In essence the game had two parts: the first was your usual tag, where one person would try to tag an individual from a group! But then at a pre-arranged time the tempo changed, and the game became a variation of a mob slaying!
Essentially the person who is tagged becomes the hunted instead of the hunter as the whole group starts chasing him (it was always a him for obvious reasons eg we wanted girlfriends and thus had to act nice to them). And it was not just chasing but we would also have carte blanch to hit and kick and punch and.....(fill in your favorite physical blow) him until he could reach some pre-set point where he would be safe from the group assault!
The thing is that sometimes we would set the safe zone quite far from where we were playing the game.....sometimes even outside school grounds! And then the chase would be on.
And the thing is that all of us (at elast the ones i still know....most of us are in college now) turned out pretty well, and we have been outperforming most people we come across (the reason i put most and not all is because i may get accused of hyperbole). And we are not anti-social or suffering from any 'social evils' because we know it was all a GAME! And we were not picking on anyone....and we did not get 'depressed' if we were too slow and got tagged! Gosh, i know several folks who wanted to get tagged just so they could be chased!
However if we had tried that in the state of Californication we would probably have been expelled and sent to jail for 'cruel and unusual punishment.' After all they would have preferred for us to get some Barbie dolls and play kissy with them!