COVER STORY: Humans vs. Zombies

By Joe Scott, News & Record (GoTriad)
March 1, 2010

At exactly midnight on March 17, college students Jathan Pugh and Guy Gunn were “infected” with a virus that turned them into brain-hungry zombies.

The following morning, they spread the infection to 17 students on UNCG’s campus.

Forty-eight hours later, the number of zombies rose to 100.

Now, there are students who refuse to walk on campus alone or without a “gun.” Nate Sykes and Sean Norona thought they were safe carrying their weapons from their residence hall to class, but a zombie snuck up behind, turning them into zombies, too.

“I prefer being a zombie anyway,” Sykes says. “It’s way less stressful.”

This is not the beginning of the apocalypse or even a scene from a horror movie. It’s just another day for the UNCG students who play Humans vs. Zombies (or HvZ), a live-action, role-playing game that takes place on college campuses nationwide.

In 2005, college students Brad Sappington and Chris Weed founded the game while attending Goucher College in Maryland. Since then, the game has spread to hundreds of campuses across the United States and internationally.

UNCG joined the game last year. For one week each semester, students (and nonstudents) combine the interactive adventure of video games with a real-life game of tag. And it’s quickly becoming a phenomenon.

In the 2009 fall semester, 380 local students and nonstudents played the game as individuals or in teams. This semester, 445 players are registered for the second game, which began March 17 and will end Friday.

To the outside world, HvZ might seem a little odd. But those who participate in the game say it’s a perfect way to exercise, network with other students on campus and, more importantly, have fun.

“It’s an adventure that I think everyone has dreamed of,” says Alyssa Wharton, one of the UNCG game’s five moderators. “Who doesn’t want to know how long they would survive in the zombie apocalypse?

“They think their life is so boring, and it’s like, y’know, suddenly you have an adventure, something to look forward to.”

The rules of the game

The objective of the game is for the human players to avoid getting tagged by zombies. Humans may defend themselves with plastic Nerf guns and grenades (balled-up socks) while completing various missions. But if they are tagged or “eaten” by the zombies, they must join the walking dead. If less than 15 humans survive the final mission of the game, the zombies win.

The game is not allowed inside campus buildings, such as dorms and classrooms, or moving vehicles.

As for the zombies, if they get shot with a Nerf bullet or hit with a sock (the official weapons used in the game), they are temporarily stunned for 15 minutes, and if they don’t “eat” a human every 48 hours, they die permanently.

A Web site http://uncg.hvzsource.com tracks which students are part of the human resistance, the zombie horde or the deceased.

Wharton and current moderators (or mods) Matt Bounds, Lily Penny, A.J. Pendergrass and Adam Collis keep the most recent game going by enforcing the rules, establishing missions that human players must accomplish and making sure school faculty members are aware of the game. The latter is especially vital, as it keeps administrators and campus police from accidentally thinking their school is under attack by a ragtag terrorist group with plastic guns, something that happened during a 2008 game at Alfred University, a private college in New York.

“We want students to be able to play games like this and have fun,” says Checka Linewall, head of student life at UNCG. “But now that we live in a post-Virginia Tech America, we also want to make sure that everyone on campus is aware of what’s happening so that everyone feels safe.”

“One time, someone called the campus police on a student because he didn’t know what was going on, but they (the police) already knew what was going on,” says Pendergrass, the self-described “rules lawyer” for the UNCG game.

How to survive the zombie apocalypse

The most common way for a human player to become a zombie is to be tagged by a zombie while walking (or running) across campus.

During the first game in 2009, neither Pendergrass nor Wharton survived to the end, but fellow mod Collis made it through the final mission, a race against the zombies to an imaginary helicopter that would fly the humans to safety.

He notes that his secret was to eat almost nothing but frozen pizzas that he prepared in his dorm so he could avoid the entrances of the school cafeteria, a hot-spot for zombies hungry for human prey. And because zombies swarm the campus during the times just before and after classes, Collis’ other secret was to be a better student.

“I had to pretty much adjust the way I did things,” says Collis, a sophomore trombone performance and music education major. “I got to class earlier, and I stayed in the School of Music longer, and it gave me more time to practice because I was there all day.”

Pendergrass says that the biggest mistake most human players made during the first game was to take their considerable Nerf arsenal and set out to hunt zombies.

“A lot of humans would be like, ‘Hey, let’s go hunt zombies,’ which didn’t make a lot of sense,” Pendergrass says. “I had a guy chase me twice, and he would keep shooting me, and I was like, ‘Whatever.’ Then this one time I saw him, I set up a trap for him, and he got caught.”

Another way to become a zombie is to ditch class. Players police their friends and classmates, and if the mods find out that anyone skipped class to avoid getting caught by zombies, they are automatically turned into one.

“If people are skipping class, and they’re in the game, it makes the game look bad,” Collis says. “And if it makes academics suffer, the school won’t let it continue, so we want to make sure students go to class.

“This is secondary to school. First of all, we’re students. Second, this game is just a way to have fun and expel some energy.”

The Brotectors

UNCG’s HvZ game has several teams among the human resistance, including the Templars, the Spencenauts and Foust Force, the two latter teams named after Spencer and Mary Foust dorms.

But only one team made it to the end of the fall 2009 game with zero casualties: The Brotectors, a trash-talking quartet of “bros” who wear aviator sunglasses and whose on-campus antics have earned equal numbers of detractors and admirers among HvZ players. They’re the untouchables.

During a particular mission, Pendergrass says that he and a group of zombies once chased the Brotectors to the school cafeteria.

“They had a one-minute head start, and they just walked, and we followed them, and we were right on their backs following them,” Pendergrass says. “We all walked over to the caf, they turned a corner, and then we all turned, and they were gone. Just gone.”

Stories such as these give the Brotectors a hearty laugh.

“It’s like a giant game of telephone,” says Christopher Robin Knorr, a nonstudent who created the Brotectors. “We’ve had people walk up to us and say, ‘I’ve heard you’ve each taken on 30 zombies at a time,’ and that’s no way possible.”

Matt Virgil says: “I’ve heard rumors that we’ve transferred to different schools to play HvZ games there.”

“That we were born with Nerf guns in our hands,” Matthew Grossman says. “Absolutely ridiculous.”

They and “undercover” member Drew Decain sit in their lair, a rental house just off campus. Surrounded by empty alcohol bottles, food containers and milkshake cups from Cook Out, the Brotectors’ bombed-out living room is not the result of a zombie attack but of a party three days earlier. They also have an arsenal of large automatic guns by Buzz Bee, Nerf’s largest competitor in the foam dart arms race, that would make Rambo jealous.

“HvZ makes life more interesting because everything you’re going to do on campus becomes an adventure,” Grossman says. “Most of the time, you get lost in the day-to-day activities of going to work or going to class or going home and relaxing, but with this game, every time you go to class or to Taco Bell for a burrito at night, there’s danger and adrenaline.”

The Brotectors quickly made a name for themselves during the first HvZ game by being the only team to show up at the first informational rules meeting with weapons in tow and decked out in zombie-fighting duds. Knorr, who called himself “Prince Booty,” wore cowboy boots and aviator sunglasses; Grossman, or “Mr. Clean,” wore a brown leather vest with no shirt underneath; and Virgil, whose nickname is unprintable, wore a cowboy hat and a white T-shirt.

At the meeting, the Brotectors talked a big game and offered free protection services to any human player who needed to be escorted across campus safely. But they soon had to discontinue their service because they were getting too many fake requests by zombies who wanted to tag them. One zombie even waited outside the door of their house, hoping to catch them as they walked to school.

“Other people have said that because we’re the most iconic human resistance out there that the zombies just wanted to get us that bad,” Knorr says. “And some people just can’t handle the game aspect of it.”

No doubt about it, Knorr and his fellow Brotectors take the game seriously. Knorr went as far as modifying the foam darts on his Buzz Bee gun to keep it from jamming. And after the zombies tagged his girlfriend, he even avoided making contact with her around campus until the end of the game.

“There’s a couple of times in that last game where I was sure we were dead,” Knorr says. “I wanted my brainchild to win, so I was so nervous. I was shaking sometimes because I didn’t want to get caught.”

As of Monday morning, the Brotectors had a few close calls during the current game, but their flawless record is intact. However, because of their notoriety among zombies, they’re not so sure they can repeat their initial success through the final mission on March 27.

“I actually got a death threat when I was on the radio a couple of weeks ago,” says Virgil who hosts a show on WUAG (103.1 FM). “Someone called in and asked if I was in the Brotectors and said they were going to remember my time slot when they became a zombie.”

Knorr says, “I just feel like the zombies want it more this time.”

LEARN MORE

For more about Humans vs. Zombies, visit http://humansvszombies.org or http://uncg.hvzsource.com.

(Click here to see the original source page.)