They Don’t Stand For Anything
At first glance this may seem like an odd complaint as the very idea of a zombie is that they are essentially a very faceless antagonist. Hordes upon hordes descend upon us and it’s very rare a game will stop and take into consideration that these are our former friends, neighbors, and family we’re slaughtering. What’s rarer is if the video game will have the a zombie horde meaning something beyond scary monsters that want to bite you again and again. In film, they are used to represent everything from consumerism to racism, to our own obsession with being lost in technology. Why don’t we don’t see this anymore?
Dead Rising 2 is one of the few zombie games in recent memory that really used them to tell something more than beyond face value. Do the monsters in Dead Island, Dying Light, or Resident Evil represent anything that helps give the narrative more weight and substance? Now there is a very good argument to be made that not all games need a deeper story, which is very true. Sometimes I don’t want to get as heavily invested into a story or world if I am just trying to kill an hour or two. Yet, this idea seems to heavily outweigh a deeper analysis of the undead, as those types of games are few and far between. This isn’t asking for the abolishment of mindless shooters or that all games need to have seventeen different meanings, but a few more would be nice.
Zombies need to evolve just like the video game industry’s ability to tell stories. There is no doubting just how complex and thought-provoking gaming has gotten, so seeing our antagonists represent something outside of just another enemy to cleave in two could be interesting.
