Zombie Attacks, Foiled By Mathematicians

[fclbrokle]

A delightful NPR story today (now yesterday) on mathematical models of zombie attacks (although hardly the only news story about this). It conveyed a sense of fun in doing mathematics that somehow isn't conveyed by... well, stories about mathematics that seems more "serious." Other amusing observations include that Mathcamp is apparently not the

Comments

[fclbrokle]

So, 2004 was a run of To Reap the Whirlwind which you played in 2007. It was the most complicated game we had ever run up to that point, and we were worried that the combat system would be confusing. We were also worried that with all those ways to become more powerful (like changing into the half-man, half-wolf form) and with special powers, that people would try to abuse them and attack each other for no reason. (This was a big problem in our early games.)

An intrepid group of campers decided to solve this problem by running a LARP of their own, which they called Death Until We Die. We all got (very impressive) character backgrounds, which were really funny (I, for example, played the role of Dr. Lucky), and then we basically went in and everybody tried to kill everybody else. It was total chaos; once you died, you became a zombie seeking brains, and the game slowly became overrun with zombies. It had something like 50 players, and it used the combat system from Whirlwind so that players could get used to it.

Anyway, 'twas awesome. :)

[ultrawaffle]

What about LARPS?

[fclbrokle]

Oh, LARPS was great, but with LARPS I felt like the "contract with the players" got a bit broken when all the combat broke out, because we were having a good time acting! (I enjoyed the first half much more than the second half, although I had a blast throughout.) In contrast, there was no doubt what Death Until We Die was about, and it was *so* incredibly tongue-in-cheek...

That said, I suppose LARPS did have zombies in a way...