Zombies Ate My Brain

Shambling, directionless, single-minded creatures whose potency is measured not in individual quality but sheer population, zombies just never get old. I suppose we are all children of George Romero, and while cinema-buffs will talk about the racial overtones and subversive themes of Night of the Living Dead, what resonates with me is the apocalyptic isolation of rag-tag survivors against a world that wants to eat their brains.

In a way, I think that’s what video games are all about.

With the possible exception of Nazis, I have a tough time thinking of a more desirable antagonist for the imaginary violence I recreationally reap. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, as long as I have ammunition and artillery, I will fire my weapon straight and true into the zombie horde, and I will do so with maleficent glee. If I were forced to commit to a single vote on the topic of favorite gaming bad guys, zombies would be asked to slouch toward the podium to accept their award and then try to eat its metal brains.

I’m not sure any creature is better suited to both the medium and the technology of video games. Their mindlessness not only makes them menacing and intimidating, but really absolves the usual litany of complaint associated with NPC smarts. No one wants a zombie to go get help when his nearby buddy is felled like an overripe watermelon by a sniper rifle shot to the head or to dive behind a nearby dumpster for safety from a hail of bullets. They should merely glance up at the assault and commence to shufflin'. Their glorious evilness is the simple fact that they will walk through the fire and let it burn.

— You’re welcome, Buffy fans.—

I could go on about how nice this simplistic single-mindedness must be for game designers who don't have to worry about complicated artificial intelligence, but actually I’m more pleased about not having some poorly coded AI ruin a game experience for me. If there's one suspension of disbelief buttressed by tungsten cables, it is the one where zombies wander directly into the line of fire. Largely harmless when alone, and even comical, the beauty of zombies is that they give license to replace intelligence with sheer force of numbers.

One zombie won’t kill you. Ten thousand will, and what’s worse is that you feel like maybe, just maybe, you should have even been able to hold their decayed multitude back regardless of the size of the force. They paw harmlessly at blockades, leer menacingly through windows before accidentally breaking through, creep slowly in for the brain eating kill. They are a slow motion nightmare, the kind where you are running from the unknown as though your legs were mired in molasses, and when the inevitable bite comes there is no intelligence, no sympathy, not even a sense of victory or loss. Only isolation, hopelessness and pain.

Video games, frankly, get off on this stuff. The idea of one man pitted against a world gone evil and mad is about as core a concept as you can get. Zombies call forth a purity of the form that is relieved of narrative and technological expectations. Give a man a shotgun, a never ending supply of ammo and a zombie horde waiting to soak up bullets, and you have got yourself a game as pure and ideal as any.

That's what makes a game like Dead Rising so ridiculously and simply phenomenal, and while I may take exception with other elements of the title, it is the quintessential zombie game. Its proportions are ridiculous and its occasionally irreverent whimsy in the face of apocalypse is spot on, but underneath all the veneer exists that rotten core of a world totally doomed. Fight as long as you can, but even if you win you're still in a world over run with freaking zombies, and eventually ... .

Left 4 Dead has this clear undercurrent as well. These games, and a handful of others, illustrate what is great about the villain. The hive-mind that can turn its million eyes upon you and seek destruction through the epic weight of its forces. To me, when I think about zombies, I think about the legends of South American fire ants that devour livestock still alive, or sticking my foot into a river and having it ravaged by piranha. Aside from convincing me to stay the frak out of South America, it is the fear of being overwhelmed, and worse the fear that no matter your strength, no matter your resolve, eventually attrition will break you right the hell down. And, when it does, it's brainsville for some hungry zombies.

So, I never get over zombies, because I think the fear, or at least the uneasiness, they elicit is so primal that it can’t exactly be gotten over. They represent and are even emblematic of an irrevocable doom that we all seem to have at least a preoccupation with if not an outright phobia. They are more than a symbol of our mortality. They are the horrible terror of a helpless beyond. Unlike vampires who are basically damned but still get to be cool and have a ton of sex, one fears not just what a zombie is, but what it once was and lost. It is ourselves stripped of thought, of will, of freedom, of life, but still slouching toward desire.

Still, every time a game developer gives me a shotgun, a chainsaw or a small tactical nuke to use against zombies, the push back against that dark resonates in a primal way with me.

Comments

Even in a game like Plants vs Zombies, they are the quintessential video game enemy.

That's one thing I didn't get in the Dawn of the Dead remake. The guy in the gun store got bored of shooting zombies. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

The point about simplistic AI requirements really got my gears turning...

The basic zombies in Left 4 Dead are fairly quick, and while they aren't terribly "intelligent" in any way that a person playing and interacting with them would recognize, they do tend to climb and navigate their environment to get at your brains in a fairly efficient way. AI programming of any kind is no mean feat, as any programmer can tell you. Even the simplest ideas, like "go around the obstacle to the left, right, or climb over" can result in a surprising amount of actual coding expertise.

This got me thinking: As environments, physics, and various interactions get more realistic and complex, the behind-the-scenes irony of this observation may become increasingly illusory, as more effort and tech are brought to bear on the idea of making an insane number of AI entities LOOK STUPID as they claw through different materials.

You dive underwater to escape the horde, only to find them clumsily clawing water out of the way, propelling themselves in a perverted approximation of swimming. What if getting them to do that convincingly took an additional 186 lines of AI, physics, and animation blending code that a normal human character swimming with purposeful strokes would never require?

The [good] Romero movies make it clear that we are the zombies. When the protagonist is shot for a zombie at the end of Night, it's a reminder that any of us can become the indistinguishable and easily replaced horde to someone else. Dawn builds an entire movie around this theme; the survivors wait out the apocalypse by shopping in a mall, which is what the zombies banging on the doors associate with comfort and pleasure. We are the teeming masses who spend eternity pining for the clean, stark mall, not the individual survivors struggling to make it on our own in a desolate wasteland. This is one of the areas that Left 4 Dead disappointed me. The game was familiar with the imagery of zombie movies but didn't seem to 'get it.'

Or maybe it does get it. Left 4 Dead denies you the narrative--no Alyx to sigh over, no petty scientific rivalries to snicker at--and instead leaves you to, once again, make a run for it down the railroad tracks even though you know that the reward at the end is to start back at the beginning. It makes no effort to cover over the fact that gaming boils down to the repetition of a few basics actions. We pound at the keyboards and controllers like zombies, sloths in front of the screen. And when Left 4 Dead 2 releases, we'll be pounding on the glass doors at the mall.

CptGlanton wrote:

We are the teeming masses who spend eternity pining for the clean, stark mall, not the individual survivors struggling to make it on our own in a desolate wasteland. This is one of the areas that Left 4 Dead disappointed me. The game was familiar with the imagery of zombie movies but didn't seem to 'get it.'

By everything I've heard from Valve, they weren't trying for some high brow examination of our consumer culture. They just wanted to make a fun co-op game and blasting zombies is awesome. You might consider that missing the point or even dropping the ball, but I would posit that if you were disappointed it's only because you were expecting it to be something it never tried to be.

CptGlanton wrote:

It makes no effort to cover over the fact that gaming boils down to the repetition of a few basics actions. We pound at the keyboards and controllers like zombies, sloths in front of the screen. And when Left 4 Dead 2 releases, we'll be pounding on the glass doors at the mall.

Irongut paws at his monitor, "GAAAAMMMMEEEESSSS"

Their glorious evilness is the simple fact that they will walk through the fire and let it burn.

— You’re welcome, Buffy fans.—

I touch the fire and it freezes me. I look it into it and it's black.

Another great read. Thanks!

Dead Rising does a great job of conveying the scale of a zombie apocalypse, I agree. I love how the mall gets more and more jam-packed with shamblers as the three days progress. Some people hated the difficulty of the game due to time-sensitive events ("There's no way you can save these guys and still make it in time to fight the clown!") but I thought that the choices you had to make - who to save, who to leave behind - made a lot of sense given the overrun mall scenario.

And, of course, if you are damn near flawless you can save everybody but it doesn't change much for Frank West. In the end, everyone loses to the bottomless horde.

Irongut wrote:

"GAAAAMMMMEEEESSSS"

Game zombies. I hate game zombies.

Also, somebody needs to drop a gravity gun and some sawblades ala Half-Life 2 into L4D. I would love to launch a sawblade into a swarm of L4D zombies and watch it clear a straight path in front of me.

If you get the chance, read World War Z. Brooks covers a couple of zombie scenarios that I never thought of before, and would love to see in a game.

Nice read. I think you're onto something about zombies being a perfect exoskeleton for the gooey game mechanics within. It's always seemed strange to me when I'm infiltrating a small island compound and wind up shooting a number of evil troopers approximately equal to the population of Nigeria; but with zombies, hey, of course everyone is involved. The A.I., too, works well in that wrapper.

As the undead bad guy of choice, I’m grateful to the cultural zeitgeist that propagates the continuing trend.

[pedant]
I think you have a misplaced modifier there. It sounds like you're the undead bad guy of choice, not the "cultural zeitgeist" zombies. I had to read that five times to make sense of it.
[/pedant]

[pedant]
I think you have a misplaced modifier there. It sounds like you're the undead bad guy of choice, not the "cultural zeitgeist" zombies. I had to read that five times to make sense of it.
[/pedant]

You know what. You said this wrong. What you should have said, is:

Sean, that's a terrible sentence that should be dragged behind the woodshed and beat with a rusty pitchfork.

Which is exactly what I just did.

I'll file that away for next time.

(*note to self: be more verbally abusive. If they aren't crying, you aren't trying.*)

CptGlanton wrote:

This is one of the areas that Left 4 Dead disappointed me. The game was familiar with the imagery of zombie movies but didn't seem to 'get it.'

I think the issue here is that you and Valve were looking at two different zombie movies. The "zombie movie" has changed some in the past 30 years.

Shivetya wrote:

If you get the chance, read World War Z. Brooks covers a couple of zombie scenarios that I never thought of before, and would love to see in a game.

Abosolutely, World War Z is awesome if you want to consume some brains, er, zombie media in something other than games. Max Brooks (the author) takes the premise, "okay zombies are real", and asks how this would affect the real world. Great stuff. Plus the audiobook version has Henry Rollins as one of the cast (as well as numerous other celebrities).

Elysium wrote:
[pedant]
I think you have a misplaced modifier there. It sounds like you're the undead bad guy of choice, not the "cultural zeitgeist" zombies. I had to read that five times to make sense of it.
[/pedant]

You know what. You said this wrong. What you should have said, is:

Sean, that's a terrible sentence that should be dragged behind the woodshed and beat with a rusty pitchfork.

Which is exactly what I just did.

Sean, you and I need to have a little talk about proper application of a pitchfork.

CptGlanton wrote:

The [good] Romero movies make it clear that we are the zombies. When the protagonist is shot for a zombie at the end of Night, it's a reminder that any of us can become the indistinguishable and easily replaced horde to someone else. Dawn builds an entire movie around this theme; the survivors wait out the apocalypse by shopping in a mall, which is what the zombies banging on the doors associate with comfort and pleasure. We are the teeming masses who spend eternity pining for the clean, stark mall, not the individual survivors struggling to make it on our own in a desolate wasteland. This is one of the areas that Left 4 Dead disappointed me. The game was familiar with the imagery of zombie movies but didn't seem to 'get it.'

Or maybe it does get it. Left 4 Dead denies you the narrative--no Alyx to sigh over, no petty scientific rivalries to snicker at--and instead leaves you to, once again, make a run for it down the railroad tracks even though you know that the reward at the end is to start back at the beginning. It makes no effort to cover over the fact that gaming boils down to the repetition of a few basics actions. We pound at the keyboards and controllers like zombies, sloths in front of the screen. And when Left 4 Dead 2 releases, we'll be pounding on the glass doors at the mall.

Did you see Gregory Weir's look at L4D, entitled "Left 4 Godot"?

My mind usually goes to parallels with communists and the Red Army when I see zombies, but there are a lot of uncounted hordes of "other" out there to choose from.

LobsterMobster wrote:

By everything I've heard from Valve, they weren't trying for some high brow examination of our consumer culture. They just wanted to make a fun co-op game and blasting zombies is awesome. You might consider that missing the point or even dropping the ball, but I would posit that if you were disappointed it's only because you were expecting it to be something it never tried to be.

Are you busting out the "just a game" shovel? Because I've got a nice, long weekend to burn explaining just how wrong that is. I hope you like link-bombs.

I have zombie fatigue just from being around geek/gamer culture for the last few years. Can't we move on to werewolves or something already?

No. We can't.

Count Elmdor wrote:

I have zombie fatigue just from being around geek/gamer culture for the last few years. Can't we move on to werewolves or something already?

Werewolves fall in line with Vampires though. Still, a world full of werewolves, vampires and the like might be cool.

Werewolves have a human side and so we want to believe they can be redeemed. Vampires we can sympathize with as well, and modern looks at vampires split them into good vampires and bad vampires. There's a new TV show right now about that but I forget the name.

Unless they're cartoons or pets, zombies are a comfortable analogue to terrorists, religious extremists, a vengeful Mother Nature, and fascism. No wonder they're in vogue.

Even NPR is getting in on the zombie action.

Elysium gets in ahead of the zeigeist (barely).

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I think the issue here is that you and Valve were looking at two different zombie movies. The "zombie movie" has changed some in the past 30 years.

Yes. They got dumber.

wordsmythe wrote:

Did you see Gregory Weir's look at L4D, entitled "Left 4 Godot"?

My mind usually goes to parallels with communists and the Red Army when I see zombies, but there are a lot of uncounted hordes of "other" out there to choose from. :)

Well, to start with I would disagree that Left 4 Dead shows that "usual Valve polish." I would also disagree that Beckett's work is based on humor and friendship. I would summarize Beckett and L4D as "I can't go on, I'll go on." It's not a matter of pushing forward; it's being unable to do anything else.

wordsmythe wrote:

Did you see Gregory Weir's look at L4D, entitled "Left 4 Godot"?

You beat me to it. His post is one of my favorite observations of Left 4 Dead.

Count Elmdor wrote:

I have zombie fatigue just from being around geek/gamer culture for the last few years. Can't we move on to werewolves or something already?

Zombies are enjoying another day in the sun after being set aside in the late 80's or early 90's. They'll pass in time to be replaced by something else. Probably vampires (again) or aliens (again).

The Wheel of Time turns and monsters come and go...

Elysium wrote:

With the possible exception of Nazis, I have a tough time thinking of a more desirable antagonist for the imaginary violence I recreationally reap. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, as long as I have ammunition and artillery, I will fire my weapon straight and true into the zombie horde, and I will do so with maleficent glee.

Have your cake and eat it, too!

IMAGE(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2547/3682485202_5836df1d82_o.jpg)

I share your predilection for role-playing the remnants of humanity against the zombie onslaught. However, there have been some instances of undead enemies in good games that I feel need to be recognized. Zombies, outside of the proper context don't offer the same experience as Romero Zombies (tm) or Max Brooks zombies, or zombies from The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, or other zombie lit that does it right. Specifically, zombies without a zombie apocalypse, don't work. For examples of zombies that don't work, see Return to Wolfenstein or the Thief games. I am a fan of those games, but I *hated* the zombie levels.

Zombies are great because they're the only enemy that the average GameStop-dwelling mouth-breather can claim mental superiority to.

Anything smarter than a zombie puts them at immediate tactical disadvantage.

CptGlanton wrote:

Well, to start with I would disagree that Left 4 Dead shows that "usual Valve polish."

Really? I'd love to hear why you think Left 4 Dead lacks polish. I'm of the opinion that it's one of the most polished games Valve has produced. I'd rank it above HL2, both episodes, and Portal.

muttonchop wrote:
CptGlanton wrote:

Well, to start with I would disagree that Left 4 Dead shows that "usual Valve polish."

Really? I'd love to hear why you think Left 4 Dead lacks polish. I'm of the opinion that it's one of the most polished games Valve has produced. I'd rank it above HL2, both episodes, and Portal.

Because it shipped with multiple game-breaking glitches? Because the weapons aren't balanced? Because it shipped with only two MP maps, and people only found one of them worth playing?