This coming week will see the arrival of the latest game to cash in on the (admittedly, simmering down) zombie craze, Dead Island. With other games such as Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, and the perennial Resident Evil series having already lead gamers down a well worn path of brain-munching and flesh-devouring, many people were ready to dismiss the announcement of the game as just another product meant to capitalize on the current popular trends of the video game industry. After having blown off more undead skulls than could possibly be counted, the entire video game community was almost done with the idea of the game before they had even played it. That was until they saw the game’s first trailer.
If that trailer doesn’t make you want to cry your eyes out by the end of it, you may have to consult your physician to see if the little bit of your brain that controls your emotional core hadn’t been surgically removed while you slept last night. This single trailer made gamers take the idea of a zombie game seriously again. Within this trailer, gamers saw promise and they saw hope. What they saw was something that could possibly give the video game industry a zombie game that wasn’t just an imitation of classic B-horror cinema or a morbid playground for macabre carnage. What they saw was a game that promised to give us in the gaming community something that we are not often used to receiving in our games: an emotional attachment. Now, that is not to say there haven't been games that have done this kind of thing before. There have been several games that have brought players onto the verge of tears by the time they put the controller down. The thing is, none of those games had zombies in them. What many people, myself included, were hoping from this game was a zombie game that would present us with some hard choices to make in an impossibly bleak situation. We were dreaming of the nightmarish scenarios that might be presented to us within the context of zombie head bashing. We were hoping to have our very moral characters questioned by what we would do to protect our loved ones if we were presented with a horde of zombie flesh eaters bashing at the door of our hotel room. Above all, we were expecting a somber and nuanced story of real people confronting impossible odds within the context of a visceral action game. That was until we saw this image.
Word, yo. This single image destroyed any hope that we may have had that this game might give us a story that was full of nuance and depth. It was cemented further when we realized through trailers that this character was indeed the stereotypical alpha-male gangster rapper. Now, I have yet to play the game, so it may be that the character has more depth than his character design indicates, but it will be an impressive feat knowing how little game developers like to take risks in their protagonists. So now the hope of having three-dimensional characters was running down the sink. Well, maybe we would still have the ability to make some tough choices that would shake our moral fiber to the core, right? After all, that trailer was pretty intense, what with its depiction of the zombification of a young girl followed by the image of said zombie girl tearing out the throat of her loving father. Well, that was before the developer, Techland, announced that the game would not feature any child zombies. At all. Bummer.
Now, I am not saying that I have a hankering for slaughtering pre-pubescent skin-devourers, nor do I wish for the glorification of child abuse. Far from it. To me, child abuse is the single worst act that a person can inflict on another human being and is something that should never be taken lightly. But that’s just the point. I was hoping that this game wouldn’t take its subject matter lightly. As stated above, I and many other people were hoping to face some tough decisions, including but not limited to the disturbing choice of slaying an (albeit undead) child or having your own entrails pulled out and used as an hors d’oeuvre. I was hoping that we could finally have a game that (pardon the pun) would have the guts to take an absurd situation and turn it into an interactive story that would show the world how far video games have come along in what they can convey about the human experience. Instead, it would seem that what we would get was what we initially feared: just another zombie game.
Is the video game industry ready to tackle something as disgusting and disturbing as facing an undead horde of kindergartners? In my opinion, not only is it ready, but also it’s been ready for a long freaking time. Video games have infinite potential when it comes to exposing the best and worst of our individual selves through the act of play, and it’s had it for over a decade now. Yet, still we see that potential wasted in favor of recycling the same tired and worn out ideas and stories in the name of making a profit. The better question is: is the world ready for games to tackle such subject matter? The general public, and much of the video game community, still see games as being something that is meant only for fun, almost to a childish degree. With such attitudes, it is easy for them to condemn any game that tries to approach the same subject matter that is tackled by film and literature every year. If The Walking Dead can depict a young zomb-girl getting her brains blown away on basic cable, why can’t an M rated video game do the same? Yes, the idea might seem vile and repulsive, especially in the context of a video game, but the beauty of games is that this situation might be completely avoidable depending on the design of the game. The game might ask the player if he or she is willing to discard their old humanity in the name of survival, and if the player is unwilling to make that sacrifice, the game might give the player different options with which to survive. Possibility is the essence of interactivity, and it is this interactivity that gives gaming its weight as a storytelling medium. However, that weight is completely discarded every time a developer refuses to take a risk that might actually challenge its audience.
Dead Island looks like it has shaped up to be a perfectly serviceable action-horror game. Still, that doesn’t take away the sting of knowing that the game could have been so much more than serviceable. It could have been the next great step in pushing video games as a medium; instead it wastes its potential on appealing to the widest market possible. Is this the fault of the developer? To an extent, but the blame lays mostly at the feet of video game buying public. If gaming is ever going to break free of the juvenile shadow of SpikeTV’s Video Game Awards and G4tv, then we, as gamers, are going to have to start making powerful statements with our wallets and supporting games that ask us to do a little bit more than just pull gun triggers and splatter brains onto our TV screens.
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