In case you aren’t up on your latest collegiate sporting trends, an elaborate Zombie Apocalypse themed game of Tag has been growing in popularity around the nation and even internationally in recent years: “Humans vs. Zombies”.

In a nutshell, it simulates the tried, true, and trite Zombie/Survivor standoff seen in dozens of movies, videogames, and comic books. Human players fend off ‘Zombie’ players with safe ‘weapons’ ranging from NERF guns to marshmallows. Certain rules are enforced, but fundamentally this is a game of tag that happens to prey upon and foster hateful stereotypes about the Differently Animated so that undergraduates can have fun between skipping class and beer pong.

The University of Washington’s faculty has become fed-up with the game after some players, apparently in violation of rules and conventions, carried the game indoors and disrupted the learning environment. Now there’s a movement afoot to ban it from UW’s campus:

University of Washington faculty is taking a stand against Humans vs. Zombies, a game of tag conducted by the students on the university campus played weekly. The game was created in 2009 and has been growing ever since.

Recently, a professor and a campus employee told KING-TV that they were alarmed when they saw one student dressed in combat fatigues and carrying a toy rifle crouched in a fourth floor window of a campus building. They are working with university administration to get the game banned from campus.

…

They broke the rules of the game by going inside campus buildings and are considered a burden to the faculty and other students trying to enjoy regular campus life.

Make no mistake; this game is highly offensive, Living Supremacist propaganda in an addictive, athletic formulation. It’s the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ of the 21st Century, a game predicated upon baseless, cruel stereotypes and prejudice, one which people of good will should shun and which will, we hope, one day be abandoned out of good taste.

That being said, the ZRC has never been in favor of censorship, and we fail to see how ‘banning’ the game will accomplish anything. If you’re talking about preventing people from running in the halls and disrupting class, there are already rules against that in place, both apparently within the game and presumably within University regulations. If you want to force people to play their hate-sport off campus, they’ll do just that. According to Wikipedia there was even a municipality based edition of this game in Ohio (which is of course disgusting).

Otherwise, since NERF guns, marshmallows and ignorance are all legal, a ban isn’t going to go anywhere. You might make the game more alluring, however, since it could now be marketed as forbidden fruit; good job on that one, Uni faculty.

Naturally, The Zombie Rights Campaign condemns this ‘game’ in all of its forms and instances, and calls upon all of its players to reconsider their preconceptions and negative perceptions of the Differently Animated and abandon their hobby, fixated as it is upon death and distaste for a wide swath of innocent people who just happen to be alive in an unconventional sense.

We’d just rather achieve the abandonment of said game organically, through discourse and dialogue and improved social consciousness, rather than a University edict, in no small part because authoritarian measures like that rarely achieve positive social ends, no matter how well intended.

Tags: Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 6:50 pm and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.