Zombies oust humans again

The carnage is over. The zombies won. ‘Humans vs. Zombies,’ a campus-wide game of tag played at… The carnage is over. The zombies won. ‘Humans vs. Zombies,’ a campus-wide game of tag played at colleges across the country, wrapped up another successful game at Pitt last week. While tabling for the event in Towers before the game started on Feb. 1, Shane Price, the group’s vice president, said the game provided a fun escape for students. ‘It breaks up the monotony of walking to classes,’ said Price. ‘It becomes fun.’ Business manager Tim Cogan agreed. ‘It’s also entertaining to shoot strangers with Nerf guns and for them to be OK with it,’ he said. The point of the game is to stay human as long as possible. All players except three original zombies start out as humans and try to beat back the growing zombie horde. Humans carry Nerf guns, balled-up socks and foam swimming noodles in place of shotguns and chainsaws to immobilize their zombie rivals. When a zombie has been tagged, he cannot turn a human into a zombie for 15 minutes. If this were a real zombie attack, it would be like shooting the legs off the zombie and waiting for him to crawl up the stairs to your hiding place to eat you. Zombies tag humans when they firmly touch the human, and they must do so once every 48 hours or starve to death. The human must then turn over his corpse for consumption by the zombie and then succumb to the zombie horde. Cogan said that games usually run from 10 days to two weeks. ‘After two weeks players get a little tired of playing,’ he said. This semester, unlike previous ones, the club plans on running two games. Price pointed out that people who buy Nerf guns for the game like to get more use out of them. The second game, planned for later in the spring when the weather clears up, will appropriately benefit the charity Feeding America. ‘It would be nice to find a business that would give a certain amount of money per player,’ said Price. He also said players would try to find sponsors, and that he hoped the charitable aspect of the game would draw more players. ‘It doesn’t have to take any more time than you want it to,’ said Price. He added that if a player wanted, he could just carry a few old socks around to toss at zombies and play on his way to class. Cogan said that this game had drawn only 60 players because of the snowy, cold weather, but that they can have upward of 200 people play a normal game. The club would like to expand its activities, said Price.’ Last semester they played capture the flag every weekend on the Cathedral lawn until it got too cold, and this semester they want to show a zombie movie. Pitt student Shanna Murphy joined the game in 2006 after hearing about it from a friend at another school. However, she is no longer involved with the game. ‘Since Pittsburgh is home of the zombies, I thought it would be really appropriate,’ said Murphy. Two students, Brad Sappington and Chris Weed, invented the game at Goucher College in Baltimore in 2005. The game quickly spread to dozens of other colleges, high schools and military bases, according to its official Web site. Depending on the school, the games can be complicated or simple. Some schools write stories and use plots as backdrops for their games, while others plan missions for their players to make things more intense. For example, Goucher’s storyline involves a meteor with alien microbes to turn its students into flesh-devouring zombies. A mission could include having a group of humans ‘securing’ a location and then being rewarded with bonus points or anti-zombie vaccinations. Some schools make these missions mandatory, but Pitt does not. Murphy said the game is usually played at smaller campuses. She’s not sure it works out as well on city campuses like Pitt’s. ‘I only heard that someone almost got pushed into traffic,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if they actually were, but I could definitely see that happening. Some people got a little too into it.’ Murphy said that she was interested in zombies and what might happen in an actual attack. ‘It is really scary to play the game because you’re being hunted down,’ she said. ‘I was recognizable ‘mdash; an easy target.’ Price said there have been some injuries during the course of the game, but all players have been required to sign waivers since the game became an official club registered with Pitt last spring. ‘They haven’t blamed anyone for it or anything. Everyone seems to realize that these things can happen. They just visit the hospital (if necessary) and then move on,’ he said in an e-mail. Cogan added that most injuries were caused by normal rough-housing. ‘Mostly the normal bruises will happen when you trip or get a door closed on you,’ he said. Although ‘Humans vs. Zombies’ is open to any Pitt students and faculty members, the game requires that players spend at least several hours on campus a day, so the majority of players live on campus. ‘Most of the people playing now are the people who started,’ added Cogan. Some of those players have attained legendary status within the game’s community. ‘Everyone’s heard about me,’ joked Cogan. He said that in the spring 2007 game a player who managed to stay human throughout the game earned the nickname ‘Captain America’ because of a giant blue noodle and his efforts to protect other human players. ‘He ran around shuttling people places,’ said Price. Price added, ‘There was a guy named Twitchy. Because he was very twitchy.’