Killing zombies on campus just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.
Students at Bowling Green State University once carried Nerf guns for a week each semester, shooting the zombies before the creatures could tag them. Participants were seen by most bystanders as nerdy but harmless kids who liked role-playing.
But these days, bright plastic Nerf guns bring panicked phone calls to campus officials. Last fall the game freaked out several students and parents, who feared that the Nerf shooters might be on real rampages.
Administrators called in the game’s organizers and asked whether they could replace the fake guns with something that looked less like a weapon. The compromise: Players now throw marshmallows.
Which, let’s face it, just isn’t the same.
“There wasn’t that thrill this game, because the Nerf guns do add an aspect to it,” says Peter Geldes, a junior at the university and president of BG Undead, the student group that runs the game. “It’s more realistic that people would use a gun as opposed to throw something at a zombie.”
Mr. Geldes is one of more than 1,000 students who have signed a petition calling for the toy guns to be reinstated.
Games like Humans vs. Zombies have been popular on college campuses for decades. A game called Assassin requires players to sneak up on opponents and pretend to kill them.
“Colleges are kind of perfect for this sort of thing,” says Ian S. Bogost, an assistant professor of literature, communication, and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies gaming cultures. “They’re closed, well-defined spaces, and people living on them have a whole lot of free time.”
But the games have been under new scrutiny ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he says, scrutiny that has intensified after recent incidents of campus violence.
Jill Carr, Bowling Green State’s dean of students, attended meetings with leaders of the game this spring about zombie rules of engagement.
“Our core message was,” she says, “Could they understand how someone in our current societal situation could have some fear, or maybe a sense of panic, in thinking there was a person on campus with a weapon?”
The dialogue continues, but Ms. Carr acknowledges that it’s very difficult to balance the need for fun with the reality of fear.
Humans vs. Zombies was invented by students at Goucher College in 2005, and, like any good zombie invasion, it quickly spread. Students on at least 15 other campuses have staged contests. The largest match so far drew more than 1,000 players. The game starts with one zombie, who infects human players by tagging them and turning them into zombies. It ends when either all the players are zombies or a group of humans has survived for a set amount of time.
The best thing about the game, players say, is the thrill of worrying that a zombie might be around every corner. But recent reactions to the game expose a new level of anxiety on campuses.
A zombie contest happened to be under way at Goucher on the day last April that a Virginia Tech student walked through a classroom building on his campus, gunning down students and professors. Since then some people at Goucher have insisted the game should stop.
But Goucher’s president, Sanford J. Ungar, has taken a stand in support of campus zombies.
“We must be careful not to overreact,” he wrote in Goucher’s alumni magazine. He even agreed to participate in the latest game, held last week. In one of the game’s missions, students on the human team had to walk the president from his office to his residence without letting a zombie tag him.
One reason for that good will has been the close relationship between game leaders and administrators from the start.
Students take pains to clearly mark participants (humans wear bright bandannas on their arms; zombies wear them on their heads), so that nonplayers don’t get caught in the cross-fire. And leaders have devised rules that forbid playing in classrooms, libraries, dining halls, or other areas where doing so might cause disruptions. Organizers also emphasize safety: They forbid realistic-looking weapons, for fear that a passing campus police officer might mistakenly take action.
At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln last month, a game of Assassin led administrators to ban Nerf guns. One student had walked into a classroom wearing a ski mask and brandishing a toy gun. The campus police removed him from the classroom and questioned him intensely, but no charges were filed.
“He had the appearance of what one might see on CNN or Al-Jazeera of a terrorist,” says Douglas S. Zatechka, director of university housing. “How does one know if this person is participating in the Assassin game or if they have a real gun and are intent on shooting someone?”
Sure, the gun was Day-Glo orange, but Mr. Zatechka says he’s heard reports of gun manufacturers producing weapons that are made to look like toys.
“Everybody’s nerves are frayed,” he says.
Ten years ago he would have shrugged off Nerf guns. “I’ve been in the housing business 43 years,” he says, “and this is a different era than when I got into it. What we used to chalk up to a goofy college-kid prank, we chalk it up to a huge danger to the students.”
Fans of Human vs. Zombies and other hunt-and-shoot games are fighting to preserve an activity they say provides a unique bonding experience.
“If someone saves your proverbial life from zombies,” says Max Temkin, a junior at Goucher and one of the organizers of Humans vs. Zombies there, “you’re their friend for the rest of your time in college.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 54, Issue 33, Page A1
