The Playful Undead and Video Games

Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay

Stephen J. Webley, Peter Zackariasson, Stephen J. Webley, Peter Zackariasson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351716512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the central role of the zombie in contemporary popular culture as they appear in video games. Moving beyond traditional explanations of their enduring appeal – that they embody an aesthetic that combines horror with a mindless target; that lower age ratings for zombie games widen the market; or that Artificial Intelligence routines for zombies are easier to develop – the book provides a multidisciplinary and comprehensive look at this cultural phenomenon.

Drawing on detailed case studies from across the genre, contributors from a variety of backgrounds offer insights into how the study of zombies in the context of video games informs an analysis of their impact on contemporary popular culture. Issues such as gender, politics, intellectual property law, queer theory, narrative storytelling and worldbuilding, videogame techniques and technology, and man's relation to monsters are closely examined in their relation to zombie video games.

Breaking new ground in the study of video games and popular culture, this volume will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including media, popular culture, video games, and media psychology.

1 Zombies, Again? A Qualitative Analysis of the Zombie Antagonist's Appeal in Game Design

Matthew Barr

Introduction

Zombies—or zombie-like entities—are a ubiquitous enemy in modern video games, from the infected victims featured in Left 4 Dead (Valve Corporation, 2008) and The Last of Us (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013), to the more traditional zombies that plague the residents of Raccoon City in the original Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996). Perennial sales behemoth Call of Duty has featured a zombie-based mode in instalments released since World at War (Activision, 2008), while the indie scene is similarly infested, with titles including DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2013), Zombie Night Terror (Gambitious Digital Entertainment, 2016), and Project Zomboid (The Indie Stone, 2013).

Assumptions are made about the continued popularity of zombies as video game antagonists, many of which are framed in terms of design-driven or technological concerns. For example, zombies’ impaired mental and physical function means that they are readily recreated using even limited in-game artificial intelligence (AI). As Dill (2013, p. 5) notes, zombie games are an example of where sub-par AI may suffice because “the characters are deliberately made to be a little bit stupid or wonky, so that their strangeness will be more acceptable.” It is also assumed that something of zombies’ appeal lies in their ‘otherness.’ As Aarseth and Backe (2014) suggest, enemies that lack any shred of human consciousness, that represent an “alien, post-human Other” (p. 1), might be considered ideal targets for indiscriminate on-screen execution.

However, the undead—not least because of their resemblance to the living—remain somewhat problematic as disposable, morally acceptable cannon (or chainsaw) fodder. Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009) faced accusations of racism in its depiction of African zombies (Brock 2011; Pham 2009; Goldstein 2009), suggesting that the undead are not quite ‘other’ enough to alleviate moral and social concerns. This is an ironic turn in zombies’ popular culture history, perhaps, given the satirical intentions of George A. Romero’s original zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead (The Walter Reade Organization, 1968). The film was released just six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Romero sought to cast non-white actors in significant roles and went so far as to depict the lynching and murder of a key black character at the film’s conclusion. Furthermore, following decades of battling the relentless digital undead, there may be a certain sense of zombie fatigue that hangs over games which continue to rely upon this trope, not unlike the fetid stench of the antagonists’ rotting flesh. The question arises, then, as to why game designers continue to appropriate the undead in their games, despite the potentially problematic or increasingly well-worn nature of such adversaries.

In this chapter, assumptions about the ludic appeal of the undead are discarded and a fresh qualitative approach taken to determine why game designers continue to create games centred on zombie antagonists. Interviews were conducted with 20 game designers who have worked on high-profile zombie titles, both indie and AAA, and content analysis performed on the resulting material. A common criticism of content analysis as a methodological approach is that the use of predetermined categories or codes to characterise data is too rigid, and prone to overlooking unanticipated themes. To address this, a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967) was taken to the initial design of the work, embracing the ‘no preconceptions’ approach favoured by Glaser (2012). The interviews were minimally structured and focused on a single open-ended question: what is the appeal of zombies from a game design perspective? Also explored was the question of whether the ludic appetite for the undead might diminish with time. Initial coding of the interview data resulted in the development of a scheme for categorising interviewees’ responses to the open-ended question. This scheme—or coding frame— was then piloted and revised before being used to code all the material. Coding was first conducted by a senior researcher, then again by a trained research assistant, to establish the reliability of the process and refine the identified themes. As such, the research ultimately followed a classical content analysis approach (Bauer 2000; Marvasti 2004).

Three dominant themes emerged from the data: storytelling, gameplay, and utility. These themes are discussed in turn, before some of the less significant, but still notable, themes are considered.

Storytelling

Zombies’ narrative convenience and storytelling possibilities were widely regarded by game designers as an important aspect of the antagonists’ appeal. As David Crislip (Resident Evil 4, Dead Rising) suggests, “they open up so many opportunities for storytelling, including chances to focus on the inhumanity of survivors.” Joel Burgess (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series) agrees that it can be rewarding to focus on the human characters, “to shift tone and focus on the tragedy of losing a significant person to the zombie condition.” Harrison Pink (The Walking Dead series) concurs, noting that zombies may “be a part of a very intimate emotional scene where someone loses a loved one and see them as a zombie and they recognise them, and they have to deal with that.”

The emotional drama inherent in seeing a loved one ‘turn’ offers rich storytelling possibilities. Andy Hodgetts (Project Zomboid) illustrates such possibilities by recounting a powerful scene in the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead:

a man who, every day, sees the reanimated corpse of his wife shambling around outside their home. Some basic instinct inside her drives her to the front door, moves her hand to the door knob. But she never comes in because it’s simply instinct, not rational thought. All the while the husband watches from the window through the sights of a sniper rifle, desperate to put an end to it but never able to pull the trigger.

This small vignette serves as an example of another story-related theme: that of moral choice, and the dramatic possibilities such choices bring. As Andrew Langley (The Walking Dead) suggests, “a post-apocalyptic landscape overrun by zombies is a very effective way to force players into some tortuous moral and ethical dilemmas.”

More generally, there is a certain storytelling efficiency that comes with using zombies in a game:

If you want to give the game a setting where the player can roam an environment shooting things and looking for loot without such pesky narrative issues as law and order, morals, other humans with their own agendas, the zombie apocalypse works well.

(Paul Mathus—Dead Space series, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier)

And leveraging players’ expectations can be a powerful narrative tool:

people like having the same story told again and again—putting a zombie into something is a great comfort factor. It’s like putting a Nazi in, or putting an English actor into something—you have certain expectations, right? And I think zombies do that.

(Richard Leinfellner—The Evil Dead)

Given the focus on cooperative play in Valve’s Left 4 Dead, zombies provided a narrative shortcut that allowed players to jump directly into the action, according to Wright Bagwell (Dead Space series):

Zombies were the perfect type of enemy because they didn’t require a lot of fictional justification about when, where, and in what numbers they showed up. Left 4 Dead was easy to explain and market because of the well-understood fiction. . . . Tutorials can sometimes go on for hours before the player really understands the game and the fiction, which gets in the way of having fun.

This idea—that zombies are an already well-understood foe—was central to many of the arguments for using the undead in video games. As Paul Mathus suggests, “it also means I don’t have to have overwrought cut scenes addressing the issue of why it’s OK to kill 1200 Nazis, or give my protagonist a dead family to avenge to justify their homicidal rampage.” Richard Leinfellner elaborates:

if you put a zombie in a game, you don’t have to put a lot of narrative with it. That makes it kind of economical in terms of storytelling because if you put a zombie in, what are they going to do? They’re going to eat your brains, right? If I put some zombies into a game, it kind of gets everyone on the same page very quickly.

Richard Foge (State of Decay) connects this idea to wider storytelling concerns:

zombies represent a certain kind of setting. They represent a specific kind of apocalypse, which comes along with several sort of resets that happen. So, because zombies are present, you assume that civilisation is gonna be in pretty much hard-core disarray and this is going to be a return to simpler times where survival is the focus and you don’t have to worry about things like universal health care and whether or not your country’s political beliefs align with your beliefs and all that stuff.

Using a familiar setting can also simplify the marketing of a game, at even the earliest stages of development. Wright Bagwell adds: “The appeal of zombies is that they’re well-understood. That makes it easier for you to pitch your game, and for players to quickly understand your game.” Bagwell also notes that zombie antagonists offer “a palatable justification for slaughtering hordes of humanoids.”

This observation demonstrates that related to the idea of zombies as a narratively convenient foe is the notion that their slaughter is morally justified—as Paul Mathus indicates in the preceding text, the moral justification is implicit in the enemy’s nature. This was a widely agreed-upon theme in the interview data, and connects with assertions about zombies’ otherness making them candidates for indiscriminate slaughter. Boon (2011) also highlights the otherness that underpins depictions of the ‘zombie ghoul,’ noting that the flesh-eating zombie is “another that aggressively seeks to deprive the individual of his or her unique self, to excise the figure from human identity.” So, it is their otherness, defined by a desire to destroy us, that serves to justify zombies’ massacre.

Ben Wanat (Dead Space series) elaborates:

The undead are repulsive abominations and it is largely uncontroversial to kill them. And you don’t necessarily feel bad about doing it because the conflict is so clearly cut and dried. It was you or them, and they couldn’t be reasoned with.

More simply, Richard Leinfellner suggests that “if you’re killing something that’s already dead, that has fewer moral implications.” This moral justification is closely coupled with narrative concerns, as Mathus explains:

They solve some real narrative problems with regard to the basic gameplay of shooters. Because the central mechanic in a shooter is . . . shooting, constructing a narrative where it’s OK for your protagonist to kill mass quantities of enemies and still be a ‘good guy’ is difficult.

Richard Foge refers to the undead as “guilt-free” enemies, making a similar link with the games’ shooting-based mechanics:

One of the main verbs that players enjoy and that we’ve been making for games for a very long time is to kill. And there aren’t a lot of enemies that you can just say ‘OK, yeah, go beat the hell out of or shoot or kill this enemy’ with that that same sort of guilt-free space.

Gameplay

The undead also enjoy certain, somewhat unique, gameplay affordances. Taken together, these affordances represent as significant a reason for zombies’ popularity as storytelling possibilities. As Matt Kazan (No More Room in Hell) states, zombies may be “used as action fodder where they are given little consideration beyond being in front of your gun.”

Zombie-based gameplay is frequently designed around their horde behaviour; that is, the undead tend to move in large groups, and are often encountered in waves. As Florent Sacre (ZombiU) notes, “zombies are weak where they are alone but a dread[ful] threat when they are numerous.” Benson Russell (The Last of Us) elaborates on this, noting that with certain types of zombie, “they throw themselves at any obstacle with abandon, and this combined with massive numbers allows them to conquer most anything.” Zombies’ flexibility as foes is discussed presently, but Harrison Pink suggests that in addition to potentially functioning as the focus of intimate drama, “they can be a faceless horde, they can be mowed down.” This mode of gameplay, perhaps enabled by the ‘guilt-free’ narrative discussed earlier, is commonplace in zombie titles.

The manner in which undead enemies are typically dispatched also has gameplay implications. Broadly speaking, the interview data revealed two modes of in-game zombie encounter: the headshot and the melee attack. The first of these mechanics is firmly rooted in zombie lore, which generally dictates that the undead may only be dispatched with finality by destroying the brain or removing the head. More than this, though, the headshot works as a game mechanic because “the player has to be skilled to shoot it in the head” (Florent Sacre), while t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Zombies Zombies Everywhere, What Is One to Think?
• 1 Zombies, Again? A Qualitative Analysis of the Zombie Antagonist's Appeal in Game Design
• 2 Resurrecting "Obsolete" Video Game Techniques From Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil
• 3 The Undead Past in the Present—Historical Anxiety and the Nazi Zombie
• 4 The Zombification of Skyrim
• 5 Fantasies of Full Employment: Zombies, Video Games, and Violent Labour
• 6 Resident Evil and Infectious Fear
• 7 Zombie Video Games, Eros, and Thanatos: Expressing and Exploring the Life and Death Drives Through Video Gameplay
• 8 Through the Eyes of the Other: The Relationship Between Man and Monster in Siren: Blood Curse
• 9 Dead Rising and the Gameworld Zombie
• 10 Proliferation, Blockages, and Paths of Escape in Resident Evil and Call of Duty
• 11 Zombies, Play, and Uncertainty in Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare
• 12 "A Jill Sandwich"—Gender Representation in Zombie Video Games
• 13 It's Never About Zombies—Post-Apocalyptic World-Building, Interactive Storytelling, and The Walking Dead
• 14 The Pace and Reach of Video Game Zombies
• 15 Zombies Ate Democracy: The Myth of a Systemic Political Failure in Video Games
• 16 Queering the Zombie
• 17 The Law of the Playful [Un]Dead: The Influences of Intellectual Property Law on Zombie Video Games
• 18 "The Romeroesque"—Playing With Ethics and Ideology in Zombie Games, From Indie to Mainstream and Around Again
• Index