Last semester, Tech’s campus was struck not only by the H1N1 virus but also by the Humans vs. Zombies (HvZ) game (with common symptoms being yellow bandanas and bags filled with socks and marshmallows and increased paranoia) during dead week.
“HvZ is a game where you have 2 factions, horde and resistance. The horde represents the zombies and the resistance represents the humans. It starts out with pretty much everyone being human except for one original zombie. The original zombie’s goal is to assemble a horde of zombies by converting humans into zombies and eventually leaving no humans,” said Jack Morgan, third-year CS and one of the administrators of the game.
The game lasts a week and the human’s objective is to survive the entire week and complete the final mission which is to evacuate the city. The zombie’s objective is to convert everyone into zombies.
“Humans want to survive; the zombies don’t want them to,” said Sammi Immele, first-year CHBE and administrator of the game.
“The point of the game is to have zombies win, so then everybody wins.” said Micah Cleveland, first-year CS, and administrator.
There are missions for the zombies and humans to complete. These act as side objectives that each of the factions can complete and they contribute to the plot of the game.
Completion of the missions can change the rules of the game to favor the successful factions.
“For example, one mission the zombies completed gave them a shorter stun time while a mission the human’s completed gave them extra safe zones,” said Jessie Newman, first-year CS and player.
Zombies convert the humans into more zombies by tagging them. Humans can stun zombies by throwing socks or marshmallows.
Stunning prevents zombies from tagging humans for roughly fifteen minutes.
During the first game roughly one hundred seventy participated. Players can be identified by their yellow bandanas.
Humans wear their bandanas around their arm or leg and zombies wrap their bandanas around their head or around their neck when they are stunned.
Aside from the players there are admins who plan and run the game. They are also in charge of the website at and post videos of the game to the HvZ Youtube account.
Moderators play the game along with the players and help the administrators make decisions based on the rules during the game.
Non-player characters (NPCs) act as characters in the plot during the game.
“Two groups are responsible for starting the game. One of the groups came up with the idea from the water gun assassin’s game during homecoming and got the administration on board,” Morgan said.
“The other group came up with the idea from internet searches on zombies and started a Facebook group and recruited people to play,” Cleveland said.
The two groups met which lead to the HvZ dead week game.
“Pretty much nothing went as planned, but the first game was basically a trial to make sure that things would be working and for future games,” said Tyler Weiss, fourth-year ME and administrator to the game.
The group has plans to run a second game during Feb.
“While people had criticisms for the game and various parts they did not like, pretty much everyone wants to play again and many people who didn’t play are interested in playing in the next game,” Cleveland said.
The administrators are planning for more people during the next game and should be better prepared for the game.
“A lot of crazy things happened. The teams organized mailing lists, texting lists, and facebook groups to organize and plan for missions,” Weiss said.
“One of the zombies went so far as to make a fake facebook of human playing the game but didn’t have a facebook, and joined the human resistance group that was limited only to humans. Another attempted to spoof an administrator account to get the humans to come out fake a mission,” Cleveland said.
Some of the changes that the admins plan on making include allowing a limited usage of Nerf guns, along with marshmallows and socks, during the missions.