It’s no news to anyone that nerds love zombies. I mean, people in general love zombies, but nerds love them a lot. Maybe too much. We give them a lot of our time. We watch overlong movies with them, we dress up as them in public, we discuss the social ramifications of their existence in our culture. We even bicker over which ones are better, zombies vs. zoombies (speedy zombies).
So it’s no surprise that they find themselves in our games so often. They’re such a great foil. There are so many aspects of what make us us that they can comment on, and they make an ideal stumbling block for players. They can fit almost any role with a little bit of creativity, and make a great point as to just what it natural to people (the scene with Bob and the gun from Day of the Dead, anyone?). But even when they’re used traditionally they can convey a great depth of meaning.
Consider the first Resident Evil games. These were games that represented zombies in a fashion faithful to their roots. They were less an immediate threat and more an obstacle, something we pit ourselves against which forces us to conserve our resources and carefully consider our movement, rather than react quickly. Whether by design or technological constraints Resident Evil’s zombies were everything Romero’s were. They were slow moving, slow witted and hard to put down. And once they got a hold of you things were not going to end well. Even if you escaped you might wish you hadn’t.
As a result the threats in Resident Evil come from other places, a topos echoed from Romero’s work. Except here it’s not a resourceful group of survivors beset by outsiders who want what they have to survive, instead its a long survivor beset by mutant plants and dogs. Fucking dogs! The impact remains the same.
The pervasive and perceived threat isn’t the challenge we’re faced with. The challenge we’re faced with is how to deal with what the trappings of our once ordinary lives have become in a world where society at large is now our enemy. It’s about how we deal with isolation and how we manage the resources we can scavenge. It has more in common with post-apocalyptic games and fiction than it does with other members of the horror family.
Of course, Resident Evil abandoned this in favor of the trendier “zoombies” of late, as showcased in 28 Days Later. But by this time the game play posed fewer questions and instead demanded more of the player. Instead of being left to consider our place in this horrible new world or how to escape it we got a recap of the story of Bad Dudes and a series of Saw level monster-closet horror scares.
Not that Resident Evil 4 and 5 are bad games. They’re awesome games, and they’re very smart in their own right. They’re just smarter systems than they are games. The part of the game that we can think about is far smaller here, and the part that wants to challenge us has not necessarily grown larger but has certainly become more direct and invasive. Later Resident Evil games are less about experiencing survival and more about surviving challenges, and as a result they lose some of the perhaps unintentional intellectual oomph they held in the first place.
This is not to say that games can’t use zoombies to communicate their point. Halo and Fallout 3, neither of which are “zombie games” per sec, both execute on this point expertly. Fallout 3 uses ghouls as “too human humans” in a world gone wrong and as an embodiment of mindless rage as the situation merits. And Halo uses the Flood to show us just what our warring societies could become if they submit to their religious extremism and military-industrial obsession. Granted zoombies are tools here utilized in order to make points about the game world, rather than the focus of the game itself, but they’re utilized to great effect.
After all, speedy, rage filled zombies embody so much of what we fear about our society. They give physical presence to our fear of the rage and horror which all human beings are capable of. They are mindless, strong and relentless, driven by the instincts we are all taught to fear. And when a game uses zoombies to this end, it can be a powerful means of conveying a message.
Enter Left4Dead. Now as a rule a game with a number in its title is not going to make some bold artistic statement (please, please, please prove me wrong, Thief 4) but, as with many rules Left4Dead breaks this one.
What could’ve been a Counter-Strike mod was carefully crafted into an interpretation and realization of cinematic tradition and variations on a very versatile theme. At its most basic level, Left4Dead is a very standard, samey shooter filled with mostly dull obstacles that you do your best to charge through and especially big ones you use teamwork to get through or around, depending on circumstances.
Sometimes there’s a big cinematic moment intended to cause tension and sometimes there’s a really cool spontaneous moment that showcases just what procedurally generated content in capable of in this day and age, but it doesn’t say a lot. Its less a way to show us something about ourselves and more a fun place to be, an ever changing playground filled with shambling corpses. At least on its surface.
But when you consider the tremendous effort that went into designing each of the look ofbasic Infected along with their movements and their intelligence you see that they’re labors of love. And when you consider their role as cannon fodder they become commentary on video games in general.
After all, the danger in Left4Dead doesn’t come in the form of expected or predicted threats. It comes in the form of unexpected waves, striking between safe areas and choke points. It comes in becoming isolated from your friends by fast moving or dramatically acting zombies. It comes from the unexpected, the random, the threat which is normally posed by human players realized by an artificial intelligence.
Left4Dead has this great Thermopolis feel when it’s doing its thing best, where you’re fighting against impossible odds, seemingly endless legions besetting you, and you know that the game is designed to let you fail. You’re eking by, trying to beat the designers as they do everything they can to laugh at you and play cat and mouse with you.
And moreover you’re moving through familiar places, seeing familiar faces while an entire society pushes you to conform. And of course, as we as gamers are trained to do, you refuse. You fight, you struggle and sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose, too, but that’s life, isn’t it? You can always pick yourself up and try again.
All of this from a zooming group of baddies without brains in a game with a grand total of eight weapons (nine if you count fists and rifle butts). Left4Dead is a minimalist, experimental game which owes far, far too much to its interchangable, raging antagonists, and it couldn’t work with anything but super fast cracked out rabid zombies.
Of course, even as these examples illustrate just how powerful zombies can be in video games there are plenty of examples of “meh” zombies thrown in to what could be great games.
Jehrico’s generic and completely personality-less undead are a great, low profile example of “zombies” being misused. That game could not have been possessed of more boring, turgid examples of the walking dead in all their forms. And Plants vs. Zombies’ zombies? Sure, they’re cute and funny, but they’re bereft of social commentary. Bah, I say to them!
But there is perhaps no worse offender than the Alone in the Dark reboot’s “zombies.” An awkward mix of fast and slow, requiring unnecessarily obtuse methods to be dispatched and beyond frustratingly buggy, they lacked personality, depth, mythos and threat all at once. They were less a barrier and more a sideshow, and they failed on almost every level as video game baddies.
The only thing they to succeed with was to avoid commenting on either the greater overarching threat of the game and the main character at the same time. And that’s sort of impressive, since antagonists can usually help to define both of those in some way. But not the hands of Lucifer, no. They’re content to smolder in generic rage and occasionally leap towards you after a lengthy period of confused shuffling.
Zombies are a potent tool, but they aren’t a panacea to be applied to a bad idea, however much we might like them to be. Throwing zombies into the mix doesn’t make everything as fun as you’d think it would and they work best when they’re treated as thought provoking and resonant tools for commenting on the nature of other elements of a work rather than as obstacles or a objects put in place for a little flavor.
Zombies deserve love. They deserve it more than they get it, because they’re like our little retarded cousins. We all secretly fear that one day we’ll become them, but at the same time it doesn’t seem that bad to be them. They’re not too bright, sure, but they seem to be doing alright. And occasionally they offer us some really profound insight. At the very least they’ve learned enough about life to no longer be ashamed of their own bodily fluids, and I think that’s a lesson we should all take away from these wondrous, diverse, laconic teachers.
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