For the past few weeks, I’ve been occasionally playing around with Urbandead.com, a massive online multiplayer zombie movie simulator. With a limited number of moves per day, players can search for weapons, explore ruins, and/or munch brains in a generic destroyed cityscape, while interacting with other players. While amusing at first, I quickly lost interest, due to the fact that nobody seemed all that interested in joining forces. In fact, with the exception of a group called The Many (a 60+ strong pack of zombies capable of wiping out entire blocks at a time) the cooperation element seemed all but unexplored.

In the past few days, though, the paradigm has dramatically shifted. Now, strangers hand out first-aid kits, safe houses are established where users can go temporarily offline without fear of being chewed on, and in-game cans of spraypaint are being used to warn of danger points, rather than just the usual “Cthulu rulez” geek speak. What this all means in a larger sense, I wouldn’t venture to guess, but any aspiring sociologists looking for a thesis topic may want to check it out.

In a final macabre twist, The Many has become much less of a threat lately, as the server for their coordinating website was apparently located in New Orleans.