Zombies

What do zombies and emergent behavior have in common? Alot when considering Urban Dead, a massively multiplayer zombie apocalypse simulation.

Urban Dead is an exceptionally well-balanced and well conceived browser-based game. In the game zombies and humans compete for control of a fictional British suburb called Malton. Both opposing groups have limited forms of communication for organizing others of their kind in the local area. Humans have radios, flare guns, cell phones, spoken communication, and grafitti. Zombies have crude gestures and limited groaning noises.

Every single zombie and every human is controlled by a living breathing player. There are no NPC's (non-player characters) in Urban Dead. It may not seem impressive that human beings exhibit emergent behavior. Surely in most settings people naturally form groups and social alliances. Urban Dead is not terribly interesting from a social science perspective, but is very impressive from a game design perspective, because the clever communication tools put at the fingertips of both human and zombie players in the game encourage cooperation and the formation of goal-oriented groups. Other aspects of the game make cooperation necessessary. Humans barricade buildings in which they hope to leave their character peacefully when they log out, but even when a player has logged out of the game, their character may not be safe. Zombie players may break down the barricades and kill the "sleeping" humans within. So when the human player logs back in he may find that his character has joined the undead!

To prevent this outcome human players will hide out in buildings with lots of other human players so that it is more likely that someone will be able to monitor the barricades, not to mention the fact that the more humans are together the less chance any one person has of being eaten by zombies. Also, there are so many different jobs to take care of that no single human could do them all. Groups of humans need medics, zombie killers, fuel and generator suppliers, barricaders, and potentially zombie revivers to return the undead to their human form.

Zombies, when faced with human survivors, can emit loud groans that distant zombies can hear. These distant zombies will then converge on the source of the groaning and, hence, the survivors. This naturally causes zombies to form groups. These groups will often grow when they find more humans, because their groaning will summon more distant zombies. The zombies cannot groan without humans present. This prevents false signals from being sent. When humans become scarce the conglomerations of zombies will thin or dissappear as zombie players leave the group and head out in different directions in search of humans.

Some players dislike the limited forms of communication in the game. They use wiki's extensively to organize groups of players in a top down manner. These wiki users refer to players (usually zombies) that solely use in-game communication as ferals.

Urban Dead scores high marks for giving players the tools and potential to make the game a fun experience. Certainly some players abuse these tools. The game does not prevent humans from killing other humans, or destroying radios and power generators. But the rise of these spoil-sports has itself given rise to players that devote themselves to killing human players that engage in this behavior. In other words, the appearance of criminals on the scene spurred a balancing, opposing force of vigilante justice.

Urban Dead is a game rich enough to let players set their own goals and tell their own stories in an open ended world. I strive to create such an open world in my own game that will leave room for players to make their own choices that lead to consequences I did not intend or foresee such as the rise of "criminals" and vigilantes in a game that was originally designed with only two opposing forces in mind; zombies and humans.

More Zombie Links for your amusement!

Here are some Urban Dead links I use often:
A map of the suburb of Malton
The main page of the Urban Dead wiki.
Useful tools of players in the game: portable generators and DNA extractors.

My two Urban Dead characters are Hiro Goodfella and Thomas Freelunch. If you play, give me a ring. I'll try to get an in-game cell phone the next time I am revived.

A movie that both brought together all the cliches of zombie movies and defined some more of its own: Dawn of the Dead

A British spoof of zombie movies: Shaun of the Dead

A hilarious zombie T-shirt from cafepress.com Zombie Track Team: We don't run, but we'll catch you... eventually.

The Urban Dead logo is the property of Kevan Davis, the creator of Urban Dead. He owns all the rights to it. I'm just borrowing it to add color to this drab page.