Senior Assassin is up and running for the Class of 2019 at WHS with a unique addition to the game. Senior Matt Karle and a few of his classmates collaborated to create a website to help the game stay organized.

In past years of Senior Assassin, there has not been any website to keep the game organized. When Karle came along, things changed.

“To be perfectly honest, if somebody asked me to organize a game without the tools that I have built for myself and this website, I wouldn’t really be sure how to go about it,” Karle said. “[I can] imagine it would be a lot of Facebook messaging with people, and I think this is a nice way to put it all in one place and streamline the process.”

Not just anybody has the skills to create such a complex project, but Karle is a student of the Honors Applied Computer Science (HACS) class at WHS.

“It’s considered the ‘Post-AP-Comp-Sci class,’” Karle said. “The prerequisite is that you have already gone through the AP, and it’s for kids who are looking for a more project-based computer science course. Part of what we do is we come up with ideas like these.”

For Karle and the other contributors to the website, the feeling of confusion and wonder is what drove this project up from the ground.

“One of the challenges of putting together the website was none of us really knew how it worked in the past,” Karle said. “None of us really knew through what means they organized the game or even if everyone was really clear on the rules of how it’s played. I’ve always been peripherally aware that this game is played, some senior sets it up and the rest of them go wild, but that was part of the challenge.”

When Karle set out to create this website, he was hoping for a simple, easy way for game players to access all of the necessary game information.

“What we tried to put together was a website that anybody can just go in and make their own game, and any other person can join their game,” Karle said. “Ideally, the website handles the organization and randomization where players are assigned to a target anonymously. Hopefully, the website does all of the complicated work, and then once gameplay starts, we let the players report their kills.”

Along with how the website works and gameplay, there is an element of trust that comes with any type of competitive game. Karle and his group found a way to control the game as well as keep the aspect of trust.

“My idea was that we would create a confirmation system where once you report a kill, both the moderator and the target are notified that this has gone down. If either one of them says it’s true then it’s considered a done deal. This is to avoid dishonesty,” Karle said. “When the round is ending, I let everyone know that after a certain point, every kill that was on the list was just going to be considered true if people didn’t come up to me and say it wasn’t, because that’s just how I wanted to do it.”

So far, players have responded positively.

“It’s been pretty helpful. It tells me my target and my safety item and how long I have to get my target,” senior Keefer Li said.

According to seniors using Karle’s website, the accessibility of the website is certainly a plus.

“It’s accessible from pretty much anywhere,” senior Michael Maurer said. “Things can be updated and let everyone know all at one time compared to people hearing down the grapevines. It also keeps things totally anonymous.”

A website like this takes a lot of preparation, but Karle and his team had limited time.

“Earlier in the year, I made a website which is called cleanify.me,” Karle said. “That took like two to three months to complete. Essentially, we were trying to do a comparable task in an eighth of the time, which obviously had challenges. It completely cut out any possibility of an on-paper phase. We didn’t really get to do any planning. We just dove right into it.”

Karle’s website cleanify.me allows users to link their Spotify account and make any of their playlists completely non-explicit. For more information, visit http://www.cleanify.me/.

Karle hopes that the websites he has created continue to be used both at WHS as well as beyond Wayland.

“I think that part of the purpose we set out to achieve when we made the website was to make it reusable, [and] not just at Wayland,” Karle said. “A big part of our goal was to have it for posterity here. If possible, it would be amazing if it could spread to other towns.”

Karle’s website can be found at http://assassinga.me/