Considering my knowledge about electronics, I would surely spend a great amount of time trying to figure out whether the collar could be disabled or simply taken off without triggering the explosives. If that wasn't possible I would probably attempt an appeal to the social side of everyone.

Let's see - odds are 41:1 that you're going to die. It is very certain that you 'll have to kill at least one person, and probably a lot more, if you wish to survive the game. The question you have to ask yourself is whether it's really worth surviving with your best friend's blood on your hands.

The battle isn't really against your classmates, it's against those who try to force everyone to kill each other. Having a healthy disrespect for authority, and bearing in mind that in the end, I'm probably going to die anyway, I would try to convince everyone not to play. It's the only possible course of resistance.

Let them blow all our heads off if they want, but they can't force us to become animals and satisfy their perverted thirst for blood. Our blood. We're going to die an eventless and very obviously pointless death that will fail to feed their frenzy. If we submit ourselves to their rules and their perversion, they are sure to repeat the event. If nothing exciting happens, the masses will lose interest, and it becomes pointless to have the contests in the first place.

The real question thus becomes: Are you willing to die for a principle?

Not everyone will be as smart as you. Nor as clear-headed. Fear will play a huge part. Even if nobody wanted to kill anybody, everyone will harbor some distrust towards everyone else, except perhaps for their closest friends. Walk up behind someone who has a gun and is afraid you might kill them, and you're liable to get shot, even if your intentions are good. And when one person dies, everyone will assume that someone has decided to play the game. More fear. More distrust. More people die. The fear and distrust multiply exponentially with each death.

It's entirely feasible that the game could end with nobody having intended to kill anybody, but everyone having killed each other out of percieved self-defense.

So, first, how will you find your classmates? And secondly, how will you convince them to trust you? And third, how will you convince them that it's better to die of an exploding neck ring in 24 hours than to start killing people and have a chance of surviving?

And third, how will you convince them that it's better to die of an exploding neck ring in 24 hours than to start killing people and have a chance of surviving?

I already tried to do that in my original comment. It seems I failed miserably, so in reality, I'm doomed, since I already threw my weapon into the ocean. Oh, well...

Hmm. Maybe I'm being facetious here because I don't want to face this, but I like the Worms strategy of burrowing a worm. You hide, they kill each other. Hopefully, you win.

I /must/ ask whether all the participants are male.

Clarification: I must ask because of Lord of the Flies.

Won't work. You can't hide, because if you hide in one spot too long, eventually that spot becomes a forbidden zone and you explode.

And no, the participants are not all male.

I'd just have to kill everyone... This society has become completely irrational. To allow (read: accept the status quo or be interned) the society to degrade to this level is an indication that fascism has already sucked much of the humanity out of the people so I have a feeling this mindset of kill everyone wouldn't be that distant from the norm. Plus, I'm really competative by default. Sounds a lot like Running Man. Quoth teh Arnold: "I hope you left enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomache!" Sounds like a great RPG. Maybe a little hard to DM, but meh not my job.

I could'nt kill my friends.
Faced that as the only way to survive, i probably would try to follow Ol' Grey's AOA.
In case/when that failed, i would proceed to Eilonwy's solution, for as long as posseble, moving away from the dead zones ;) when needed.
If i at some point doing the above, i loose thrust in my friends ability to withstand the pressure, i HOPE i would have the currage and time to expedite myself to "the other side", useing that as my last resort of hiding.

I believe that I would probably end up 'playing' with a goal of insuring someone else won- That is, I would identify the person who I could best deal with winning, and concentrate on acting in such a manner as to maximize their chance of 'winning'. This would probably entail forming a team if they trusted me that far.

My first instinct would then be to attempt to form a larger group of known people to work together- a larger team would have a better chance, in general, than a smaller team. Of course, the the enlarging of the team would bring up other problems. As long there were non-team members to deal with, it could probably (almost*) be held together fairly decently. The problem occurs when we run out of non-team members. At that point, people from within the team would have to turn against each other, since most people are quite possibly trying to make themselves the survivor (This problem is not encountered at the 2-person team, since the survivor there has already been decided).

It is possible that the team members would agree that at that point, we split up and, after a suitable truce, the fight is back on. That would be the situation that I would tend to prefer, being the more civilized way to handle it, but I don't think it would happen that way- I believe people, even if they had agreed to that sort of arrangement, would very likely get nervous that someone else wouldn't go along with that, and decide that they had to strike before they were struck. (*)This could very well occur even before all non-team members were taken care of, which, unless a full guard was kept against team members (which would tend to accelerate the decay), would probably prove quite detrimental to the overall plan. There are ways to attempt to deal with this (Say, making oneself as useful as possible to as much of the group as possible, and making oneself as small a danger as possible), but that is dangerous, and if it went wrong, then the result would be worse than otherwise.

Anyhow, given that there are very few people I would trust in that situation, any increase in the size of the team would probably be minimal. On the other hand, a larger team would increase the ability to specialize- letting one group try to figure a way out, while the other sections of the team guarded and hunted. While the larger team would probably be the better choice [Indeed, the best choice would be a group consisting of everybody, with one person killed every 23 hours or so- maximizing the amount of manpower able to devote to getting out of there and maximizing the time available to come up with a solution. The problem there would seem to me to be that the people who would be most likely to accept the verdict when it was their time would be those who were best for keeping the group intact, and the stability of the group might very likely fall rapidly after a period (If a way out is not found, then much for the same reason as stated above as the general problem for groups).], I think that unless conditions turned out just so, I would opt for the smaller group.

Anyhow, in short, I believe I would, unless circumstances were quite different than expected, end up 'playing' in order to insure survival (for someone other than myself.) and would probably form some type of team based upon the circumstances
(Of course, given that I am not, nor have been, in a situation like that, it may very well turn out that my behaviour would be completely different, but..)

Preach the word of God till i am killed or accidently/purposefully step into a forbidden zone.

Naturally one would have to hope that everyone has something of a working knowledge of electronics. If not, pick two people who do, and give them immunity. Organize everyone else around; nobody kills anybody else. NOBODY gets to kill anyone. The people all draw straws, and the two electronics technicians play paper-rock-scissors. The person with the longest straw and the technician who loses are up first. The tech must try to disable the bomb collar. Everyone else is at a safe distance, but within earshot of the two. The tech must be narrating what steps he is taking to disarm the bomb-collar as he works, while the other tech notes it. If a mistake is made and the bomb goes off, statistically the tech who tries on the next day's losing person has a better chance of not making the same mistake and successfully disarming the bomb.

If the first try is successful, they've figured it out and can survive without anyone dying. If not, two people have just died, effectively satisfying those in charge of the program; they have become martyrs who were chosen by fate to allow others a better chance at survival.

It really is the only civilized way to do it, provided nobody volunteers. Any defectors can be killed on-site by the governing body (those organizing the civilation) and their collars can be used for experimentation, providing for exemption of a live test-subject.

My solution: I kill everyone else as quickly and expeditiously as possible. I would suffer no guilt as I have been coerced into doing so at risk of my own life. Once I have survived and returned to the mainland, I spend years of my life training to an unbelievable level of black-ninja skills and learning to focus my unbelievably intense anger and rage into a razor-sharp relentless killing drive, and go after the nutbags that cooked up the hideous scheme in the first place, killing them all, returning society to it's civil state, thus saving countless thousands of lives in the future.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or of the one.

I finally got hold of the book and read it.
It was impossible to find it at any Danish library, but the kind book-geek at the service desk got so impressed at my questions back in july, that he ordered it home from the "US head library" or something :-)
I had the nice Red book for 1 month, and read like a mad man, because i figured i had to read it twice to get the most out of it.
And... phuuu... beeing a book, it shure is exiting!
THE most exiting book i have read maybe. I read no more than 4 books a year, so i aint got that much experience or something, but bottom line is:
I _really_ would like to see the book as a movie, directed by Quentin Tarantino...
I got a copy of Batoru rowaiaru but I miss the english voicetrack ;-)

Wouldn't work, at least, not if they are telling each other what they are doing. According to the book, the collars were bugged. The people in charge of the Program heard every word that was said by each of the players and also kept track of each players vital signs and location. If you read the book, you'll learn that one of the characters, Shinji, discovers the collars are bugged when he tries to hack into the Program's computer system.