Kill ’em with Kindness: Reflection on an Instance of Cruel 2 B Kind
On a breezy (but thankfully sunny) Saturday afternoon, Zack, Nylah, and I organized a game of Cruel 2 B Kind. We recruited a cohort of friends armed with an arsenal of weapons and an email chock full of rules. We made two major changes to the original game: players were no longer required to bring booty, and there was a time limit. Both of these changes lowered the barrier to entry in hopes that more players would come. Additionally, we offered free coffee to the winners. The weapons we chose were: wish someone a happy made up holiday, mistake someone for a celebrity, and blow someone a kiss.
The game started slow going. Several players failed to check in on time, one player was recruited at the last minute, one player flaked altogether, and one showed up two thirds of the way through: Stanford students at their finest. As the Puppet Masters, we could have helped this by adding prompt reminders before the game.
The first ten minutes with five players checked in was quiet. Each player staked out a space and held their ground:
Then the game picked up as a mega team formed, recruiting players one by one. There were a few key moments of fun:
- One player approached Nylah, lamenting her fruitless hunt. However, in mentioning the game she was overheard by the Mega Team who descended on the kill.
- One player staked her place at the Bookstore, looking unsuspiciously busy, as the Mega Team approached and took a second table. She remained undetected until the last moment where, 30 seconds before the bell, both she and the Mega Team fired the same weapon and the game ended with a ceasefire.
There were also a few key surprises:
- The Mega Team seemed pretty adverse to attack — we noted several times they passed by a perfectly suspicious passerby without an act of kindness.
- At least two players told us at the Assassin Awards that the “weapons” didn’t feel like genuine compliments and were uncomfortable to aim at strangers. They believe they would have been more confident to reach out if they could choose their own compliments. This may have been more the fault of us Puppet Masters, however: when shown the complete weapons list, players voiced that several options other than the weapons we chose would have been preferable. For example, the made-up holiday made one player feel like “people probably would tell me I’m crazy” as compared to complementing one’s shoes, which was perceived as more innocuous.
Key changes to make for the next iteration might include a larger player base, a larger number of strangers, a longer game, starting teams of larger than one, and weapons perceived as inside the social norm (“Welcome to Stanford!” “I like your shoes/jacket!”). I was personally very pleased to note easy camaraderie between the players at the coffee chat afterwards. From observation, they seemed to enjoy themselves once groups had been formed.
