News travels fast on the internet, and not always along the most predictable channels. Urban Dead is a sadly compulsive and hugely popular text-based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in which human and zombie characters battle for control of a post-apocalyptic virtual city. The general idea is that people are meant to kill zombies and zombies are meant to kill people, but there are players who think it's more fun to attack their own kind. People who kill people are known as PKers. You can pick up objects of varying degrees of usefulness: baseball bats, bottles of beer, fire axes, first-aid kits, mobile phones, pistols, shotguns, spray cans etc. If you have a spray can, you can paint graffiti on the walls of buildings. A few weeks ago, messages started to appear informing players that 'Dick Cheney is a PKer!'

LRB 9 March 2006 | PDF Download