Manhunt(Globe and Mail, 18 Sept 2004)
by Liz Clayton
I’m hiding in some kind of sculpture surrounding a fountain in Metro Square — just in view of the eternal flame, and two of my would-be captors. I watch two pursuers ambush two of my comrades within a recessed stairwell, as I congratulate myself for remaining unseen. Within half an hour I will be caught in a phone booth on King and myself become a pursuer. This is Manhunt, and it goes down every week whether you know it or not.
Manhunt is, according to the game’s website at manhunt-toronto.com, “regressive hide and seek that’s totally rad”. For those who play, it’s a chance to use their city as a three-dimensional game board, a form of free entertainment that bonds them to their environment. It’s also a heck of an excuse to run around.
The premise is simple enough: players are counted off one-at-a-time in a kids’-nursery-rhyme round robin style and disperse to hide somewhere within the game’s geographical boundaries. The last remaining person (determined by rock paper scissors) is “it”, and begins hunting all the other players, slowly converting every caught person from Manhunted to Manhunter. If all goes well, the end of the game becomes a tense takedown with the hunters far outnumbering the hunted. Tackling may occur.
The turnout this week is about ten people — though games have drawn as many as 30 or as few as 3, depending on if there’s a good concert going on on a particular Thursday night. The players are largely a glasses-plaid-and-Converse crowd, most of them indie rock fans who know each other from the message board 20hz.ca. The game isn’t limited to the message board crowd, of course. People bring friends of friends, supplying the ill-prepared with last-minute identifying armbands that show they’re in the game. Matt Collins, who started the weekly game here in Toronto, recalls recruiting a stranger who’d simply missed his bus back to Whitby.
“ We kind of wanted to have an extra person to bump it up to 8 people or something, and there was a guy just sitting on the steps and he asked us what we were doing and we asked him if he wanted to pay Manhunt…from the get go he was really into it,” said Collins.
The game is as much social as it is chase-oriented, and a lot of time is spent visiting before, after, and during the game — many hunters take smoke-breaks. As pre-game chatter turned to the players’ desire to recruit a celebrity to join in during the Film Festival Manhunts (they’d prefer Gary Busey), a girl in the group called to a passerby, right on cue.
“ Hey, David Suzuki, do you want to play Manhunt with us?” she shouts to a man strolling along Simcoe. It really was Suzuki, but he politely declined.
Collins adapted the game for the big city from a childhood version he played growing up in a townhouse complex in Milton.
“ As far as I remember the rules that we use are the ones that we played with then,” says Collins, who finds the urban version a unique way to engage oneself with the city. He particularly enjoys bringing the kids’ game to neighbourhoods not traditionally considered “fun”, like the business district or Yorkville.
“ People really seem to like the really subversive ones where there’s a lot of people doing what they normally do in that area and then there’s a lot of people with armbands running around chasing each other,” said Collins.
Collins’ fiancée, Kat Gligorijevic, agrees that part of the game’s appeal is the way it changes how one interacts with the city.
“ I don’t see Manhunt as an attempt to recapture childhood, but as a way to recontextualize the urban landscape that succeeds where, say, Reclaim The Streets fails,” said Gligorijevic.
Though the modern-day urban game was launched in Toronto, it has already traveled to Halifax via Toronto player Star DT.
“ I got there and one of my friends had corralled like 35 kids which was more than had ever played Manhunt in Toronto. They were really excited and had put a lot of thought into what their armbands were gonna be,” said DT, who added that the Haligonian Manhuhnters were in the process of making a zine about the game. An Edmonton Manhunt is reputedly in the works as well.
“ I just think it’s such a great alternative to you know, going to a bar. There’s no reason why adults can’t play like kids, right? It’s just fun and hilarious and silly and it’s better than standing around and looking bored at a bar all night,” said DT.
News of the next Manhunt game can be found at manhunt-toronto.com.