Story Machines: Zombie LARP and Humans versus Zombies
"...you can also win by sacrificing your teammates to the dark gods and their zombie minions. You can win by dying horribly in a corridor and then returning as one of the shambling undead and eating your friends. Essentially, you win if you get a good story"
"If you're really lucky, we will give you a gun. The nice thing about guns is that they turn you into a protagonist.... This is almost a story generation tool on its own."
These are quotations from a great talk (and hand-drawn slides) by Mary Hamilton which she gave at The Story in February 2011. I ran into Mary at the Guardian in London last week. This reminded me that Mary's talk is what inspired me to bring my arsenal of Buzz Bees to my workplace and use them. It's a really great talk.
When I posted these links to the Media Lab "awesome" list, Media Lab researcher Cody Sumter responded with this lovely email (Cody gave me permission to cross-post this to my site):
Zombies, gameplay, and narratives. This, I may know something about...
Preamble and disclaimers:
While at Truman (2007) I started a game called Humans vs Zombies (HvZ) - based on the concept originally run by Chris Weed at Goucher College in 2005. I now serve on the board for the national org (started by Chris) to help facilitate the game across the world (http://humansvszombies.org). Yes, I serve on the board of an organization that promotes shooting people with nerf guns on a regular basis.
Alright, enough of that. On to the discussion (which I will attempt to keep short (unlikely))...
Different structures. Different narratives:
ZOMBIE LARP has a different structure from HvZ which results in different outputs (in terms of both experiences and narratives). With ZOMBIE LARP you take small-ish groups of people, place them in an an unfamiliar but appropriately zombie themed environment with lots of NPCs, and send them off to survive/maybe find a way out in a timeframe designed to be well under an hour. Thus, you reach 30-40% survival rates. HvZ is played by large scale groups (Truman's games have been up to around 500 players on a 5800 person campus). Games take place once a semester for about a week, 24/7, with the entire campus/city becomes the stage for a game (similar to assassins). Survival rate: 3-4%
With short time scales, in thematic settings, players are able to try on various disposable personas, and the stories you generate are intense but short. Glimpses of action, success, failure, and death. With long time scales, in familiar settings, the ability to play a character breaks down and you are forced to play yourself. Don't believe me? Try going around your normal routine for just a day (not Halloween) pretending to be James Tiberius Kirk. Bottom line, whenever you aren't thinking about it and the setting isn't reinforcing it you will revert back to being yourself. However, the game does infect your normal routine, and so you find yourself beginning to react as if a zombie apocalypse has infected the campus. So, in a sense, you are playing a character. It just happens to be a version of yourself. The expanded time frame then yields the brief energetic action/death/escape stories of the shortened version along with longer stories of hundreds of zombies sieging entire buildings for hours while playing Human Human Zombie (think duck duck goose), replacing all the words from songs with "brains", and generally doing everything they can to terrify the poor trapped humans (who, in turn, have their own stories of attempting to coordinate with humans for backup and attempted escapes).
In essence, you are creating the stage for tightly shared experiences for hundreds of people. However, unlike assassins, these games create a close, yet dynamic, social structure. In assassins it is you against the entire world since you don't know who you can trust. With zombies, it's clear who is on your side and who is against you. This means that you have an instant connection with members of your side. About to leave for class and run into another human? There is an immediate understanding of your situations and cooperation becomes the norm compared to complete isolation in assassins.
A further compelling aspect of both ZOMBIE LARP and HvZ is that the sides are not permanent. Death as a human may mean that you leave some of your friends behind, but it also means that you are able to integrate with an ever growing group to hunt down those same friends' brains. Paranoia and terror contrasted with freedom and the thrill of the hunt.
Personally, I prefer the longer form version for narrative generation. I think it allows time for greater social and individual evolution - making for richer stories. However, I'm somewhat biased in this regard. Plus, week games are only really possible on college campuses, which makes short games the only real way to experience anything like this for the vast majority of people.
Alright, this is getting far too long already. I'll go ahead and leave structured set pieces/plot vs player generated narratives and slow vs fast zombie implications for another day. Instead, have some videos (if you've made it this far).
Videos of the games:
ZOMBIE LARP (http://vimeo.com/28690043)
HvZ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq2bkTsfn3s) Short from Washington University
HvZ (http://vimeo.com/1956330) Documentary from Goucher College
Now if only I could figure out how to do my thesis on this...
Thanks Cody!