Zombies invade Rhodes campus, South Africa
Zombies invade Rhodes campus, South Africa
21 February 2012
DAVID MACGREGOR
http://www.dispatch.co.za/news/article/2922
ZOMBIE fever gripped Grahamstown yesterday as hundreds of paranoid Rhodes University students fought running campus battles with “the living dead”.
More than 350 students – and even a history lecturer – signed up this week to take part in the four-day Humans vs Zombies (HvZ) bloodfest that has fast become a global phenomenon since launched in America 15 years ago.
Held in South Africa for the first time late last year when the Rhodes University Gaming Society dug deep in their pockets to host the Zombie Apocalypse, this time round HvZ has been given the thumbs up by campus management – who even sponsored the event as part of their Live Smart Week.
Larissa Klazinga, student services officer in the dean of students’ office, yesterday said the focus of Live Smart was student wellness.
“We hope teaming up with a diverse group of roleplayers to host unorthodox events like HvZ on the one hand and traditional sporting events like athletics on the other will ensure that for this week at least, students spend less time in bars and more time enjoying themselves without drinking excessively.”
Described as a “massive game of tag (catchers)”, Klazinga said besides encouraging newcomers to make friends with “returners”, HvZ also attracted those who were more at home in front of a computer than running around outdoors .
According to former GameSoc chair Monique Mulholland – who got the HvZ concept going at Rhodes last year – new technologies played a huge part in keeping “humans” informed of the whereabouts of the ever increasing hordes of “zombies” who stalked the campus.
“New media plays a big role.”
Besides shouting verbal warnings to each other, players also use Facebook and Blackberry Messaging (BBM) to try and outwit and outlast the opposition.
Starting with one randomly picked secret “original zombie” – who is given a purple bandanna to wear on one arm just like the humans for the first few hours of the game – the aim is to tag as many humans as possible before all the zombies are forced to wear the bandana around their heads to tell them apart from their living enemies.
The only way for humans to keep the zombies at bay is to throw “anti- undead projectiles (AUPs)” – clean, rolled up pairs of socks – at them to stun the undead for 15 minutes, while the only way for zombies to notch up a kill is to tag touch their human prey.
At least one tag must be recorded every 48 hours on the GameSoc website or the zombie dies of starvation.
Dressed from head to toe in a custom made camo ninja outfit , star HvZ player Matthew “the chain soldier” Funcke, 23, said people who knew nothing about the game got nervous when they spotted him skulking around the campus bushes.
“I also get a fair amount of mockery,” the computer science honours student admitted – before adding he even attended lectures in his camo fatigues and resorted to using a night vision monocular as he lurked in the shadows at night dodging zombies.
Areas like buildings are off limits and hordes of zombies are known to lay siege to canteens and lecture halls waiting for human victims.
Veteran GameSoc member Will Walters said the idea of HvZ was to try to break away from the clich�d idea of gamers being stuck in “caverns” behind computers doing nothing.
He said the best way for humans to survive the zombie onslaught was to adopt a herd mentality.