Beginning next week, 35 elite students from Staples High School here plan to arm themselves with plastic guns with names like Lock 'n' Load, Secret Shot II and Expand-a-Blast, then stalk classmates through town.

The students, who are all in the Advanced Placement program for college-bound seniors, call the game A.P. Assassination and have elaborate plans for staying alive, with underclassmen as bodyguards and siblings as lookouts. The contest is expected to last for three weeks, and the final two survivors will shoot it out in a town park, then collect cash prizes generated by the $7 entry fee.

The game and others like it have become a spring distraction at dozens of high schools and colleges across the country; the games were apparently inspired by a 1982 movie, ''Tag: The Assassination Game.'' In the film, college students shoot each other with rubber darts, and it's all great fun until one player begins using bullets.

Some students nationwide have begun to worry about just that possibility in the aftermath of the blood bath at a high school in Littleton, Colo., last month. A few Staples students are bowing out this year, having decided that four weeks after the Colorado shootings might not be the best time to lurk in bushes and hide under cars in hopes of knocking off a target, even if the deed is done with a foam dart.

The rash of bomb scares and copycat threats that followed the Littleton killings has added to the tension over the sprees with toy guns.

At a parent-teacher meeting this week, the principal of Staples High School, Gloria A. Rakovic, urged parents to try to dissuade their children from participating. ''They're symbolically hurting each other,'' she said, ''and we have seen that the distinction between what's real and what's not can get fuzzy. This is a teachable moment to talk to kids about how their behavior is perceived by others, and whether they care how people perceive them.''

Although the games vary somewhat from school to school, the basic elements are these: Students draw the names of classmates and then try to shoot their prey without getting shot themselves. It is like Secret Santa, except that students exchange volleys of water and plastic foam darts instead of gifts. Phony pizza deliveries, pre-dawn stakeouts and after-work ambushes are all part of the game.

Despite the concerns about Littleton, the games are going on at many schools this spring, from Harvard University to a tiny Catholic high school in Connecticut, school officials say. But in some cases, the students themselves have altered or curtailed this year's editions out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, an instinct for public relations. At Staples, for instance, a rebel group of seniors is boycotting the game and plans a barbecue instead. For entertainment, there will be Capture the Flag.

''To have 90 kids running around town with toy guns -- not that I wouldn't have fun doing it, but I can't make that sound right in my head right now,'' said one of the rebel seniors, Alex Williams-Resnick, who is captain of the ski team and president of the drama club. ''I've never had to deal with having a gun pulled on me. I asked myself, 'Am I throwing it in someone else's face? To do this in the name of fun, am I belittling the actual violence that goes on in the world?' ''

To authorities on violence who contend that video games and other forms of popular entertainment can provoke violent outbursts by troubled young people, the proliferation of assassination games -- and their continuation despite the Colorado massacre -- is alarming and even dangerous. Robert R. Butterworth, a child psychologist in Los Angeles who studies trauma, said he was astonished to hear of the practice, given the current climate.

Dr. Butterworth said such games could help desensitize students to violence. ''We're not going to change the culture for these deviant kids,'' he said, ''but we have to be careful that we don't make it too easy for them to be ignited.''

Many students scoff at that idea. Jay Liner, a senior who is in the third week of an assassination game at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford, said it was patronizing to suggest that 18-year-olds cannot differentiate between a squirt gun and an Uzi. ''Nothing has changed from the week before Littleton,'' he said. ''I don't want to sound un-whatever, but that's the way I feel.''

While some of the changes being made to the games appear to be token, others are significant. At Harvard University, students who live at the Quincy House dormitory called a 19-hour truce in an assassination game that ended May 2 in a furious foam-dart shootout in their courtyard. ''Due to the extraordinary tragedy that occurred,'' organizers told players in an E-mail message sent the night after the Littleton shootings, ''we would ask that people don't carry guns tomorrow.''




At Conard High School in West Hartford, students officially changed the name of this year's game from Assassins to The Game (after Water Wars and Soak were vetoed as too corny). Like Westport's, the Conard game is not sanctioned by the school and is run by students. The rules prohibit shootings on school grounds.
Conard's principal, Chuck Landroche, said he made a rare special announcement over the public-address system to encourage students to discontinue the game in light of Littleton, but to no avail.
After a heated assembly at Sharon High School in Sharon, Mass., about 30 miles south of Boston, seniors canceled their squirt gun assassination game and are thinking about holding a class cookout or taking a trip to a water park. Some students admit that the game had been getting out of hand anyway. Michael Schindelar, the senior class president, said that one year the game resulted in five car accidents.
And at the University of Nevada-Reno, students wore purple ribbons in tribute to the Littleton dead during their assassination game. Also, the game was played differently this year: Instead of firing squirt guns at each other, the students ran up and branded their targets with labels showing the university seal. The students called it Sticker Tag.
Trenton Johnson, the senior class president, said that although some students complained that ''we've become even more politically correct,'' he believed that the campus would remain wary of mock violence and that the assassination game was dead for good.
One of this year's most furious debates over the game unfolded this week here in Westport, a town of 25,000 built around the mouth of the Saugatuck River, where stone mansions with ''Private Residence'' signs are surrounded by bright boutiques and trendy galleries that evoke a Yankee Aspen.
In this haven for overachievers, even the assassination game is exclusive. By tradition at Staples, the town's lone public high school, the game is played only by seniors who have taken Advanced Placement courses, college-level work offered in high school.
A.P. Assassination, which begins at midnight after the final Advanced Placement examination, was designed as a chance for the top students -- most of whom have already been admitted to prestigious colleges -- to bond and blow off steam in the month before graduation.
This year's Nerf war is to begin May 22. The rules require that the guns fire ''nonspherical objects,'' like darts tipped with suction cups.
Opponents of the game say they expect their protest cookout to attract at least 40 of the roughly 90 students who are eligible for the game. Matt Cass, a senior, said students were concerned about how it would look if grown-ups saw them popping out of bushes with toy guns. But more than that, he said, ''we can see that violence is society's problem, and not just an individual's problem.''
Donald R. Cohen, a family therapist who is host of a radio program, ''Kids Are Talking,'' on the high school's station, said students here had reacted very emotionally to the Colorado shootings, in part because Littleton and Westport are similarly upscale.
But supporters of the game say they think that the boycott barbecue represents a ridiculous overreaction. ''We try to put a little intrigue into it, but this is basically tag,'' said Dan Lascar, 18, who hopes to become a physics professor. ''How long have people been playing Cowboys and Indians? If we choose to turn our lives completely around and upside down because of the gunmen, they truly have won.''




Alison Cooke, the yearbook editor and an organizer of this year's game, said that although ''it can look, I guess, somewhat disturbing, possibly,'' it is ''a way to relax and get to know people.''
She said that of the 45 people who had originally signed up, only 10 had dropped out since the Littleton shootings. But she said the assassins, catching the sociable spirit of the year, plan their own cookout after just one of them is left standing.