important role in building proteins and regulating genes, are made up of four different types of nucleotide bases. Switch these to alter the RNA's configuration, increase its stability, and up your score. Target shapes get increasingly more complicated as you progress to becoming a puzzle architect or, in the lab mode, compete for the chance to have your own RNA designs synthesised and assessed by scientists at Stanford University.
Protect a forest... to help protect forests
Not released until later this year, but well worth keeping an eye out for. You'll be charged with taking care of a plot of New Zealand forest and protecting it from ravenous Australian bushtail possums. Set traps, create sanctuaries or fly aerial operations to sow toxic bait to save your pixelated forest. Researchers will then take the best strategies and apply them in real New Zealand forests, where native plants and animals are under threat from these invading possums. To help raise money for the game, Ora's developers have released Possum Stomp, a mini game app available on iOS or Android.
Classify galaxies to understand universe
Zooniverse's flagship project. Sift through pictures of millions of galaxies and help classify their shapes to unravel their history. A galaxy's shape tells you whether it's collided with another galaxy, if it's formed stars, and how it's interacted with its environment. Like all Zooniverse projects, offers an authentic experience of science, so you'll not get points. However, if seeing far-flung corners of the universe before any other human eye isn't enough for you, keep a look out for weird and wonderful objects and they might be named after you, such as Hanny's Voorwerp, a galaxy-sized gas cloud named after one player.
Untangle puzzle and unearth new neurons
Help scientists figure out how the brain is wired, starting with nerves in the back of the eye. You're given a cube of tangled nerves from which you have to tease out the shape of individual nerves and, slice by slice, build up their three-dimensional structure. It's little wonder this game is so pleasing: it taps into two things you probably forgot that you love - colouring in and treasure hunts. Score points by tracing well and unearthing new neurons. The timed events really ramp up the heat, and might have you sitting at your computer all night. Be warned.
Listen to whales, help marine biologists
Another authentic experience from Zooniverse. This time be a marine biologist (no scuba diving, sadly) and study whale song. Listen to recordings of killer whales and pilot whales from around the world and link them with a list of potential matches. Find a match and it'll be stored for further analysis. Your work will help biologists determine the size of these animals' repertoire and whether they have accents, indicators of intelligence or a culture. If you've noticed neither animal is a whale but instead a type of dolphin, this game is probably for you.
Identify arable land to feed the world
By 2050 there will be 10 billion of us on the planet. That's a lot of hungry mouths that we'll struggle to feed with the current agricultural setup. Trawl through satellite images of the Earth and look for arable land to help develop the first-ever global crop map, which will help plan for global food security, identify yield gaps and monitor crops affected by droughts. The more land you identify, the higher your score and the better your chances of winning great weekly prizes, such as an Amazon Kindle, a smartphone, or a tablet. But hurry: the competitions stop in April.

This article was amended on 27 January 2014. An earlier version referred to Zoran Popovic as director of the Centre for Game Science at Washington University. That should have been the University of Washington at Seattle, Washington state. Washington University is in St. Louis, Missouri.

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How online gamers are solving science's biggest problems

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or all their virtual accomplishments, gamers aren't feted for their real-world usefulness. But that perception might be about to change, thanks to a new wave of games that let players with little or no scientific knowledge tackle some of science's biggest problems. And gamers are already proving their worth.

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The research falls into three categories: short-term laboratory experiments; longer-term studies, often based in schools; and correlation studies - between playing time and aggression, for instance, or between video game sales and trends in violent crime.

Lab experiments confirm what any gamer knows in his gut: playing games like "Call of Duty," "Killzone 3" or "Battlefield 3" stirs the blood. In one recent study, Christopher Barlett, a psychologist at Iowa State University, led a research team that had 47 undergraduates play "Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance" for 15 minutes. Afterward, the team took various measures of arousal, both physical and psychological. It also tested whether the students would behave more aggressively, by having them dole out hot sauce to a fellow student who, they were told, did not like spicy food but had to swallow the sauce.

Sure enough, compared with a group who had played a nonviolent video game, those who had been engaged in "Mortal Kombat" were more aggressive across the board. They gave their fellow students significantly bigger portions of the hot sauce.

Many similar studies have found the same thing: A dose of violent gaming makes people act a little more rudely than they would otherwise, at least for a few minutes after playing.

It is far harder to determine whether cumulative exposure leads to real-world hostility over the long term. Some studies in schools have found that over time digital warriors get into increasing numbers of scrapes with peers - fights in the schoolyard, for example. In a report published last summer, psychologists at Brock University in Ontario found that longer periods of violent video game playing among high school students predicted a slightly higher number of such incidents over time.

"None of these extreme acts, like a school shooting, occurs because of only one risk factor; there are many factors, including feeling socially isolated, being bullied, and so on," said Craig A. Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University. "But if you look at the literature, I think it's clear that violent media is one factor; it's not the largest factor, but it's also not the smallest."

Most researchers in the field agree with Dr. Anderson, but not all of them. Some studies done in schools or elsewhere have found that it is aggressive children who are the most likely to be drawn to violent video games in the first place; they are self-selected to be in more schoolyard conflicts. And some studies are not able to control for outside factors, like family situation or mood problems.

"This is a pool of research that, so far, has not been very well done," said Christopher J. Ferguson, associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University and a critic of the field whose own research has found no link. "I look at it and I can't say what it means."

Neither Dr. Ferguson, nor others interviewed in this article, receive money from the gaming industry.

Many psychologists argue that violent video games "socialize" children over time, prompting them to imitate the behavior of the game's characters, the cartoonish machismo, the hair-trigger rage, the dismissive brutality. Children also imitate flesh and blood people in their lives, of course - parents, friends, teachers, siblings - and one question that researchers have not yet answered is when, exactly, a habit is so consuming that its influence trumps the socializing effects of other major figures in a child's life.

That is, what constitutes a bad habit? In surveys about 80 percent of high school-age boys say they play video games, most of which are thought to be violent, and perhaps a third to a half of those players have had a habit of 10 hours a week or more.

The proliferation of violent video games has not coincided with spikes in youth violent crime. The number of violent youth offenders fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010, to 224 per 100,000 population, according to government statistics, while video game sales have more than doubled since 1996.

In a working paper now available online, Dr. Ward and two colleagues examined week-by-week sales data for violent video games, across a wide range of communities. Violence rates are seasonal, generally higher in summer than in winter; so are video game sales, which peak during the holidays. The researchers controlled for those trends and analyzed crime rates in the month or so after surges in sales, in communities with a high concentrations of young people, like college towns.

"We found that higher rates of violent video game sales related to a decrease in crimes, and especially violent crimes," said Dr. Ward, whose co-authors were A. Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Benjamin Engelstätter of the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany.

No one knows for sure what these findings mean. It may be that playing video games for hours every day keeps people off the streets who would otherwise be getting into trouble. It could be that the games provide "an outlet" that satisfies violent urges in some players - a theory that many psychologists dismiss but that many players believe.

Or the two trends may be entirely unrelated.

"At the very least, parents should be aware of what's in the games their kids are playing," Dr. Anderson said, "and think of it from a socialization point of view: what kind of values, behavioral skills, and social scripts is the child learning?"

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Studying the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games

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The research falls into three categories: short-term laboratory experiments; longer-term studies, often based in schools; and correlation studies - between playing time and aggression, for instance, or between video game sales and trends in violent crime. Lab experiments confirm what any gamer knows in his gut: playing games like "Call of Duty," "Killzone 3" or "Battlefield 3" stirs the blood.

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Killer, the last-man-standing game of water-pistol ambush, has become a key end-of-the-year ritual in several New York City high schools. At St. Ann's, a private school in Brooklyn Heights, the game lasts two and a half weeks and is especially ferocious. Over the years, students there have developed a seventeen-point rule book, a map of the safe zones around the school, an entry fee (currently twenty dollars per team; it goes into the winners' pot), and a nonplaying senior-class "judge," to arbitrate disputed kills and rule violations. The judge also makes a pie chart of death-the order of killing assignments, which he or she then distributes to squads shortly before opening day.

"I'm looking for some good massacres early," this year's judge said as the competition began, the second week in May. (Summoning what his classmates referred to as his "inner lawyer," he asked that his name not be used.) "I've arranged at least one boyfriend-girlfriend kill that could be interesting."

Initially, each team of up to four students is given only the identities of its immediate prey. All other players are anonymous, so that in the days leading up to the game the school becomes a souk of intelligence-gathering and disinformation. In 2007, Jake Protell, a freshman, distinguished himself by ferreting out the itinerary of a field trip that two targets were taking to Tel Aviv. Protell took a car to Newark Airport, found the victims before they passed through security, and dispatched them using two bathtub "squirt fish."

"I had to get special permission from the judge for the squirt fish, because I didn't want to take my gun anywhere near an El Al counter," Protell, now a junior, recalled, as he paced Pierrepont Street, three water guns shoved inside the pocket of a hoodie.

Eighteen squads of assassins signed up for Killer 2009, a total of seventy players, creating a pot of three hundred and sixty dollars. The first week kicked off with the upperclassmen's swift massacre of the less disciplined freshman teams. There were a couple of tenacious ninth-grade holdouts, though. Willis Cohen, age fifteen, just five feet six and a hundred and thirty pounds, was gumming up the works for a team of seniors assigned to kill him. Since the start of the game, the twelfth graders had been sleeping on futons in a couple of vans borrowed from their parents, the better to pull off a stoop-side ambush and avoid being ambushed themselves. They had to take Cohen out before they could move on to their next victims.

At 10:30 P.M. on a Wednesday, three of the four seniors, armed with Walgreens-issue water pistols, staked out Cohen's house in a blue Toyota minivan. The idea was to use a cell phone to call the Cohens' landline, posing as Cohen's teammate Dominic, using Dominic's caller I.D. The call had been engineered from a remote computer by a squad member with prodigious hacking skills.

"We want to get Cohen out on the stoop, or learn whether he's sleeping at home," Tuck Gaisford, the seniors' driver, said.

The call went through. But Cohen's mom-who had earlier driven her son and a teammate to a kill in SoHo-had been tipped off. The brownstone remained dark, and the seniors spent the night on a cul-de-sac in the Heights.

Meanwhile, Jake Protell and his squad-Paulie Lowther, Charlotte Istel, and Mark Croitoroo-mowed through entire teams, racking up thirteen kills in four days. In five hours on Memorial Day, Lowther, a member of the winning teams from 2007 and 2008, shot a boy sitting on his stoop in Boerum Hill, a second as he ventured from his country house to Cobble Hill, and a third whom he duped into coming to a party in the Village.

Willis Cohen was finally killed through no fault of his own. He woke up one day and, as usual, hopped a neighbor's fence and exited through another house. He caught a livery cab on Amity Street and headed north to the Heights. He knew he was in trouble when his driver refused to raise the windows. A member of the Gaisford team shot him in the chest through the cab's passenger-side window as he pulled up to the school.

"I told the driver to pull over on the other side of the street, but he wouldn't do it," Cohen said, the wet splotch drying in the center of his T-shirt. In the end, the Protell-Lowther team won, with twenty-one kills. They celebrated with a spaghetti dinner.

In the late innings of Killer season, some kids occasionally sleep in the deeper recesses of St. Ann's itself. The game's valedictory message is built into its architecture: school is the safe ground. And, keen as the graduating seniors may be to leave, the game tells them that the world outside is not. ♦

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Water-pistol war at Brooklyn private school