Six to Start and Naomi Alderman’s Zombies, Run! (iTunes) is a running adventure played in two landscapes at once – the real world under your feet, and a zombie-infested fictional wasteland surrounding the safe haven of Able Township. Mixing GPS speed and distance tracking of the kind offered by popular sports apps Runkeeper and Endomono with a well-scripted and performed story, it’s a hybrid of coaching game and interactive performance.
The first chapter of the story is fed to you through burst transmissions from a communications tower in the distance: you’re cast as the protagonist in a survival horror, the unnamed survivor of a helicopter crash who must outpace the zombie horde in order to reach safety. As the broadcasts continue, details of the lives (and lost loves) of the survivors begin to trickle out.
Where Zombies, Run! exceeds radio-play is the mixed-reality created by prompting and responding to changes in your speed. Packs of undead lurch, audibly, into range and a bleeping radar cues you to increase your pace to escape. At the same time, radio transmissions (which interrupt your chosen playlist) guide you to places and spaces which don’t exist in the real world. Survival suddenly becomes dependent on fictional, invisible landmarks.
There’s a deliberate kind of creative (mis)recognition at work, then, based on the encounter of real and fictional spaces, fed to you through marked and unmarked cues which create a feedback loop between live runner and pre-scripted radio broadcasts. For me, that miscrecognition created a kind of enjoyable disorientation: in sticking to my real world route – bound by houses and roads – was I heading further into danger? If I couldn’t “see” a landmark, how could I find it?
Not to worry – though my path didn’t change, the radio-operator congratulated me: I was making good time and heading in the right direction. I was / I was not on the road outside Aberystwyth after all. I’d need to run faster, though, as a pack of zombies was following me from the ruined hospital I’d just cut through. I escaped, but not before losing the (fictional) shirt from my back.
As such, the kind of immersiveness created by Zombies, Run! might appear, counter-intuitively, in moments of discontinuity between the fictional and the real, where the runner/player is invited to invest in the fiction as motivation for running faster, longer. Though engagingly written and performed, I’d argue that there’s little attempt at the illusion of realism: what Zombies, Run! offers is the chance to be in two places at once.
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