The Quick and the (Un)dead

When Nick Moen '16 is asked to shoot a reporter at point-blank range, he agrees with less hesitation than one might expect. He brandishes the fine Nerf blaster he's packing, which is loaded with an alarming number of darts and tricked out according to his personal specifications.

The reporter regrets the question.

"The rule," Sam Chapman '15 chimes in helpfully, "is that you can only use guns you would be willing to shoot yourself in the face with."

Ah. You don't want to hurt the zombies, just stun them. So you can get away. Because if they don't feed on a human for 48 hours, they die. And if they all die, the humans win. (Which hardly ever happens. [But it could.])

This, of course, is Humans vs. Zombies, a campus-wide game of tag and a Whitman tradition. The game is organized, plotted and executed every fall and spring by a team of seven or eight student moderators like Chapman and Moen.

Moen shoots the reporter, who shrieks somewhat more girlishly than she intends to. The dart lands with the force of a snapped rubber band; if she had been a zombie facing off with Moen's human, she'd have been stunned, unable to infect anybody with her undead germs for 15 minutes.

Every semester, more than 50 students at a time-up to 250 a few years ago, in Chapman and Moen's recollections-play for a week. Everyone starts as a human except the Original Zombie (OZ), who skulks around infecting people in secret; newly-minted zombies must wear headbands identifying them as zombies, then connive to eat (tag) humans, while the humans try to repel (with Nerf blasters or well-aimed socks) the zombies. Gameplay never really stops (except in safe spaces, like during class), but all the players come together six out of seven days to complete organized missions that move them through increasingly complex scenarios to the final battle, which takes place on a Saturday.

"This is my eighth game," says Chapman, adding that Whitman's is the second-oldest game of HvZ in the country, after Goucher College, where the game originated. "I got involved because I wanted to write the plots-we have characters, too: I was a zombie Marcus Whitman in the first one, and walked around tagging humans while wearing a coonskin cap."

Moen, on the other hand, arrived as a first year with the same last name as a HvZ player who had just graduated. Organizers who thought he was the graduate's younger brother (no relation in the end) invited him to play.

"HvZ was the way I met a number of people I'm still friends with," Moen says. "It got me out of my room first semester freshman year."

Moderators gather in the summer before the school year begins to conceptualize the HvZ games for the coming semesters. This spring's plot has a rough "humans vs. the Borg" feel to it-the zombies aren't just undead but are being assimilated into a computerized hive mind.

"Typically, we have a general idea," says Moen, "then we develop the gameplay mechanism. That way, the [experience] is designed from the gameplay perspective first, then the plot is written to fit."

Chapman's all-time favorite was last fall's Four Horseman of the Apocalypse-themed game. "I was Death," he says. "Someone else was War, then Pestilence and Famine."

"That was a really cool one, intersecting story and gameplay," agrees Moen. "People really got the connection between the plot and the day-to-day missions. It comes down to how well we managed to translate the themes."

Chapman says, "We bill it as a uniting experience, a way to make friends outside your dorm. Having someone's back is a good way to get to know them. And one of the biggest parts of the culture is telling stories."

Perhaps because of this storytelling impulse, there is a lot of overlap in interest between HvZ, the fencing club and the Renaissance Faire committee, according to these two mods. But any student is welcome to play, as long as he or she can commit to what Chapman says is the most important rule:

"Don't be a [jerk]."