Sunday Symposium: Is The Zombie Dead?

[Dog Pants]

A light symposium today to build up some karma before the general election and inevitable discussion of politics. Zombies have been around as a fictional entity in their current form for around fifty years now, and for at least thirty of them they were considered to be the subject of niche classics at best, second-rate exploitation flick staple at worst. Around ten years ago there was a spate of decent, or at least relatively high budget, zombie movies released which brought them into the mainstream, and before long mainstream videogames followed suit. Zombies have now become to games of the 2010s what the Second World War was to the 2000s. Now, appropriately enough half way through the century, we seem to have reached saturation point. Zombie games are no longer a rare niche, zombies are the focus of many mainstream titles now rather than a low-level bad guy. The social pressure cooker of Romero's apocalypse has mutated into the brutal anarchy of Kirkman's, and DayZ has paved the way for gaming to follow suit in droves. So are we fed up of them yet? Is there more life in this tired old undead dog?

My perspective is a little skewed. I've been a fan of zombie films for a long time. The elevator scene from Dawn of the Dead is possibly my first memory. I've read essays on the evolution of the genre and seen many examples. It's a subject close to my heart. So naturally I don't want my favourite sub-genre to become trite and obsolete, but it's for just this reason that I wish they'd make fewer games. I read about 26 of the Walking Dead graphic novels before I couldn't take any more. It was subversive. It started out as a great tale of apocalyptic survival, normal people thrown together then squeezed by the creeping doom of the zombie hordes until they started to pop. But Kirkman has turned it into a tale of human misery rather than futility. We've always known that nobody survives in zombie stories, the intrigue is in how the human spirit copes with that, and we can admire it. Sometimes we get a pleasant surprise, like in Shaun of the Dead or World War Z (the Max Brooks version, not the Hollywood one), and we're rewarded for daring to hope that the heroes might survive this time. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, has become Saw with zombies. In fact, barely with zombies in sight any more. The lumbering fellows always were meant to be the backdrop rather than the subject, an external pressure which closes in almost imperceptibly. In Kirkman's world, though, the zombies might as well be cows, lumbering about in the background. The human stories which made the genre appealing have become stories of misery committed between sociopaths. Back to the videogame space again, not only has this subversion spawned the DayZ-a-like, which lest we forget was also meant to be a zombie survival game back in the days when most games ended under piles of the undead, it has also grown a whole genre of 'survival' games which actively encourage players to be dicks to each other.

This weekend I played the demo of Dead State. The survival is about holing up and keeping people alive and sane. It's half management game, half turn-based tactical. Sort of like zombie X-Com I suppose. It's not the best game in the world - the UI is awful and the combat is tiresome (at low level at least), but it feels like the genre should do. Humanity huddling together for survival in a sea of dead. I then went and played Project Zomboid again, which has improved massively since I last had a look. It's a similar sort of thing, but I'm not entirely sure if there even are any other humans alive out there. It's a story of isolation and survival. So I don't think zombies are dead, I just think they're being used in an unoriginal and irresponsible way, to provide an excuse for assholes to be assholes.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I'm bored of zombies, and I think I know why (aside from the awful over-saturation of the market).

Zombies are thick, there's no intelligence there, at all, it's cheap AI and cheap gameplay. You can run, or you can fight, there's not much else there.

If you compare any given zombie game to say, any game with notable enemy AI, say starting with farcry (11 years ago) you have a multitude of options for dealing with the enemy, including ignoring them and hoping they go away. Alien Isolation is another great example, the alien basically wanders around the world, if you make enough noise, it may well come and slamfuck you.

Zombies just don't build tension, you just bumble along with them as an existing threat that due to being thick like potatoes don't really offer anything interesting, hell, even in DayZ the zombies aren't a problem, it's the humans that'll fuck you 9 times out of 10.

[Dog Pants]

You've hit on something I've considered before, which is that zombies in films are threatening because of their numbers. One zombie is laughable, but a thousand zombies are an unstoppable horse. Games struggle to make this kind of scale due to technical limitations, so they tend to just have a few shambling around in groups, or they make them fast in order to make them individually dangerous (but not really zombies any more).

[Dr. kitteny berk]

You've hit on something I've considered before, which is that zombies in films are threatening because of their numbers. One zombie is laughable, but a thousand zombies are an unstoppable horse. Games struggle to make this kind of scale due to technical limitations, so they tend to just have a few shambling around in groups, or they make them fast in order to make them individually dangerous (but not really zombies any more).

Even at that, the inference of masses of zombies is attainable. Take a mall, you just need to make there be enough zombies at the (very few) exit points to give the impression of an impossibly large zombie horde, combined with occasional ingress into your safe space, you have pretty effective zombie apocalypse with no more than 200 AI zombies, which is utterly doable on modern hardware*

Speaking from a non-game angle, I'm not sure it's inherently that numbers make zombies more scary, I think in a mall scenario, it's that it's just completely hopeless, There's no winning against a real zombie horde, it's just surviving in an ever-decreasing safe space until one gets to you. That'd make a shit game.


FWIW, these are the defaults from L4D2

Code: Select all

z_mob_spawn_min_size 10
z_mob_spawn_max_size 30
z_mega_mob_size 50
z_mob_spawn_finale_size 20

*I reckon, nothing to base this on.

[Dog Pants]

It's not about decreasing space, it's about fending off disaster until something catastrophic happens and the hordes get in. Just like Dwarf Fortress or FTL.

[Joose]

There are games that do the "huge crowds of zombies" look, such as Dead Rising. The trouble with those is that you tend to end up in a bit of a binary state thing with that. Either you are safely and hilariously mowing down millions of zombies, or you are fucked. Theres not a lot you can do, game design wise, to vary that much.

I think thats the problem. Zombies can be great, but there is not a lot you can do to vary something that includes zombies without making them not really zombies any more. That means that, with the huge amount of zombie based media in the last few years, means we have explored pretty much all the options.

I don't think this is something specific to Zombies necessarily. Any subject has a limited amount of variety in it (although the exact amount of variety might... vary), so if everyone dogpiles onto any one subject enough its going to get tired after a while. I think that time has come for zombies.

Of course, just because we as consumers are pretty much done with zombies doesn't mean you should expect zombie things to dry up any time soon, especially with games. They are the new Nazis: They look pretty much human but people tend to have no moral compunction against murdering the shit out of them. Like Berk says, they also have an advantage over Nazis in that they are piss easy to program the AI for. If (See human) then (go and bite it) else (wander about aimlessly).

Like I say though, its a natural thing. Its just like how years ago every damn game was about WW2. Then we all got bored of WW2 because they started running out of angles to cover it from, so the number of WW2 games dried up a bit. The zombies games will dry up soon enough, and we will move on to over saturating something else. I dont think we will ever completely lose zombies in things though, just like we still get the occasional WW2 game.

[Dog Pants]

There are games that do the "huge crowds of zombies" look, such as Dead Rising. The trouble with those is that you tend to end up in a bit of a binary state thing with that. Either you are safely and hilariously mowing down millions of zombies, or you are fucked. Theres not a lot you can do, game design wise, to vary that much.

I think thats the problem. Zombies can be great, but there is not a lot you can do to vary something that includes zombies without making them not really zombies any more. That means that, with the huge amount of zombie based media in the last few years, means we have explored pretty much all the options.

This is my point though, the zombies are being mishandled. Treating them as a type of bad guy is missing the point. They're a horse of nature, a source of catastrophe. In classic zombie fiction nobody goes out looking to fight the zombies. They might arm themselves in case they get grabbed by one, but everyone always avoids them. They're there to create an ominous atmosphere, an inevitable sense of doom. Just like in Dwarf Fortress-esque games of failure. Das Boot is good for exactly the same reasons as a zombie film - the characters are trapped and helpless in a desperate situation, trying to survive. They're forced together under pressure, and they're trying not to crack. So making a game where fighting zombies is a viable option is the same as making a submarine game where opening the hatch and going out with a bucket is a viable option. The zombie games I enjoy get this right - you avoid the zombies, because to fight them will inevitably bring more, and you'll die under a pile of gnashing corpses. The ones I wish didn't get made are the ones where you charge around destroying them for kicks. And actually, done right, that can be good too - take the scene in Dawn of the Dead where the biker gang get in and hit a zombie in the face with a cream pie. That's fucking awesome, it shatters the tension by making this terrible threat suddenly ridiculous. Dead Rising could have been the equivalent of that, if it had been been tempered somehow. In Dawn of the Dead all those guys get eaten because they're fucking about with seltzer bottles and blood pressure testers, which brings us back to the realisation that, while an individual zombie might be ridiculous, there are still millions of them out there and they're still going to get you.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

It's not about decreasing space, it's about fending off disaster until something catastrophic happens and the hordes get in. Just like Dwarf Fortress or FTL.

Yes it is, you start off free to roam the world, zombies strike (catastrophe), you limit yourself to a safe area, say hide out in a mall, zombies breach (catastrophe) and you barricade yourself upstairs, zombies (catastrophe) stairwell and roof, zombies (catastrophe) > die like bitches.


Edit: Of course, this is all best case, most of us will die like vegetables in our sleep.

[Dog Pants]

I'd say the decreasing space is merely a side effect. Of course if claustrophobia is something you pick up in zombie films then that's no less valid an observation, it's all in the interpretation of the viewer, but I don't think that's generally what the director's shooting for. The point I'm trying to make is that the traditional Romero zombie scenario can make a good game, it's just that most zombie games these days don't try to do that.

[buzzmong]

The problem of zombies in mass media is that they're being portrayed as killable. It might be difficult, whether by design (fast zombies ala 28 Days) or simply down to resources (5 bullets vs 10 zombies and you need to hit them in the head etc...), but they retain that killable factor, which boils down to whoever is facing them having the ability to win the current battle, even if the war is unwinnable. You can then end up with having to drop in the human element, either with people flaking out, betrayals and the like, or to pump up the survival situation side of things in order to maintain the situtation as a threat.

A lot of times they fall foul of the "If it bleeds, we can kill it" trope.

To me zombies are meant to be an oppressive hoard of the undead and a constantly shifting, albeit bitey, horse to avoid for as long as possible. To that end, the best stuff I've come across pretty much always has them as nigh unkillable (short of total destruction like blowing them up or something). When you take away the ability to win, and the only options are to flee and avoid (this is what Alien Isolation has done), then they become a fucking terrifying foe by constantly carrying around a sense of inevitable doom.

If you allow them to be killed easily, they just become an obstacle that you have to, and can, deal with, which misses the point of them imo.

[TezzRexx]

Most of points I wanted to make have already been covered, but I'm definitely bored of Zombie films and particularly, games.

From memory, the only zombie games that were big before the mid 2000s were Resident Evil, House of the dead, and Zombies ate my neighbours! From the 16 bit generation. All 3 different game types, all still with niche appeal, but all fun in there own right, and yet that still didn't cover the scope of what could be done with that genre. Fast forward to now, and most things have been covered. From FPS, to co-op, to daft gimmicks like Dead Rising, I don't feel gameplay wise there is much more that can be done and therefore I'm rarely interested.

Zombie media's interest is generated by its the storytelling and characters, both of which are missed often with games, so therefore the game relies on its gameplay alone to be successful. L4D is a good example however, of ignoring the story and concentrating solely on gameplay, which worked.

The only ground that hasn't been covered for me yet, would be something of the scale of Dead Rising, with excellent co-op but with truly useable surroundings, like killing a insane about of zombies by dynamically collapsing objects and many types of pathways to prevent it being linear but technical limitations and required effort vs reward will probably mean this will probably never happen.

[HereComesPete]

The only ground that hasn't been covered for me yet, would be something of the scale of Dead Rising, with excellent co-op but with truly useable surroundings, like killing a insane about of zombies by dynamically collapsing objects and many types of pathways to prevent it being linear but technical limitations and required effort vs reward will probably mean this will probably never happen.

Dying light maybe?

[FatherJack]

I still enjoy zombie games, I wouldn't say I'm bored of them, but there have been definite low points such as when Call of Duty and everyone else seemed to think a tacked-on zombie mode was a necessity. I like ones that are a bit different, or just stand out as good games.

My favourite zombie film has always been Dawn of the Dead - the zombies are a threat, but it's the living that fuck everything up. I don't rate Dead Rising among my favourite zombie games as despite the setting, it doesn't really capture the feelings of the film. Dead Island copies heavily from Dead Rising and also misses the point.

Half Life of course has zombies, but they are done rather differently and work well and aren't really the focus of the game. The Last of Us was a great game, though again not technically zombies, it manages to tell a compelling story - it's set several years after the outbreak which is a unusual twist and in its best moments focusses on the main character's dealings with other people and each other more than the infected, with them marvelling at glimpses of life in the pre-outbreak world.

State of Decay came closest to feeling like Dawn of the Dead. You claim outposts and fortify a base while you search for supplies and gather survivors, building add-ons until you have the perfect home and feel like they did when they had the mall to themselves. Then people start arguing, falling out, leaving, going missing. Suddenly zombies are getting through all the gates are there's no-one on guard duty. You do kill a lot of zombies in the game, but you don't ever really feel invincible. Noise will always draw more and more zombies, guns most of all, but if you stick with melee weapons you'll find yourself grabbed from behind when there are more than a couple of undead.

7 Days to Die is an interesting take on the genre - it's more like Minecraft than anything else (which also had zombies) - but it's a much more desperate scramble to collect the rather numerous items required to construct a rudimentary shelter and survive that first night. Then it becomes a balancing act of improving your shelter at the cost of using up all the resources in the area.

Contagion isn't a fantastic game, but it does kind of engender the feeling of hopelessness and inevitability of defending against a zombie horde in a cheery suburban setting.

I'm looking forward to see what Dying Light comes up with, with its mix of parkour, traps and a day/night mechanic. Finally a chance to play as Father Grigori, perhaps?

[Joose]

It occurred to me, reading through this, that approaching the zombie genre with an Alien Isolation philosophy might be interesting. Obviously there are some differences: A:I is about being chased by a single fast moving monster, zombies are about lots of slow moving monsters. But the overall design idea of A:I would work: You are constantly under threat of attack (but not constantly under attack) and if you do get attacked your weapons don't do shit. Sneaking around the threat is the only sound tactic and running as fast as you can is the only option you have when things go tits up.

"You are in a building surrounded by zombies. There might be some zombies in here too. Try not to let them notice you, try not to let them in, try not to get screwed by the other survivors trapped in your building. Lets see how long you can make it." That actually sounds like it could work.

Thinking about it, make it pretty simple and top down and I think I might be able to make that in GameMaker. TO THE PROTOTYPE MOBILE!

[TezzRexx]

The only ground that hasn't been covered for me yet, would be something of the scale of Dead Rising, with excellent co-op but with truly useable surroundings, like killing a insane about of zombies by dynamically collapsing objects and many types of pathways to prevent it being linear but technical limitations and required effort vs reward will probably mean this will probably never happen.

Dying light maybe?

I've not heard much about that in all honesty, but I'll have a look into it

FJ, I completely forgot about the Last Of Us which probably would've added quite a bit to the point I was trying to make! A great example though of great storytelling and gameplay. I don't think it would have been as big of a hit if the gameplay wasn't as good.

[TezzRexx]

It occurred to me, reading through this, that approaching the zombie genre with an Alien Isolation philosophy might be interesting. Obviously there are some differences: A:I is about being chased by a single fast moving monster, zombies are about lots of slow moving monsters. But the overall design idea of A:I would work: You are constantly under threat of attack (but not constantly under attack) and if you do get attacked your weapons don't do shit. Sneaking around the threat is the only sound tactic and running as fast as you can is the only option you have when things go tits up.

"You are in a building surrounded by zombies. There might be some zombies in here too. Try not to let them notice you, try not to let them in, try not to get screwed by the other survivors trapped in your building. Lets see how long you can make it." That actually sounds like it could work.

Thinking about it, make it pretty simple and top down and I think I might be able to make that in GameMaker. TO THE PROTOTYPE MOBILE!

That sounds good. Imagine having to get to a building and build your own barricades too without making too much noise, and then inadvertently having to finish it against a horde of attacking zombies

[Dr. kitteny berk]

There's one that does that.

[Dog Pants]

Fort Nite.