Humans vs Zombies! The Child Lives On!

8:37 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 4 Comments

“Part of going to college is learning to take yourself more seriously, be it through developing your opinions, honing your discipline or by many other means. When we look at the professional world, we see many intelligent, disciplined, serious people, but we’re worried that it comes at a price. It’s easy to become so wrapped up in your own professional serious image that you forget how to have fun. That idea is simply unacceptable to us. Humans vs Zombies is a way of holding on to one’s inner child, of allowing one’s self to have fun for no other reason than to have fun. Participation forces you to re-evaluate your life. The simple task of walking to class becomes a life or death situation. If you commit yourself to the game and allow yourself to play earnestly, you eventually come to a point in which you realize just how ridiculous you seem to the outside observer. This idea sounds, to put it modestly, unpalatable to most people. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt in our minds as to the benefits in playing. We notice these benefits even when returning to our professional lives.”

At the top of their website, there is a quote that I think really dovetails into the purpose of this blogging experiment:

"The antidote for the ailments of a generation.”
                                    - International Herald Tribune


As one player with a cool hat eloquently put during an interview:
“I play zombies because they outlawed dodgeball when I was in middleschool, and there is no other way for me to pretend to be a commando anymore and it be real.”

They have taken away our dodgeball, they have taken away our toy guns, they’ve taken away our monkey bars and our slides, and our swingsets and even our sticks. This generation has been raised in a sterile environment, driven by the fear that someone might get hurt, or worse, dirty. And whatever we did have when we were young, we’ve been told that we must grow out of our play, that the mantra to live by is “sobriety and seriousness always and everywhere. Some of us millennials, however, are fighting back. This generation has fathered the “flash mob,” “Assassins,” and countless other large scale social phenomena’s in the same playful spirit of HvZ. Though we do want to grow up, and have families and houses and cars and everything else that entails, we do not want to be “grown ups.” I don’t know about you guys, but I refuse to believe that growing up means selling my attic full of costumes, my nerf guns, and my soul along with them. My love for life is contingent upon the fact that I can go out, dressed up like a zombie and chase humans around if I want to. Or maybe I want to grab a bottle of wine and write a poem. The whole point of working is so that I can do ether.

Here are a couple more thoughts to tie this whole thing up: As another player said: Humans verse Zombies is “everything you ever wanted to do when since you were seven.” The whole experience of “HvZ” is a more mature version of the times when you used to play make believe with your brother in the creek behind your house. Back then we may have been happy with  tag, but now that we have matured, instead of putting tag away, we simply make it more awesome. That is my generation. The makers of the game said on the “Who are You” section of their website: “We’re college students and professionals who think that play is part of adulthood.” Amen brothers! May your nerf guns never jam and your hearts never falter!