Dev Blog Archives - Page 12 of 12

If you’re a horror fan, I’m sure you’ve watched zombie movies and thought “I could survive a hell of a lot longer than those guys”. After all, you’re prepared for this stuff — you’ve got a baseball bat by your door, a survival kit in your closet, and a plan. That’s great, but won’t do you much good if you’re not home. And it’s not like the zombie apocalypse is going to send out a Facebook invite in advance, which means that most of us would have no idea where we’d actually be when shit hit the fan.

Take a look around. It’s pretty crazy how many places would completely suck to be in or around if zombies started running (or shambling) around — no matter how prepared you think you are.

Case in point: It’s my job to think about this stuff all day, but this weekend I found myself in a situation where I’d have been zombie chow if things went south.

If the world was going to end tomorrow and you needed to get out of dodge, who would you take with you and why? My fourth grade teacher had us play this game a few times. She’d write a list of possible candidates on the board, and to really make us think, tell us that our life boats could only hold five people. We’d break into teams to discuss our options. Should we bring the doctor or the farmer? Would we rather have someone who could cook and sew, or someone who could build a house?

I didn’t think about it at the time, but at its core, this was a logic puzzle that distilled each person’s value down to one thing: the skills that they possess. When you’re thinking about building your “dream team” for surviving the zombie apocalypse in Class3, or if you’re debating what skills you think you’d need to survive, it’s easy to base your choices on similar logic.

You can try to picture a “dream team” of fellow survivors with the training and experience necessary to cover all your needs for weapons, food, water, clothing and shelter. That sounds good, but people are more than just a collection of skills.

When you really dig into it, you’ll see that this approach is missing one very crucial thing — the human element.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

The Human Element