Contingent Cooperation in the Face of Zombie Hordes

Lately I've gotten back into Urban Dead. It's a text-based browser-based MMO, free to play, in which a player is either a human survivor or a zombie in a quarantined city.

There is a very robust meta-game, which is Serious Business(tm). There are free agents as well as enclaves of survivors and hordes of zombies who collaborate on password-protected message boards, stuff like that. There is also a wiki that is as central as Urban Dead gets, which includes the all-important suburb Barricade Plans, which leads me into a discussion of "contingent cooperation".

I'm going to skip a lot of background here, because it's too lengthy. It takes a long time to explain free running, barricade levels, and the sin of overcading to the uninitiated. :)

Suffice to say, Barricade Plans are created to ensure that new survivor characters have access to hospitals where they can get first aid, police stations where they can get weapons/ammo, etc, while simultaneously maintaining extremely heavily barricaded fortress-like hideouts that can withstand assault. The Barricade Plans tend to evolve and change as groups leave areas and new groups establish headquarters, stuff like that.

You see contingent cooperation when an old group disperses (or is dispersed by a particularly large zombie horde) and new survivors move in. Initially, it is chaotic in the suburb, with buildings 'caded to varying degrees with no rhyme or reason. However, when a few people - sometimes part of a coordinated group, sometimes a few early "settlers" who spontaneously collaborate - use spraypaint to tag buildings according to a Barricade Plan, characters in the area generally all fall in line. The will to cooperation is there, contingent on the first actors who set the plan in motion. The amount of people who are adhering to the early Barricade Plan depends - just as Rheingold's article describes - on the amount of cooperation they see in others.