Zombie Politics

Here is interview with PZ's designers. They give some of the sources for their version of Zombiedom so I'll post them.

Lemmy: We have a joke that we bought the design document for this game from Max Brooks. We read World War Z ages ago and pretty recently bought a copy of the Survival Guide, and it reads pretty much like a document of what should be in the game. The whole ‘zombie apocalypse scenario’ thing is something we’ve all discussed at some point,

Binky: Well, one of the things that shaped it was that we, er… paid “homage” to the way The Sims works with it’s Moodlets and we were thinking, what sorts of moods would your character be feeling in a zombie apocalypse? And, really, it would be a pretty depressing state of affairs. The game had to be dark. Moments of comedy, maybe, when you forget temporarily what’s going on, but mostly it would be horrible.

Lemmy: I personally trace it back to the opening of 28 Weeks Later – where Robert Carlyle abandons his wife to the hordes, and the viewer is encouraged to think of him as a despicable monster. When all he really was a coward, and in a moment of life and death, his cowardice or perhaps pragmatism won over his love for his wife.

Binky: There’s a bit in “The Last Man on Earth” when Vincent Price is sat on a sofa with the neighbours pounding on the door and he starts laughing… and his laughter turns slowly to crying as his despair overwhelms him. That’s a big inspiration for the game.

Plus here is a worthy comment

Lemmy: Thing is the game isn’t so much an idea but a vision of a zombie game that we’ve discovered most big fans of zombie films have.

Binky: Basically, films were our biggest inspiration rather than other zombie games.

That’s because “other zombie games” aren’t actually zombie games; they’re games with zombies in them. Treating zombies as cannon fodder or enemies is missing the point – zombie films are about the breakdown of civilisation and the sheer shittiness of human nature, and what happens when the two meet. Zombies are just a natural disaster that conveniently makes seemingly human people into outright monsters.

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I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that last comment! my character view zombies and the state of the world as a challenge to human nature and his skill. Zombies to him are just dangerous wild animals that either need to be killed or outwitted. This can cause him to be exceptionally cruel When he's dealing with the creatures.

Speaking of Zombie films. Which zombies are we using for our game? the shamblers the walkers or the sprinters? Because the sprinters are basically Reavers from Firefly or in this case from 28 weeks later.

Everything about the zombies has been randomized. We will find out when we get in the game.

I have a bad feeling about this.... Mainly because there is an option where everyone starts off infected so we could live for a day Or less

True - but that sort of true randomness does bring the unknown back into the game.

I always thought 'fast zombies' were basically a concession to the ADD of most modern media consumers at the price of losing some of the deeper horror (slow, unrelenting, inevitable, brainless). But after 2 or 3 decades of slow zombies it is hard to complain about variations (though I remember fast-ish zombies in the 1980s like in Return of the Living Dead).

One of the horror theory books I'm currently reading suggests that the horror genre is a conservative genre because it has a fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature (i.e "the sheer shittiness of human nature" noted above). In fact most apocalypse/survival games are very, very Hobbesian (no relation to me!) in outlook. Almost all enlightenment/progressive philosophies have an optimistic view of human potential and nature.

In discussing this with Seth he mention that an upside of the 'Zombie Apocalypse' is that humanity is now unified against a common anti-human (or at least 'no longer human on the inside') foe. Plus any sort of apocalypse gets you out of the current consumerist wasteland of meaninglessness...

It is very true that your life would again have meaning, whether it be simply staying alive or thriving to keep the human race alive. As for a common enemy, well a zombie apocalypse has the potential to Unite us, but it also has the potential to throw the human race back into the dark ages!

Depending on how fractured The human population is most humans could very easily go back to tribal Or warlord society Once the zombie threat is dealt with, or even while they're currently dealing with it. Though the concept of killing fellow humans for food and supplies in the zombie apocalypse seems like the absolute worst thing you could do in my opinion!

Here is a quote from a recent zombie novel that reflects Seth's view.

Colson Whitehead from 'Zone One' (2011) wrote: "There was a single Us now, reviling a single Them," mused Mark Spitz. "Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone?"

Here is a brief summary of the plot:

Mark Spitz moved out of his parents' basement after the plague to become a civilian soldier working cleanup in Zone One, an area of Lower Manhattan that has been reclaimed and walled off from the "skels," as the aggressive zombies are called. Teams of sweepers like Spitz comb through the abandoned buildings to eliminate "stragglers"—harmless slacker zombies repeating forever some banal moment of everyday life: staring into a boarded-up department-store window, surfing an extinct Internet, lifting the hood of a dead copy machine. "Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures," writes Mr. Whitehead. "Now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment." Mark Spitz's job is to blow their brains out. The punchline is that Spitz was no different then the zombies he is now killing before the plague occurred.

Consider the setting (lower Manhattan) and the time (written in 2011) I think that story is a clear allegory for the unity New Yorkers felt in the wake of 9-11.

What often gets forgotten about this topic (or at least I always bring it up when this topic come up....) is that less than a month after the attacks NY police and firefighters got into a serious scrap when " just another airing of union gripes" by the firefighters concerning the clean-up of the towers turned into a violent protest "like the eruption of a familial brawl at a never-ending wake" resulting in five police officers injured (two with black eyes) and a dozen firefighters arrested.

The main sore point was that the recovery of the bodies of the 343 firefighter killed in the towers' collapse were starting to be ignored as the clean-up site became "full-time construction scoop-and-dump operation" once the gold in the towers' basements was recovered.  

Here is the NYT account:

New York Times, Nov 03, 2001 wrote:Bill Butler, a retired fire captain, spoke. "My son Tommy, from Squad 1, is still in that building, and we haven't gotten to him yet," he said, urging everyone to challenge the decision to cut back on the Fire Department presence at the site.

Soon the streets resounded with chants. "Bring Tommy home!" "Bring the brothers home!" "They took the gold out!"

The arrests of senior firemen - including a captain, a retired captain, a fire marshall and and three top union officials - prompted mayor Giuliani to say that the firefighters were "out of control" and that they did not have the ability to contain themselves emotionally.

To some people treating dead bodies like waste to be disposed of is so repugnant that will physically fight to prevent it.

To have your body left to the animals was the ultimate insult to the ancient Greeks (see the play Antigone) and to be buried outside the churchyard is a traditional Christian form of excommunication. In Islam and Judaism any mutilation of a corpse is a serious sin and may even prevent the dead person from resurrecting/going to the afterlife. This long traditional care for the dead is why Pappy felt that all those dead bodies should at least be given the respect of a prayer.

PZ creators often site Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z as one of their primary sources and often make it sound like it is a simple continuation of Romero's films.

PZ Designers wrote:"It's the game authentic to the Romero/Max Brooks zombie." Andy Hodgetts, elaborates: “Basically if you've ever read 'World War Z' or the 'The Zombie Survival Guide' or 'I Am Legend' you've read the blueprint of the game.”

So I took a quick look at those books and this was the first page I opened to:

Zombie Survival Guide wrote: "OBEY THE LAW!: A criminal record is something you cannot afford! When the dead rise, law enforcement must look upon you as a model citizen, someone to be trusted and left alone, not a felon of questionable background who should be interrogated at the first sign of trouble." (p. 29)

Romero's first film ends with a police/militia killing the main character because they mistakenly assume he is a zombie (plus an element of racism). 'Day of the Dead' is an explicit critique of military authoritarianism. Romero's films have been called 'hippie gothics' because of their anti-authoritarianism and the large African-American audience that made 'Night of the Living Dead' a success in 1968 surely had no illusion about the value of a clean criminal record in a racist society. Speaking of hippies - Cut your HAIR, Hippie!

Zombie Survival Guide wrote: "Cold, hard figures have shown that when battling the living dead, nothing has saved more victims than basic, tight clothing and closely cropped hair." (p. 62)


(actual illustration from book)

Needless to say Brooks' would kill off the long-haired women who survive Romeo's Dawn and Day because it would be more "realistic" that way...







In World War Z we learn that The Only Hope against Zombies is Apartheid because the two nations best able to handle the zombies are Israel and South Africa because they are used to handling hostile majority populations through violence and security measures.  Max Brooks is a liberal so he softens this ugly point by having Nelson Mandela implement the 'zombie apartheid' in South Africa and by having ultra-Orthodox religious Jews be a major problem in Israel' s plan (maybe the long-hair dig was directed at Orthodox Jews who are forbidden to shave their beards or side-locks?!)- but despite these concessions the message in clear. It is worth noting that Israel and South Africa were real-life political allies due to their apartheid politics and shared nuclear weapon technology.


REALITY


WORLD WAR Z

There is a big difference between the George Romero, an Pittsburgh-based independent film-maker, and Max Brooks, the privileged son of famous comedian Mel Brooks and a writer for Saturday Night Live (the show where laughter goes to die). There is a big difference between 1968-1985 (when Romero's films were made) and 2003-2006 (when Brooks' wrote his books. There is a big difference between Romero's trilogy and the 'Survivalist Zombie' genre that imitated and cashed in on it.

The fact that the designers of PZ did not see them as separate contributes to the shallowness of zombies in the game.

Romero's film use a mix of black humour, grotesque gore, cultural criticism and nihilism to create subversive masterpieces. The zombies mattered to Romero. The 'Survivalist Zombie' genre that emerged post-911 has little of this subversive attitude as it is about surviving at any cost and as a whole the genre seems more akin to the artificial scenarios of Reality TV that are designed to bring out the worst in people than an artistic use of monsters. The Survivalist zombies could be aliens, or demons, or people with rabies, it doesn't really matter, survival matters.

Romero helped pioneer the element of 'safehouse survival' as a back-drop for the real story, the book 'I Am Legend' does the same and was Romeo's course for it. PZ and other items of the Survivalist Zombies genre make the survival element the main story and so become a conservative force not a liberating one, and eventually them end up as a 'agricultural sim' or a water-downed 'Prepper' manual.

Romero's zombies were potent because they arose out of mix of many element - old voodoo movies, sci-fi ghouls, I Am Legend, American counter-culture - but now the 'Romero Zombie' a safe corporate product injected into the enemy slot of any FPS or Survival-Sim that needs it with only slight variations (fast or slow, virus or radiation). As a 'safe' monster they have lost their bite, except when re-mixed in new or inventive ways.

Ask yourself what are PZ zombies metaphors for? Sure, they are path-finder AIs that act as obstacles to survival - but what do they mean?

For monsters to have potency and power they must engage with culture, they must come from the fertile zones of terror in our minds, they must be more than just kill-able enemies. Romero understood this and in every movie they are interesting in dress, manner, special effects and meaning - by the third movie, the zombies have begun to adapt and even become protagonists even as they are being treated as purely biological creature that can be dissected and studied. [Insert your own pun about who PZ and Brookian zombies are stale, re-tread zombies of zombies]

I'm going to have to look up those books and have a read for myself, I particularly always wanted to read world War Z, I watched the movie but apparently it was a sellout compared to the Book. The main aspects I think that need to be changed in PZ Are obviously and NPCs, but in extension to that, The emotions, mental state and personality of your own character.

The Moodle's are a very basic form of personality for your character but they don't do nearly a good enough job of actually simulating the effects that one person would go through in these horrendous situations, but sadly I don't think these aspects of the game will ever be improved upon as most of the player base would see it as a handicap. After all, most of the player base for these zombie based survival games want to be the hero of their story, A supercharged zombie killing machine. So any changes to the psychological aspect of your character that could handicap or even mentally break you would be looked upon very badly by Most of the community that surrounds this game. One for the reasons stated above, and to because most of these people have no idea what their actual breaking point is, living generally comfy lives away from any threat most of them believe that they would be able to handle a zombie apocalypse easily when it comes to mentally keeping it together. When in reality most of Western society would be woefully unprepared to live in such a brutal world.

That's basically the problem with the modern 'survival zombie' genre: one foot is in the hard-core nihilistic films from the 1960s and 70s; the other foot is in modern power-fantasy gaming culture.

The first is designed to unsettle, the second is designed to re-assure. It is not easy to combine them.

Night of the Living Dead was a blistering bad trip of 'safehouse politics' and taboo-breaking shocks - including everyone being killed. PZ want to follow this and boldly states "THIS IS HOW YOU DIE" in the title screens - but you end-up farming because people want to be able to 'win' the game....

If I wanted to play a "supercharged zombie killing machine" I would find a hard-core FPS with chainsaws and phosphorus grenades (I suspect there are a few of them). I won't play PZ and demand that Moodles have no interesting psychological effect because it isn't macho enough.

It is up to developers (especially indie ones) to make good design choices and resist diluting your game into blandness.

Where is the black humour, grotesque gore or cynical social commentary in PZ now? The demo had these elements and they are a vital part of modern zombie-lore. The PZ designers have become so stuck on simulation they cannot see they are missing core elements of zombies. Simulation can be a design black-hole.

I guess I pretty biased toward monsters because I get the feeling the PZ designers don't love zombies enough. [I have seen the designers give enough interviews that I feel friendly toward them - I'm just trying to understand the problems I feel with the game]

I do think there is an urge in some people to try to find their breaking point (it is probably part of the reason I engaged in paint-ball/street protests/philosophy/psychedelics when younger...) but it is tricky to predict how the average person would adapt to an apocalypse. Right now I reading a psychological study of survivors from Hiroshima and Auschwitz and I'm struck by how deeply damaging such 'death encounters' can be, yet how adaptable humans are to brutal conditions.

The last chapter I read described how human detach from their bodies and external perceptions to their inner world, this caused deep psychic wounds, but allowed people to survive in hell and even joke about it.

Here is a cool old cover for the book:

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