Vampire Hunters: From folk game to pervasive game.

Long long ago in a college far far away, I was part of a small group of students that played and developed an interesting genre of games that at the time we called ‘Theater Games’ because, you guessed it, we played them in the theater building.

When we arrived at the college as freshmen, we were introduced to the tradition of playing folk games like ‘Tag’ or ‘Hide and Go Seek’ in the theater building, which we had access to 24 hours a day. Shortly thereafter a creative student, Maya King, introduced a fresh variant of Hide and Go Seek that he called ‘Ninja Monster’. In this variation he would go into the dark theater and hide (well, more lurk than hide), and the rest of us would come in a few minutes later and explore. Eventually he would jump out and start chasing and tagging students. If he tagged everyone the players lost and he won. If they evaded him for a set length of time they won. Of course the only one who knew the length of the game was Maya and he often didn’t tell the players when he was giving up! It wasn’t much of a game really…but it was more fun than any of us had had since we were five.

Still, Link Hughes and I, both being game design students, decided that we could do better and with some amount of play testing ended up with…

Vampire Hunters:

One player is picked as the Vampire Lord. They enter the playspace, taking with them the ‘Three Holy Relics’ (anything can be used; we went with brightly colored earmuffs, because relics are hard to come by). The Vampire Lord hides the relics around the playspace. They can not be covered by another object.

The players enter the playspace and try to find the relics and bring them to a central location before being tagged by the vampire. When all of the relics are in the location, the tables turn and the players may tag the vampire to win.

Complications: If a player is tagged by the Vampire Lord, they give a blood-curdling scream and collapse. They then count to 60 and then rise up as vampire minions and try to tag other players.

The players have two tools in their fight against the forces of evil. The Light of God is a flashlight that Vampires must run from. Holy Water is a water bottle that the players may use to save other players who have been tagged by a vampire, but who have not yet counted all the way to 60.

If all of the players become vampires the Vampire Lord wins. If the Vampire Lord is tagged the players win.

This version of the game was very popular and was still being played at least five years after I graduated. I have often wondered if it is still being played 15 years later and if so how much it resembles the game Link and I created. It’s the nature of folk games to evolve over time and our modern idea that a game is created by one author and is then immutable stands at odds with thousands of years of organic game development. The idea that only professional game developers make games has been challenged lately by the indie community. Perhaps it is bringing some of the spirit of youthful improvisation back to games or maybe modern games such complex things that they are now out of reach of enthusiastic amateurs. I certainly hope it’s the former.