HVZ Ends--Without a BANG

By Kira Calvaresi ‘17

Published December 2014

This fall’s game of Humans Vs Zombies (HVZ) ended with a win for the human team, one first year hospitalized, and a campus-wide bomb threat.

HVZ is a campus wide game organized by the HVZ Club once every semester. Anyone can join, including professors and their family members. The objective is to either remain human for the entirety of a weekend by shooting zombies with Nerf guns, or turn every human into a zombie by tagging him or her. This fall’s game ended with a bit more excitement than most.

Moderator, Club Weapon’s Master, and Vice President Bentley Kennedy-Stone ’16, who has participated in two previous HVZ games as a player, met with The Sundial for an interview on what had happened over the course of this year’s game.  “It’s light-hearted and good-natured, but also intense,” said Kennedy-Stone. “It’s a good way for people to put a lot of value in this thing that isn’t real, this great fantasy on human’s versus zombies.”

However, some HVZ participants tend to forget their safety. The game has witnessed at least one injured person every semester. This year, it was Douglas Hill ’18, who had fallen on his back as he was running down the hill on front campus for their final mission. “It was pretty scary, because we weren’t sure if he had actually broken his spine. We paused the entire game until after the ambulance had left,” said Kennedy-Stone.

At the hospital, Hill received x-rays on his back that revealed no breakage. He was diagnosed with some deep bruising of the muscles in his back.

When asked if he enjoyed his overall game of HVZ, and whether or not he would return to play next semester, Hill showed no sign of discouragement. “Hell yeah,” he said.

Emily Cornelius ‘17, Chris Foerter ‘17, and Kira Calvaresi ‘17, heavily armed and still human, prepare for the fall 2014 run of Humans Vs Zombies.  
Photo Courtesy of OCR.

This HVZ game also ended with a “bomb threat,” as a result of the club experimenting with the traditional game.

Long story short: in every game there is one optional mission on Saturday and one final mission on Sunday, the outcome of which determines the victors of the game. In an effort to expand the scope of the game beyond one team simply battling another, this year’s HVZ included an additional component. “We came up with one mission involving riddles that the players had to decode,” explained Bentley.  “All of the objectives were mental.”

The riddle mission was scheduled for Saturday at 11:45 p.m. Humans and zombies gathered in designated locations, and were given an objective in story form by the moderator. The narrative involved a fictional “Moderator X,” who’d gone rogue and planted a bomb on campus. The ultimate goal of the mission was to find a code to disarm the imaginary bomb.

“There were four riddles taped onto the flagpole, the curb, and underneath the sign on the circle in front of the main entrance,” Bentley detailed. “These had scribbled on them in pencil, ‘Do not remove, bomb will explode.’”

When one of the notes was discovered early Monday mornig, school officials called the police, and students awoke that day to an email urging caution due to a possible bomb threat on campus. About twenty minutes after this, at 9:17 a.m.,  a second email was sent out by the Critical Incident Management Team explaining,  “The police discovered that the notes were a part of the Human vs Zombies activity this weekend and were not intended as a real threat.”

The email went on to explain that the school would be conducting an internal investigation to determine if college policy had been violated. As the end of the semester approaches though, it appears as if humans will be continuing their nerf-dart struggle against the zombie threat, in the spring.