King of the hill (game)

The way the king can be removed from the hill depends largely on the rules determined by the players before the game starts.

Ordinarily, pushing is the most common way of removing the king from the hill, and punching and kicking are not allowed.

[citation needed] "King of the kill" is a method of play in airsoft and the woodsball variant of paintball, as well as an archetype of various first-person shooter videogames.

The name of the game has become a common metaphor for any sort of competitive zero-sum game or social activity in which a single winner is chosen from among multiple competitors, and a hierarchy is devised by the heights the competitors achieve on the hill (what Howard Bloom called "the pecking order" in his book The Lucifer Principle), and where winning can only be achieved at the cost of displacing the previous winner.

The concept of king of the hill in video gaming was introduced by Core War players, who would pit their warriors against each other in a fight for survival.