Final thoughts on Zombies.

Going into this section of the class I was not thrilled to begin on The Walking Dead. I was a huge resistor of the zombie fad. I had seen the first episode of The Walking Dead and hadn’t enjoyed it, and zombie paraphernalia had inundated pop culture. I was not impressed by any of it. Then, we got into analyzing it for class. Suddenly, I started seeing it in another light and I started to get into the plot and the story and the characters. I got hooked on this thing that I had considered simply a stupid fad.

Once The Walking Dead sunk its teeth into me, I was thrilled to come to class every day and see what new thoughts and ideas I would have about this story. After watching the first two episodes of the show, reading the graphic novel, beginning to understand comics better, and then finally playing The Walking Dead game in class, I began to really understand the pull of zombie literature. Usually, I wouldn’t say that playing a game was my favorite way of engaging the text, yet in this case, it was. I wouldn’t say that any text was better than the other (see my previous post for details on that) but I would say that the text that engaged me the most was the computer game. It felt like writing to me, and I liked that.

When watching the show, it was like I was sitting around a campfire, listening to the story being told by an omnipotent narrator. I was an observer of a story, I was a person sitting in the clouds watching the tale unfold.

Then, when reading the graphic novel, it was as if I was looking at the story and starting to fill it in with my own imagination—it was as if I was truly reading the story and forming my own content into it. In fact, I often paid very little attention to the graphics in the novel and went strictly from bubble to bubble reading the characters thoughts and conversations without acknowledging the depictions associated with them. I was reading the story that was written, but I was also adding my own imaginative flare.

Finally, when playing the game it was as if I was writing the story myself. It was as if I was sitting at my desk with my headphones in, putting pen to paper and writing my thoughts down as they flowed. The game made me the author of the story, the game gave me the control to create a story that was uniquely mine. The game gave me the power of authorship that the graphic novel and show did not, and boy did I like that (there’s a reason creative writing is my favorite thing and that writing is my major!) I made the decisions, I decided the path of the character. Playing it as a class was an absolute hoot! Everyone had the path that they wanted to take, but in the end it was the loudest voices who were heard, and their path was the one that we took. It was interesting to hear the way other people wanted the story to play out, and then see the way it would actually go. It gave us, as a class, a sense of authorship that was not only fun but funny to see play out.

Last week, and this week, on campus the game of Humans vs. Zombies is taking place (for a history and details on this game follow the following link: http://humansvszombies.org/) It’s just funny how as soon as we finish up reading, watching, playing, and analyzing a whole bunch of texts on zombies, the real life game of a zombie apocalypse takes place on campus. It would have been an interesting thing to ask the class to take part in the game and see how that plays into our analysis of the texts. I would have loved to hear how our class experienced the real life game in comparison to the texts we’ve already encountered. Alas, that isn’t the case, but it is food for thought!