You might think your boss is out to get you. You might think your mom is doing every little thing she can to make your life difficult. You might even see a black SUV and nervously go back the way you came.

But at least you do not have seventy people trying to covertly murder you.

The game is called streetwars. Participants are given an envelope with the name, residence, and photograph of their target. If they succeed in eliminating their target (with a squirt gun) then they inherent their target's envelope.

At this point, at least 1/20 of the persons who go to my college are competing in the game. I should also mention that, unlike the official game, ours does not have a time limit, so the game could feasibly last all semester, or even longer. That is a long time to be sitting with you back to the wall, turning corners and openings doors with a sense of dread and a trigger at the ready, or, conversely, to be spending your nights waiting outside someone's apartment for a chance to snipe them.

It's not hard to adapt, given that everyone at this school is already quite paranoid and anti-social, but it is marginally inconvenient to think that five percent of everyone I meet is looking to kill me at the first opportunity.

However, I thought the rest of you might sleep more soundly if you knew that America's next generation of engineers and scientists will be rather disproportionately well-versed in the art of tracking down and killing strangers.