From the article:

In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal, rapidly spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations.

Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisers on controlling the spread of swine flu, said the study did have parallels with some infectious diseases.

And from the report itself:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.

This is a somewhat poor analogy, but nevertheless:

If a book about vector mathematics contained a section explaining how to determine the 3-D directional vector of the Starship Enterprise's phaser fire while stationed on the bridge, would that invalidate the underlying mathematical concepts? No. Would it invalidate the educational quality of the book? No.

If you take this study as a demonstration of the construction of an infection model then yes, it is legitimate.

I read somewhere that the book it is being published in is part of a peer-reviewed series, but haven't bothered to confirm that.

This thread got me thinking about 28 Days Later, where the "zombies" are people infected by a genetically engineered virus that drives its victims into an uncontrollable rage. The incubation period (about 10-20 seconds) seems unrealistically fast, but even if it were around 10 hours (comparable with the fastest-case scenario for the common cold) you could still end up with a pretty serious "zombie" outbreak.

Didn't they come out with a sequel to 28 days later?

Yeah, 28 Weeks Later, but it was basically more of the same (and not as good, IMO). There's talk of doing a 28 Months Later, too.

No zombie movie can top Shaun of the.... :)

On the gaming side of things, I did really enjoy Left 4 Dead, which runs surprisingly well on my 5 year old computer. Fast zombies with supernatural abilities are NOT something normal humans would win against.

For 28 days, it would be more fun to do "28 years later".

If you liked that, you should watch Hot Fuzz and Spaced as well. One of the episodes of Spaced partially inspired Pegg and Wright to create Shaun of the Dead.


28 Months Later is apparently going to be set in Russia, so it wouldn't surprise me if they later filmed a 28 Years Later set in the US.

Army of Darkness was better than Shaun of the Dead, I think. But then, it had more than just zombies. And some awesome one-liners.

And my main grief with the article is that while it COULD be used as a model for an epidemic, it's not realistic. Air-born pathogens are much deadlier and efficient.

Compared to the amount of time it would take for something like this to spread, any of the classic plagues would have it beat.

Now I feel like a nerd talking about zombies :(

Folks really ought to read the article itself, which Confuto was kind enough
to track down and post a link to.

There should be a moderation rule against scathing criticism of a study (wasted money, stupid scientists, bla bla bla) based on a short article in the popular press obviously meant for humor, when one has not actually thought much about it much less read the actual study. :rolleyes:

Frankly, were I the scientists, I'd actually be pretty irritated with the BBC, as they've managed to take a much larger study and reduce it to a tiny silly point making it look as though the government somehow funded zombie defense research. That will teach them to use humorous references in their work, I suppose. Evil humor.

It would be pretty interesting to see a MUD that simulated a zombie outbreak based on this study's models. It could reset on complete human or zombie population eradication and allow players to try different techniques to curb the spread of the disease (quarantine, treatment, killing, etc).

Kaeden?

I must confess I haven't been following that thread religiously. Is Kaeden planning to simulate the outbreak "accurately", or is it a more persistent thing he's going for?

*goes off to find out for himself*

I dunno, but he has a concept of "heat" that he was just telling me about… zombies are attracted to areas that have had more players in them, and the heat accumulates and dissapates the more/less activity the rooms have.

.. by heat he just means some kind of "activity monitoring". But that's probably a good enough simulation right there, cause everyone knows real zombies are attracted to the smell of brains :D

mm.. braaainns

[edited for clarity]

I was just reading about the differences between Romero's vs O'Bannon.... The latter are the ones that are fixated on brains, while the former will eat all body parts. From what I recall, Kaeden's zombies seem to be more heavily based on the Romero style (i.e., a blow to the head will "kill" them, while nothing short of complete destruction will stop O'Bannon's zombies).

Either way, a 'zombie outbreak' event would thematically fit many muds. My main concern (if I were to implement it) would be how to deal with kiting, particularly if the zombies were stereotypically slow and stupid.

You could always pull that thing where zombie arms pop out of nowhere and grab the player, restricting their movement temporarily. I.e, arms popping out of the ground, as well as through other things like windows, doors, walls, etc. Having zombies falling out of the sky (or just from high(er) locations) and landing on players would be another possibility.

Hey. I wasn't planning to comment in this thread as I figured it would just derail it, but seeing as how the dialogue has already shifted this way…

My MUD probably isn't a very good simulation of an outbreak; at the moment, zombies in my MUD don't even pass on the virus to others. Though I had planned to make it possible for players down the line to become infected, I hadn't really thought about NPC zombies infecting NPC survivors. This raises interesting issues for players, like, 'Should I pre-emptively massacre the NPC survivor population to prevent further infection?'. I did plan on having hostile military NPCs that would mow down zombies and player survivors. I don't see why they wouldn't mow down NPC survivors too. Which makes me wonder if it's possible to create a system where all three (or four, if you count the players) forces are able to sort of maintain a balance through murdering/converting of each other.

KaVir is probably correct in his assessment that my zombies are more akin to Romero's. My solution to kiting is that ranged weaponry/ammo for ranged weaponry is limited and ought to be used judiciously. Also, ranged weaponry on my MUD tends to create a lot of the 'heat' that Flumpy mentioned, which in turn can attract zombies even faster. Though my heat system does have some fallacies as we discovered today…needs a bit of fine tuning…

I'm not quite sure how I'd explain zombie rain, but arms (or even entire zombies) popping out of the ground could work, at least against non-fliers. Perhaps the zombies could also form an impassable barrier, or make some sort of grapple attack on anyone who got too close - then I'd just need to make sure there were enough of them to pen-in players to prevent too much kiting.

Water would be another issue - I had the same problem with aquatic creatures, with players standing on the beach shooting arrows into sharks and the like. I got around that by having the sharks dive under the water if they could no longer reach the player, but zombies wouldn't usually be that smart. I suppose they could just follow the player into the water (and sink), effectively putting the fight on hold until the player swam back to the shore (and the zombies then climbed back out after them).

Perhaps it would be easier to give the players a defensive objective. If their goal is to defend a village from a zombie attack, then it would be in their best interests to stay near the village.

A wizard did it.

It won't be so silly when you have no where to run…