Gotcha!

Cameron Lewis, Utah State sophomore, is done looking over his shoulder and running frantically to his apartment.
The Gotcha! game has come to a conclusion for this 21-year-old business major.
“It feels nice to know someone’s not out to get me all the time,” Lewis said, “but I’m still bitter I got out, I was totally going to win. I’d already killed 5 people!”
Almost 30 Old Farm tenants paid the $5 entry fee to participate in the Gotcha! game, which began in October, with the goal of ultimately winning the grand prize or the award for best elimination story.
The Gotcha! game is very competitive, involving a group of people trying to eliminate each other with chalk while avoiding being caught themselves. Everyone has the goal of being the last one standing.
“Gotcha! is the ultimate game of tag,” K.C. Bell, the organizer of Gotcha! said, “you are always watching your own back while trying to get someone else out.”
Bell, a 22-year-old junior, organized this community game and was known as “The Gotcha! Guy.”
In order to eliminate a target in Gotcha!, Bell explained, the assassin just needs to chase their target, mark them with sidewalk chalk, and say “Gotcha!”
“Before the game officially began, everyone signed a waiver that wouldn’t hold me responsible if they got hurt,” Bell said, “Some people get really into it.”
Jessie Kingsford, a 19-year-old sophomore, experienced the seriousness of the game when a trusted roommate sold her out for a date.
“My roommate let me answer the door when her boyfriend showed up,” Kingsford said, “I invited him in and he was on me like a hobo on a ham sandwich, except with chalk that is.”
Once Kingsford got out, she gave her target card to the guy who eliminated her, and the game continued.
The game began on October 6th and within the first day four people were eliminated, Bell said.
Bell’s favorite part of being “The Gotcha! Guy” is listening to the stories of how people collaborate with each other and how they eliminate someone or successfully escape from a dangerous situation.
One elimination story comes from Mark Houtz, senior in management information systems.
Houtz, 24, said he enjoyed the game for the day it lasted for him, but it has been entertaining to watch people team up and get extremely paranoid recently.
“If there’s one thing I learned,” Houtz said, “it’s that you can’t trust your friends.”
Like many other Gotcha! participants, it was Houtz’s friend that sold him out.
Houtz was sure he was safe when he visited a girl’s apartment, but he did not know that one of the girls in the living room was ready to attack him with chalk the moment he walked through the door.
Since the beginning, the game has slowed down and there are only seven remaining, Bell said, half of which have not even killed their first target.
Bell said he plans on removing a safe zone every week until the winner is declared. He will start allowing students to get their targets in classrooms or in church; there are lots of rules that can be bent, he said.
“Either the remaining seven are hermits,” Bell said, “or they are just strategizing and very careful and fast when they leave their apartments.”
Bell thinks people are taking the game even more serious now because they know they have a one-in-seven chance of winning the $100 prize.
The prize money comes from the total of the entrance fees, which Bell says he plans on reducing to $1 in the spring in order to get a bigger turnout of participants.