Strange things were afoot on the Castleton campus recently; guys walking around with bandoliers and vests, armed to the teeth with foam-firing machine guns, all while hordes of people with orange bandanas around their heads meander menacingly outside. To an outsider, it may have looked like campus was going completely insane. In reality though, a fun social event was taking place: Humans vs. Zombies.

Residence Hall Association spent a lot of time and effort thinking up and planning this game of survival tag, and in the end it paid off. I’ve never seen so much dedication to a school-run extra-curricular. The sheer number of people in any given group of “humans,” trooping around campus with a machine gun in one hand and a pistol in the other, was very impressive.

The participants all seemed to have a lot of fun. This game became a way of life for a week. Trips to Huden and fireside were dangerous and had to be planned, you constantly had to be on the lookout for ambushes, and school life as a whole was seen through a more tense filter. I actually followed one of the “survivors” from Huden to Ellis one day, and the amount of planning was very well thought-out.

However, there were those who were less amused by the whole game. Some students complained about not being able to go places without worrying about being shot by stray darts, or having a laser sight show up on their chest. Going to class involved more than just a walk to a building, but also a lot of stare-downs with zombies looking for human victims and possible accidental shootings by cautious survivors.

These things happened to me multiple times, but I thought it was kind of funny. The participants always apologized and then held conversations about how “times are getting harder” and things like that. It gave a lot of kids a fun thing to do for a week, and we here at the Spartan don’t see the problem with that, although almost none of us participated.

It was a barrel of fun to watch, from the patrols of zombies on the day of the final battle to the constant battalion of armed students outside the FAC, which became the human stronghold. There’s something hilarious about hearing loud yelling before a human sprinting away from a zombie comes bolting into view, the pursuer hot on his tail, as both of them weave in and out of cars in the parking lot.

I’d like to see this happen again. Maybe next year they should make two original zombies to balance out the numbers and make it last a full week rather than five days. Now that campus knows the potential it has, Humans vs. Zombies could be a great week for years to come.