Humans vs. Zombies game comes to end

The walking dead rose and conquered at Southeast Missouri State University. The biannual Humans vs. Zombies game concluded at midnight March 24 at the University Center with the humans losing to the zombie horde.

HVZ is a game played between two teams of students. The humans are armed with Nerf guns, dubbed foam blasters by the players, and balled-up socks. They try to escape from the zombies, who bring humans into their numbers by tagging them. The game has grown in popularity since it was started in 2005 at Goucher College in Baltimore, and is now played across the nation.

HVZ starts with a single zombie. Unable to control his or her terrible hunger, that original zombie must feed on friends, classmates and neighbors. The only thing stopping a zombie from infecting a human is a quick and steady throw of a sock ball, which will stun the undead for 15 minutes, long enough for a human to make a hasty retreat.

"The second game we played I forgot my socks. I had to walk from Towers all the way to Grauel," said Cassi Daugette, a mission writer and administrator for the Southeast chapter of HVZ. "It was the scariest experience of my life."

According to Daugette, most of the people who fall prey to zombies are on their way to class.

"It's frightening, especially when some of the zombies hide in bushes," Daugette said.

Fear isn't the only emotion that fills the humans during the course of the game. HVZ is rife with drama. The game causes friends and loved ones to turn on each other. Boyfriends will attack girlfriends, brothers chase their sisters and former allegiances are shattered. Just stepping outside of a safe zone, like a dormitory or the library, is a daunting prospect as the human numbers start to dwindle.

"That's when despair starts settling in and you worry about going to your classes more and more each day and whether or not you want to go to the mission, and you will anyway, but you just wonder if you're going to survive," HVZ administrator Joshua Peters said.

Regular zombies aren't all that the dwindling human survivors have to face. Special infected zombies have been known to roam the battlefield and have their own set of abilities to overwhelm the humans. The game on March 24 featured what the humans described as the juggernaut, a special zombie that could only shamble at walking speeds, but had the ability to act as a mobile re-spawn point by tagging in its fallen undead friends.

"Instead of stun time, they could just tag the juggernaut and be back in the game," Peters said. "And there's only one gun that can kill it."

Only certain special zombies can be taken out with weapons. Regular zombies can't be killed by the conventional foam blaster or balled-up sock. The only way to take one of the undead out permanently is to cut it off its food source. Once that zombie is dead, they are out of the game for good.

"They can be starved, which means they didn't get a tag for 48 hours," Peters said.

Once a zombie tags a human, the human must surrender a code that the zombie enters online. This code registers the human as being turned to the undead team. Up to three zombies at a time can feed on a single human, sustaining them all and keeping them in the game.

Though the humans didn't win this semester, the forces of the living have beaten the zombies before at Southeast. For the human team to win, either all the zombies have to starve to death or the humans have to triumph in the final mission. The goals in the final mission can be as simple as surviving until rescue arrives, but sometimes the humans have harder objectives to overcome while they hold off the zombies. Different game modifiers, like special zombies, are decided ahead of time by the game administrators and mission writers.

"One year we said one human has to beat Minesweeper on the hardest difficulty level in order for the humans to survive," Daugette said. "They survived for 15 minutes and they couldn't beat it, and they all died."

According to Daugette, it's typical for the zombies to win.

Even at other universities there is no safe haven. HVZ is played at more than 650 colleges worldwide. Truman State University senior Tyler George said that when you see the horde coming at you, there is only one thing you can do.

"You just have to stop, close your eyes and brace yourself for the inevitable impact," George said.