Andrew Birkhead Guest Writer

You may have noticed students over the past week wearing bandanas, shooting NERF guns and cursing aloud. Don’t be afraid, it’s only the Apocalypse. That’s right, zombies have taken hold of our campus. Fellow mortals, this is Vassar’s version of a souped-up game of tag called Humans versus Zombies.

The game was first played at Goucher College in fall 2005. The student organizers did not have the school’s permission nor help from the College’s faculty. The Vassar chapter of the game was also created independently by Royce Drake ’10 and Zach Pattison-Gordon ’10.

During the competition, two types of players are pitted against one another—humans wearing red bandanas on their heads or necks, and zombies sporting red bandanas on their arm. The game starts with one master zombie and the rest of the players as the humans. When a zombie physically tags a human, that human “dies” and is out of the game for one hour. However, after that hour, the dead human is reborn as a zombie.

Humans cannot tag the zombies, or else their flesh will come in contact with the infected zombies. Instead, to defend themselves they must shoot the zombies with NERF guns, throw balled up socks, or hit them with marshmallows. Attacking a zombie stuns it for 15 minutes. The only way to kill a zombie is to “starve” it of human captives for 48 hours.

The organizers give each human player three index cards, on which an I.D. number is printed. After a “kill,” the zombie must fill out a “kill form” with one of these cards attached. He can give the other two cards to fellow zombies to reset their starvation timer.

According to the student organizers’ Facebook group, no tagging is allowed in academic buildings, administrative offices, dorm rooms, bathrooms, the Library, or the purchasing sections of the All-College Dining Center or The Retreat.

The game of tag will only end once all zombies have starved to death or until all humans have been consumed.

According to Max Brooks—author of the ficticious handbook, The Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003—NERF guns, socks and marshmellows are not the best weapons to eliminate a zombie. Machetes and heavy blunt objects are the preferred method. But according to e-mails from Campus Security early last week, these objects do damage to real humans and are banned from campus.

Pattison-Gordon heard about the game from a friend at Goucher College during Thanksgiving break, then from other friends at schools such as Wesleyan University and Ithaca College.
Drake and Pattison-Gordon planned the game over winter break, choosing it over other games such as Senior Assasin. “We sort of arbitrarily decided to do it,” said Pattison-Gordon. “I was really enthusiastic.”

The two students said that they feel a special connection with zombie culture. “Well, zombies are pretty cool, being the only invasion/disaster that would allow people to go around killing shit without any moral qualms,” Pattison-Gordon said. “However, this is the pretend world of humans versus zombies, where rules are needed.”

The game has built-in safety precautions for innocent bystanders. Pattison-Gordon said that the game is perfectly safe for everyone, and that it includes in the rules a “Don’t Be A Dick Clause,” which states that all players are to be generally courteous to one another.

Pattison-Gordon said that he was not too worried about the impending invasion. “If you really think about it, zombies are pretty much pushovers, they just have numbers,” he said. “So…a zombie invasion would be pretty chill.”