Left 4 Dead 2: Experiments in Online Zombie Relations
The ZRC downloaded the Left 4 Dead 2 demo a few days ago, knowing that it will be the big ‘zombie’ game of Fall 2009, to evaluate its content for anti-zombie prejudices.
Preliminary impressions are that this is perhaps the worst anti-Zombie game ever made. Not only does it indulge players in heinous, extreme amounts of anti-Zombie violence, gore and visceral combat, it also encourages them to co-operate with other online gamers in small squads, training them to work as a team with the single-minded goal of exterminating all the undead from New Orleans.
This is an outrage. Left 4 Dead 2 is nothing more than a slick, heavily polished Zombie Murder Simulator that seems geared to recruiting and training an entire generational army of Zombie-bashing zealots! Never once are players presented with an option to discuss their differences with the Differently Animated, or to settle things with a Camp David summit, or even to co-exist peacefully in integrated Living/Undead communities. I was hoping perhaps for a little nationbuilding mini-game, perhaps along the lines of Sim City, where you can sit down and plan a vibrant re-animated New Orleans with amenities for the Undead as well as the Living, but NO SIR.
Just piles of guns, grenades, drugs and murderously savage zombie stereotyping.
On a side note, there seems to be a new kind of Hollywood Zombie on display in Left 4 Dead 2, or perhaps the whole series, we missed the first game, regrettably: the climbing zombie. For some reason, ‘zombies’ in this game climb like Spiderman.
Or perhaps Zombie Spiderman.
Weird. I mean, sure, some Zombies might like to climb the sides of buildings, but it’s not a generally accepted trait.
We will continue this investigation, and perhaps seek interviews with other players via voice chat, to cover this story as it unfolds.
–John J Sears
About The Author
[Be warned: Plot spoiler thingy involved]
It may interest you then, Mr Sears, to know that Left 4 Dead 2 is not, in fact, an anti-zombie game!
The flesh-hungry hordes portrayed certainly bare many traits that may be deemed ‘zombie-like’, but they are, in fact, living and breathing humans, infected with a pathogenic rabies-like virus that drives them beyond the borders of sanity and into a simple pack mentality; the abominations it reduces them to are but a pale, shadowy imitation of actual zombie-hood, not dead enough to be Undead, but not human enough to be Alive.
They bear no closer resemblance to the average rights-seeking zombie, like yourselves, than Boy George bears to the average gay man, or Laurence Tureaud as B.A. Baracus bears to the average African-American man!
Indeed, perhaps the creators of L4D2 did, in fact, take note of your concerns pre-emptively when they created their first game in quite pointedly making the creatures NOT zombies, but simply deranged, brain-addled (and sometimes hideously mutated) humans – perhaps intending, instead, to expose how very Inhuman many people truly are inside, and it only takes one little pathogenic mutagen to reveal it!
Well, technically the same could be said for 28 Days Later and its sequel, where the crazed rage virus victims were not undead either.
We believe in a big-tent approach here at the ZRC. Though we’re primarily geared toward the undead, other more recently emerged groups of Pseudo-Undead, like the Rage virus victims or Left 4 Dead’s zombie-flu sufferers, also need advocates. In my time playing the game I’ve seen many acts of barbarism against these poor people, and even seen the so-called protagonists turn on one another out of spite or malice. Left 4 Dead 2 bears less resemblence to a classic ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ than it does to a war against anything you can plausibly call a ‘Zombie’, as the NPCs do, in fact, call their victims.
War is hell for Zombies too.