Weekend adventures
Unbeknownst to most of MIT’s daytime denizens, an underground guild of “assassins” roams Building 36 on Saturday nights during the school year. Armed with brightly colored rubber-dart blasters, these members of the Institute’s “Assassins’ Guild” — a live-action role-playing society — strategize with one another, working with allies to outwit enemy teams. The weekly games continue a tradition begun at the Institute some three decades ago. “Patrol,” a high-action game of dart-gun combat, is the group’s gateway offering, focused more on combat strategy than on propelling a character through an interactive world. Senior Tom Boning, brandishing a bright orange plastic blaster and wearing the skull-and-crossbones headband that identifies him as game master, is in charge of explaining the rules of the game to newcomers. “The objective is to have fun,” Boning explains. “You do this by ‘shooting’ people and dodging other people’s ‘bullets.’” The plastic dart shooters come exclusively in fluorescent colors — the...