Urban Lewes (Dead)

For the less dedicated, or less wealthy, there are games such as Urban Dead, a free, low-tech, text-based MMORPG, in which roughly fifty thousand characters, half of them human, half of them zombies – you can be turned from one to the other by being either killed or ‘revivified’ – struggle for control of a post-apocalyptic city called Malton. What sets these games apart is that the environment is defined not so much by a set of predetermined parameters as by the sum of the behaviour of the other players. In addition, the game’s mastermind – in the case of Urban Dead, someone from Lewes called Kevan Davis – is able to fine-tune the rules in response to player activity. A few months ago, for example, a large number of disgruntled zombies, who felt they were getting a raw deal compared to the humans, went on strike. They stopped attacking people and headed for a park in the centre of Malton where they held a mass demo. The high concentration of characters in one place caused problems for the server, and the refusal of so many to play – the strike received a huge amount of support, from zombies and humans alike – threatened to sink the game. Kevan (everyone’s on first-name terms in Malton) responded to their demands by improving the zombies’ lot; the strike came to an end; and, to celebrate, the zombies went on a rampage round the city, attacking each of the shopping malls in turn, in a campaign that became known as Mall Tour ’06, and once again significantly changed the dynamics of the game. It’s perhaps noteworthy that the zombies tend to have a much better sense of humour than their more po-faced human counterparts.
Thomas Jones: Diary.  Fabulous.  (Via James)