Open the door, dear. We just want your brains.

Hi, my name is Yang Zhang and I'm a freshman at CALS majoring in bio. My interests... hmm... let me think on that one for a second... I love music in general and piano in particular. Used to only listen to classical, but now I'm broadening my horizons to include more contemporary stuff. Like rap. Yes, radical, I know. I love improvisation stuff and spend time everyday on the piano. I also like graphic novels and horror movies and tennis. Who's got cable and is able to watch the US Open? Well, aren't you the lucky one. Anyway, my money's on Federer. As always. Big fan of him.

Two summers ago, out of boredom, I started looking into Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs. I’ve never been overly computer-savvy, and downloading gaming softwares and setting everything up just seemed too advanced for me. Not to mention I was too lazy. And the internet at my house was fatally slow, so any downloading ended as my patience waned and I moved on to more interesting things. Like solitaire.

But that summer… gosh, I must have been really bored. I actually looked up the list of MMORPGs on wikipedia. Being the un-computer-savvy cheap miser with a strange liking for blood and gore (yes, I’m pre-med) that I was, I picked Urban Dead.

I thought the ride was going to be a lot more thrilling than it actually was. Urban Dead is about a city called Malton that is quarantined due to a virus break-out that turns people into zombies. The players can pick roles as zombies or as human survivors. Humans can get killed and become zombies, and zombies can get revived and become humans. Thus the game is a perpetual war of human vs. zombie. The city is basically just a grid, so the graphics are quite dull.

I would have quit this boring game a long time ago if I hadn’t joined a survivor group named Department of Emergency Management, or DEM. It has thousands of members and is actually pretty systematic in the way it takes in new recruits and distributes personnel. The group communicates through asynchronous forums and people work together to hold key buildings in the city and fend off zombie masses. People share their daily experiences and alert each other of dangers through posts called sitreps (situation reports).

Now I have to manage time to check Urban Dead everyday. I mean, people count on me to be active and save their butts when I see zombies break into their safehouses. What started out as a game is now where I meet up with friends / teammates and compare notes on how to headshoot an oncoming zombie.