Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

I think a giant gap in this is that the list of rules doesn't account for non-players in the game area. This planned over a large public park which presumably other people use. Do you play around people? Do you avoid them with a minimum radius out of respect, or do you weave by them if it helps prevent someone from getting your flag? Participants loved the game, but how did non-participants in the park at the same time feel about it? Did they feel uncomfortable using the park with the game on all sides?

If you and your friends play soccer in an open area of the park, probably all agree that other people should avoid setting up their picnic in the area of play. Parents and dog-owners should keep their kids and pets from entering. If you and your friends declare the whole park to be the area of play, including the playground, children's garden, bathroom, splash pad and parking lot as shown in the finished map, I think this ceases to be a reasonable expectation, but what the norms should be is ambiguous.

This is why stuff like this doesn’t happen more often.

I played a 10-day game of tag in college. (Called Humans vs Zombie, “humans” were able to tagged by zombies any time that they were outside. We would start with ~150 humans, at the beginning, and by the end of the game only ~30 were not zombies.)

The amount of work that the core-team put in to run the game was insane: reserving space on campus, marketing it to students, defining and refining rules, communicating with campus security, negotiating with campus administration, dealing with rule violations, and more.

I think it’s a shame that it’s so much work to put together and play what is ultimately a very simple game with very little potential to harm anyone. But there are a lot of people who are scared and uncomfortable when other people start running around.

> But there are a lot of people who are scared and uncomfortable when other people start running around.

Gosh, and for no reason whatsoever at all! /s

If you say this sarcastically I believe you think there are legitimate reasons to worry when seeing people running around in a park. Can you elaborate why that is?

They're responding to a comment about playing tag across a college campus, not a park.

This would have been less concerning a couple decades ago, but after Virgina Tech, more than 1 or 2 people suddenly running past me would cause me to make assumptions. Some "Capture the Flag Game in Progress" signs would be comforting in that situation.

> Can you elaborate why that is?

First, the person I was responding to was talking about a college campus and not a park. Second, the ridiculous number of mass shootings that have occurred in schools in the past three decades including the one on the Virginia Tech campus.

If you see a bunch of people running around and hiding in a place that's not expected it's not a great idea to assume they're doing it for fun. Not with a sad history of gun toting lunatics shooting up public spaces.

True. I got lucky: when we played, there were maybe 20-25 non-players in the entire playing area, so avoiding them was no problem. I didn't hear any complaints about our game. It could have definitely been a bigger problem; thankfully, it wasn't.

I think there’s an analog to individual empathy that happens with groups. Or maybe it is just that group membership tends to suppress understanding of others.

When the group is about fun, people say “why can’t they just let us do our fun thing?” —-meanwhile you have grown adults chasing each other through toddler play areas, screaming at the top of their lungs, running across the road, etc.

Per the authors comments, the players were teenagers.

I think there is a very good chance this game was played at night when there would be few or no people in the park. They do not mention time of day in the post, but most urban capture the flag games are played at night.

We actually played in the evening, from about 4:45-6:30pm. The park where we played was surprisingly empty for a Friday evening.

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