More than 300 students played in the 5th annual assassin game with a newly created app. As of press time, only 45 players remain.
Moderated by James Kanoff ’17 and Justin Rose ’17, the game started just after 8 a.m. May 22.
The goal of the game is to be the last surviving player. Students can “assassinate” their peers by putting their hand to their specified target’s back or head and saying “bang.”
They must record their “kill” with a video posted on the HW Assassin app and have their target confirm as well.
“We only have about a week to finish the game so we are trying to add rules to make the game go faster,” Kanoff said.
The moderators attempted to speed up the game by eliminating students without kills. On May 24, they published a “List of Shame” informing participants of a deadline to get their first kill.
They also planned to remove all safe zones and create special kills using water guns or throwing socks. However, they have been met with pushback from the administration.
They announced that the library, Kutler center and in-session classrooms would remain safe spaces, like they were in last year’s game.
After controversial kills, they also released rules that students could not “trespass into someone else’s home to kill them” and that they “may not kill someone meeting with a teacher or dean.” See the story on A1 for more details on the controversy.
One of the remaining players, Taner Vickery ’17, said students bonded during the game.
“I really feel like this game brings our school together as a community,” Vickery said. “I have talked to people who I’ve never talked to before during my three years at the Upper School.”
Because the new app was not approved by Apple, students downloaded the application “TestFlight” in order to use the unpublished app.
“We knew the old app was going to break in the winter because it was using a service called Parse and it went out of business,” Rose said
However, their new app has had problems as well. There have been glitches when publishing the videos of kills and confirming them, recording video and scrolling through the feed. Kanoff and Rose are working on fixing the bugs and speeding up the app.