Milton’s head monitors announce the exact moment when Gotcha begins. A game of elimination, players tag one another and try to keep from being tagged themselves. The winner is the last surviving player. The game is launched during the shoulder week between sports seasons, and every student from Class IV to Class I is on the playing roster. Some people really take to the live action game, and play to win. Whether you’re an avid player or someone relieved to be tagged early, most everyone likes to follow the action and watch how the tags play out.
The ace Gotcha player knows the rules and finds his or her targets without breaking any rule. That’s not as easy as it may seem. Rules evolve, over the years, and become a bit intricate. Students have been playing Gotcha in the Milton hallways and campus byways for at least 10 years, so some rules keep mayhem from occurring during class breaks; some keep the innocent bystander safe from an inadvertent tackle; and some just keep the game complicated.
To introduce this year’s fall game, and put the rules on the table, Caroline Wall and Louie Demetroulakos made this video and played it at assembly. Everything clear now?
Adding speed to the game this year was a new Gotcha website. Designed and posted by James Little (Class I) for Milton players, this site moved every player on to the name of his or her next target simply by logging in. In the “old days” someone who just made a tag would have to wait for that impossibly slow process, email, to figure out who to target next. Students also checked the new site to compare how different classes were doing against each other, and to see how rapidly the number of players “still in the game” was dropping—real time stats that were featured on the site. James believes that the site quickened the game’s pace, so more people stayed tuned in to its progress, and the winner reached his berth in record time.
Last Monday Caroline and Louie (head monitors) approached the podium at assembly to announce the winner. Caroline began: “We [students of Miltonia] made it through the game, the competition to end all minor poker bets and races to the top of Ware. We made it through Gotcha. There were over 600 hot pursuits at once, each thunderously intense as the cheetah closed in on the gazelle, as the shark swarmed the minnow, as predator caught prey. What a fantastic food chain unfolded, with one apex predator to rule them all.”
Caroline and Louie congratulated everyone on a game well-played. “There were zero incidents.” Then Louie awarded the official Gotcha tee shirt to the proud winner, who made 26 tags. Who was he? Jesse Martinez, Class I.
