Humans vs Zombies @ ANU – Part 2

Five months ago I posted a blog post about HvZ@ANU. At the time it was a concept in my head, something I had just began to formulate. Like many of my schemes and plans I didn’t have significant hopes of its success. However with the help of many dedicated and hard working friends it became a reality. Over the last months we became an official non-profit organization, joined the student association, ran a large scale advertising campaign, had an awesome market day stall and managed to create a website and sign people up for the game.

Over the last week however the actual game ran. I can honestly say I have never worked harder on anything in my life. But it was so worth it. We had roughly 200-250 people playing the game, which was very awesome. About a quarter of the players in the game were organised into official “squads”, of which we had 14. These squads did amazingly and their leadership, coordination and sheer dedication to the game was astounding.

Throughout the week you could not go anywhere in the university without seeing groups of humans cautiously moving from building to building, or swarms of zombies running after prey. The game has been the talk of the campus and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t seen the players.

As a moderator I didn’t not play the game as such but rather acted like a referee/organizer. As much as playing would be good being a moderator was fun too. I got to follow groups of both humans and zombies around and see what everyone was doing in the game. It was very cool being able to go up to any group of humans or zombies and being able to ask them to recount their tales of daring and pure awesomeness.

During the week we also ran some missions. These on the whole went very well. Some were better than others, but they were all very epic. The humans and zombies had excellent tactics and everything was very hard fought. In the end however the humans died in a last siege, falling at last behind zombies hands. To end the game we had a huge pizza / awards / zombie movie night. It was very fun and I think everyone enjoyed it.

In conclusion, the game was awesome on the whole. We had a few issues, largely stemming from our inexperience in running this sort of things, but we’ve learnt lessons and next time is going to be bigger, better and more organized. This time around we will have a huge group of people helping run the game, rather than the small bunch we had for this first one. For the moment though, I’m going to get back to that university study thing I am supposedly meant to be doing.

Oh and I made a short summary video of the game – its certainly not comprehensive and we hope to make something better later on, but it does the job:

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~ by Myles O'Neill on August 10, 2009.