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Humans vs. Zombies

Students at Goucher College gear up to play a fifth round of the immersive tag game that can last for days or even weeks.

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Even before the Virginia Tech shooting, Goucher's associate dean of students, Emily Perl, said she had received at least a dozen oral and e-mail complaints about the game. On April 16 last year, as soon as she heard about the shooting at Virginia Tech, Perl called Temkin and told him to immediately halt the Zombies game that had been running for about a week. "We don't want students running around with guns today," Perl said she told him. "There was a heightened sense of fragility."

Ultimately, however, Goucher president Sanford Ungar allowed the game to continue after meeting with the Zombies organizers, who presented administrators with a gift-wrapped Nerf gun addressed to his or her "inner child." The gift of the toy guns was an attempt to reinforce the idea that Humans vs. Zombies is a game, rather than an "issue," said Temkin, who came up with the idea. Ungar saw his decision as part of a larger refusal to overreact to what he called the "horrific aberration" at Virginia Tech. As he wrote in Goucher's alumni quarterly last spring: "We will not sign on to trendy, but unproven, electronic alert systems . . . We will not engage in tawdry one-upsmanship to try to claim that we are safer-than-thou . . . And we will not seek to label as 'dangerous' every student who is merely different . . . We must make our decisions with an eye toward striking a delicate balance between security and personal freedom."

Even so, Goucher administrators wanted to provide everyone on campus the chance to voice their thoughts about the game. So Goucher's chaplain scheduled a highly structured public meeting on the eve of the fall games. That day, nearly 100 people crowded into a classroom to listen as Weed explained the game's ability to bring together disparate groups of kids and Temkin waxed poetic. "I know the Zombies game is a really weird, freaky thing," he said. "It's, like, not socially acceptable . . . But we're weird kids with weird pastimes, and we're part of a group. That's a really incredible feeling."

While the opponents acknowledged the game's benefits, they criticized its representation of killing and violence. Jenifer Jennings-Shaud, a member of the graduate education faculty, spoke of arriving on campus one evening and seeing a man with a gun run over the hill. "I was terrified," she said. "Guns scare me. Nerf guns, regular guns. All guns." Then she began to cry. English professor Jeff Myers raised questions about the ethics of "playing war" while an actual war is happening in Iraq. Peace studies instructor Fran Donelan theorized about the possible link between fantasy violence and actual violence. "There have been many studies done about how a society's games reflect the society," she said. "Most of the games in this country revolve around hunting people down and killing them."

A similar conversation -- or argument, in some cases -- continues at several campuses where the game is played. At Maryland and Bowling Green, letters in the student newspapers have criticized Zombies players for their insensitivity to the Virginia Tech victims. At Whitman College in Washington state, game administrators decided toy weapons were too sensitive on a college campus in light of the Virginia Tech shooting and banned Nerf guns during their fall game. Bowling Green will not use the guns this spring. At Butler University in Indiana, administrators have banned Zombies outright. "People are a little edgy," said Butler's dean of student life, Irene Stevens. "Given the Virginia Tech incident, we didn't feel it was appropriate for them to be going around campus 24/7 carrying toy guns." Perl continues to wonder whether she and the other administrators are doing right by allowing the game to continue. "My worst fear is that an outsider will walk onto campus and pull a real gun, not knowing the kids are using fake guns," she said.

When concerns about the game first surfaced last year, Weed took it personally. And even as he's come to understand that students running around on campus with weapons can scare some people, he stands fast in the belief that fear should not prevent fun. "Nerf guns are so innocuous," he said. "It's the symbolism of it that scares people. It's people letting fear run their lives."

Weed was 14 when the April 1999 Columbine High School shooting occurred. In the wake of the Colorado massacre, administrators at the private school Weed attended mandated that one door in each set of double doors be locked. "I guess it was to prevent a big group of armed people from coming through the door, but it was ridiculous," he said. "I think they realized they couldn't do anything, so it was a symbolic action to make parents feel better."

Temkin's public school instituted lockdown drills after Columbine, in which the students would turn off the lights and sit against the wall where the door was, so if a shooter looked through the window of the door, he'd think the classroom was empty. When Weed and Temkin recall these measures, it's almost as if they view the adults' attempts to ensure their total safety as naive, sensationalist and a bit silly -- even childish. They and the other moderators say they are unwilling to allow what they see as a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible event impinge on their personal freedom. "How has the Virginia Tech shooting affected me personally?" Temkin asked. "It's reduced my individual liberty as a student because of the reaction to it. I obviously think that school shootings are a tragedy . . . But I just don't see how they connect to our game of tag. Making that kind of connection is pure political correctness -- the elevation of feeling good over doing right."

Coincidentally, Goucher's spring 2008 game begins on April 16, the one-year anniversary of the rampage at Virginia Tech. Despite their rejection of a link between the game and campus violence, the organizers have decided to make the first day gun-free, out of deference to those who were killed.

AT APPROXIMATELY 10 A.M. ON OPENING GAME DAY LAST NOVEMBER, the first of 160 humans at Goucher perished when sophomore Erika Cardona rushed up to one of her friends saying, "Dude, I know who the O.Z. is!" When the guy said, "Who?" she said, "Me!" and tagged him. Then she took his ID number to record her kill at the Web site the mods had created.

Cardona had the most kills of any zombie during the previous spring's game, and she's a dedicated player, which is why the mods chose her to be the O.Z. (in general, women make up about one-third of the Zombies players). During two summers in high school, she participated in roving games of Capture the Flag on the streets of Manhattan, and she once attended a mass pillow fight in Union Square. "I realized early on that it was kind of important to have a sense of play outside work and schoolwork," said Cardona.

For the two nights before the game began, she dreamed of running around and tagging kids. "It's definitely taking me over," she said. After tagging her first victim, she continued to stalk the campus disguised as a human, with a blue bandanna on her leg and her Nerf Reactor in her hand.