- Ball State’s Urban Games League hosts “Humans vs. Zombies” twice a year for a weeklong game.
- This semester’s game lasted from midnight Thursday until Monday night.
- The group pays around $100 for advertisements, $100 for foam swords and additional money for other various props and costumes.
To see more photos of “Humans vs. Zombies,” check out our gallery.
As temperatures dropped and 9:45 p.m. hit, students poured out of the Robert Bell Building lobby, ready to fight off zombies.
The Urban Games League’s “Humans vs. Zombies” game started midnight Thursday and ended Monday night. In the event, the “humans” use Nerf weapons to avoid being tagged by “zombies.” If tagged, the humans will turn into the undead. If the zombies are shot, the players are stunned and can’t tag anyone for 30 minutes.
Green bandanas adorn the heads of the zombies, while the humans wear the bandanas on their arms.
In the daylight and outside of academic buildings, humans can be tagged at anytime and many humans walk to class armed with foam swords and guns to protect themselves.
Pietre Nordell, the administrator of Ball State’s “Human vs. Zombies” and a senior general studies major, said the group is often misrepresented.
“More often than not, people don’t see us as a serious thing,” he said. “They just think we are a bunch of guys going around shooting each other. They have no idea the amount of work and money that goes into it.”
Joel Summer, a freshman English education major, is one of 189 participants on campus. According to the game’s website as of deadline, he was one of the 89 humans. He said at most, he spent $50 to buy the bandana, a Nerf gun and extra darts.
This is his second semester participating in the games.
“You can kind of shake things up just by having to watch your back going to class,” Summer said. “It’s fun that way, but also you get to do crazy things with your friends.”
He said he survives just by luck and has witnessed a friend get tagged right next to him as he was walking from DeHority to Woodworth Complex.
Each game is based around a theme and storyline. Nordell said the theme this year was a mixture of “SCP — Containment Breach,” “The Walking Dead” and “Dead Space.”
Each night, groups of the zombies and the humans meet separately and receive different missions before embarking.
So far, Summer has participated in one mission.
“Some people just want to survive the whole time and they don’t even go to the missions; but then other people want it to be a big grand story,” he said. “It can get pretty crazy. But mainly, it’s just something fun you can do … you can die while doing it so it makes it more dangerous.”
On Sunday, the mission gave the humans immunity from being turned into zombies and limited the zombies’ stun-time from 9:45 p.m. until 10:45 p.m. For the final half hour, normal rules returned. The zombies attempted to move creatures with special powers to an area on campus to sacrifice and take their powers, while the humans were trying to prevent this.
Nordell has been involved with “Humans vs. Zombies” for about seven years and has run the games once before.
He has been working on this year’s version with his staff since the fall, even before he was elected as administrator.
“We had the potential of getting all of our work thrown out even before we got elected,” he said.
The group has met once or twice per week for six months. He spent all of Spring Break and an additional three days creating a booklet for the staff, complete with a props list, a script and detailed descriptions of what each person should be doing.
He said the organization receives limited funds and participants are not charged, so everything comes out of pocket. The group pays around $100 for advertisements, $100 for foam swords and additional money for other various props and costumes. After the game, the group sells the props to people in the Atrium.
With the end of Monday night’s mission, campus saw its last green bandana-clad zombies until the undead crawl from their graves next semester.
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