Also odd in these photos is that my camera’s automatic configuration mode seems to have been driven slightly batty by the weird lighting in the Marriot (as were my eyes, actually). The flash went off constantly even in fairly bright rooms and it proved very hard to get some shots at all (more on that when I write up the SKAmbies thing later today).

Without further adieu, however, here are some of our best shots from Geek.kon 2010:

Here’s a view from our booth showing an enormous selection of anime plushies available at a nearby vendor. Plush toys are a big deal at anime cons, apparently; most vendors had at least a few. This wall was the most impressive at the convention however.

This is a good look at our booth once we had the banner set up. I think it captures the air of professionalism and approachability we strive for at ZRC public appearances, and Artistic and Technical Director Jenny Rowland, seen here, concurs.

More from the booth here; the movie playing on the laptop is AACTV2: Atomic Boogaloo, which the AAC folks were nice enough to allow us to make free copies of. We gave them away if people donated to Lynn Sage, whether by purchasing a shirt, poster, or just dropping some cash in the box. (A couple of copies also went to Dr. Cancer and the SKAmbies, for being such good role models. Well, the Zombies are. Dr. Cancer’s a mad scientist; they’re never good role models)

An additional photo of the booth, showing the wide variety of merch we have available. Well, HAD; the wristbands are now sold out, which is awesome really.

Steampunk was a big deal at this convention, and these people had the best costumes overall, I believe. Sorry again about the dust, visible here. Also, our normally red-eye proof camera again had a fit in the Vendor Hall. I think those overhead lights were fashioned by Satan.

An awesome Team Fortress 2 costume can be seen in this shot. Wow. That’s some dedication to detail.

It wouldn’t be an anime con without Pocky.

Some new signage we made at the convention.

A rare Zombie product seen at the show; however, it still manages to perpetrate the Zombies and Brains stereotyping we work so hard against.

Now this was a great White Mage costume, and as an added bonus I saw the young woman later attending the Zombie Ska show. An open-minded healer, even though White Mages are traditionally very hard on Zombies in the Final Fantasy universe.

You would not believe how popular Kingdom Hearts was at this convention. I honestly had no idea it was still kicking around to this degree. It was probably the most popular thing people cosplayed as this year.

Though for sheer-staying power, I guess you can’t beat Pokemon.

I wonder if they have Zombie Pokemon yet?

That’s it for me for now! Come back later today for a review of Zombies playing Ska, which is just cool by any standard.

Our last day in the Vendor area went quite well, and I’m happy to report that we sold completely out of Zombie Strong wristbands. That’s a ‘nice problem to have’, as they say on Metalocalypse. We’re going to put in a new order, eh, probably this week, and we’re thinking of doing another series of wristbands as well, since people love them so much.

We did cut short the sales and outreach portion of our weekend a bit so that we could go see Dr. Cancer and the SKAmbies, who actually took the time to stop by our place before the show. A productive dialogue was had, and I’ll talk extensively about the band in an upcoming post.

After the concert it was sadly time to go home, as the convention was over. All in all, the ZRC had a fantastic time! We enlightened some anime loving geeks about Zombies, which is very good preventative medicine for when the despicable and morally repugnant spectacle called Highschool of the Dead comes to our shores. In fact, we overheard people at the convention discussing the shallow blood and breast-a-thon at the show, so we arrived on the scene just in time. I shudder to think of the damage this televised sadism will inflict on the Zombie public image once it’s out on DVD in Region 1.

And so, hearts light and cashbox heavy, the ZRC departed from the convention center. In all likelihood we will return next year, ready to beat back prejudice against Zombies once more from the throngs of geeks, nerds and otaku.

Now, onward, to the Resident Evil protest this Friday!

If this has caused immense personal hardship to anyone I deeply apologize.

So, how did Day 2 go? Pretty well, overall. We did some spiffing up for the booth, hanging our mighty ZRC banner high above the table for all to see. We had a number of intriguing conversations with people and were confronted with very different questions and a very different set of biases and levels of Zombie knowledge than the ZRC gets at, say, a horror convention or a film festival. It’s shocking just how little the average American ‘geek’, as it were, knows about Zombies outside of America, even just the stereotyped violence and aggression found in foreign films. Truly, for the American pop culture, Romero is king of a demented realm of hate, to the exclusion of all others.

Thus you have a different set of challenges at a geeky convention. First, one has to broaden the horizons about the basic, widely varying nature of Zombies; their widely differing origins, the cultural backgrounds at play. Voodoo Zombies have their own unique set of issues, as I discussed with one convention-goer in some depth. Often when it comes to Voodoo Zombies you’re dealing with economic matters; hours of labor, monetary compensation, working conditions. Yet, to an average anime-loving Joe or Jane, they apply not just a stereotype about Zombies, but about the wrong SORT of Zombies, and assume that a Zombie raised from the dead by black magic is hungering for their brains.

Sometimes you have to deal with these problems in stages, advancing from the categorically wrong prejudice to the applicable, but factually inaccurate prejudice, and then from there on to Enlightenment.

All in all we’ve learned a great deal here at the ZRC. In some ways we’re a year early to Geek.kon; next year it looks like the odious Highschool of the Dead will be a big hit, and Zombies and anime will intersect in a big way in America for the first time. The ZRC will be ready though, having learned the ropes of an anime con the hard way early, and sharpened our rhetorical and merchandising skills in preparation, thanks to Geek.kon.

Also, I forgot my toolbox somewhere and have to go pick it up, as it has the staplegun. Oopsie.

Come on out after, say, 11 am or so and get your Zombie Rights on, boys and girls!

Yet here the author still indulges in Zombie stereotyping. Never seen a vegetarian Zombie before? Fair enough, I suppose, but it shouldn’t be so surprising. Zombies are people too, and some people, a small subset, are vegetarians. This stems fairly obviously, I think, from the ‘Zombies are brain-munchers’ stereotyping, and that’s a shame.

Still, whoever this IMMD poster is, they seem to have overcome the negative feelings inspired by the stereotype even as they can’t completely process it out, and welcome Zombies into the public sphere. That’s something at least. It’s a bittersweet thought though, that as Zombies become more accepted and mainstream, such events will inevitably cease being exceptional, and hence, perhaps cease making peoples’ days.

This convention we will also have a semi-limited supply of Atomic Age Cinema TV 2: Electric Boogaloo, the critically acclaimed second feature in the AACTV ongoing series. You can pick up your copy, free with any donation to the Lynn Sage Cancer Research Foundation. Absolutely free, just drop some money in the bowl… or whatever collection device we come up with.

All this plus Zombie Activism and more fun, starting Friday!

So come on out to Geek-Kon at the Marriot West in Middleton, aka Madison’s west side, and see Zombie Rights in action.

Even if you hate Zombies and love videogames where you kill them (for some disturbed reason) there’s no particular reason to do it in this one.

Dead Rising was a hit in no small part because it married classic American Zombie iconography, the mall under siege, the Undead invasion, the Zombie as metaphor for contemporary social woes, with an enormous dose of well-executed virtual violence. Although carrying an M rating, Dead Rising always had a smirk barely concealed behind its carnage, and had an unmistakable air of self-awareness, even smug self-satisfaction. Sure, it was another ‘Zombie game’, from Capcom no less, but you didn’t just kill Zombies here, you mutilated them in comical fashion and took ‘hilarious’ pictures of your mayhem.

So when Dead Rising 2: Case Zero tries to buy into a more dramatic, perhaps more mature sensibility, it doesn’t just fall a bit flat; it starts to dissociate altogether.

In order to get that pathos that people seem to want in their expansive, Mature-rated gaming experiences of late, Dead Rising 2 goes after the fatherhood element seen in everything from Bioshock 2 to Heavy Rain (inverted slightly in Fallout 3). As discussed by gaming-commentary gods at Penny-Arcade, these games attempt to touch a very different area of the consciousness of adult gamers, people who have grown up with games and now can use them, as art, to cope with feelings of vulnerability and helplessness, to view parenthood from a new, virtual angle, even as many of them become parents themselves.

Dead Rising 2 notices this trend, and duplicates it, crudely. Now, instead of playing snarky, danger-seeking, self-important photojournalist Frank West, your character is Chuck Green, a professional biker of some sort, motocross or something, I dunno, who has been drawn into the Zombie Apocalypse and now fights to protect his daughter from the twin scourges of a Zombie infection and a society that would purge her for being a carrier of the disease.

You know; in between cross-dressing and staging comical Zombie deaths.

Seriously, that’s how this game goes down. One minute you’re assigned a task to obtain the one drug in all the world that can save Chuck’s little girl from Zombiism, which the game portrays as a horrible fate, and the next you’re supposed to jury-rig a hilarious improvised weapon to cause hilarious deaths. You know this is what you’re supposed to do because the game explicitly tells you, with achievements, with experience points, with graphical rewards and sound effects cheering you on to further depravity and detachment.

Then your character’s watch will remind you that 12 hours is almost up (in game) and it’s time to get Katey her fix. Lather, rinse, repeat, alternating cycles of bloody drama and even bloodier comedy. A recurring theme of Dead Rising games is that many people, presented with the end of the world, break down into ‘psychopaths’, aka Bosses, that you must defeat (naturally for a lot of experience points). However, when your main character spends half his time entertaining unseen Gods who reward him for his cruelty with special powers, and half his time caring for his young daughter, the distinction between ’sane’ and ‘psychopath’ is precarious at best.

It’s a marriage that just doesn’t work thematically. Black comedy and horror is one thing; slapstick and horror is another. But horror and goofball self-indulgence? Exactly how are you supposed to be scared when the world that’s supposed to be threatening takes numerous breaks to give you, say, the schematic to turn a bucket and a power drill into a deathtrap, or to mount two chainsaws onto a canoe paddle and wade into an ocean of blood?

This is of course a horrible game from a Zombie Rights perspective, and no doubt the full game soon to come out will be even worse. Zombies aren’t just marginalized here, they’re barely present, even as ‘monsters’. They’re more like speedbumps with teeth standing between you and your next game-delivered objective, which usually consists of leading around a 2-dimensional NPC who complains loudly about your assistance all the while. Yawn. The Zombies are barely here. They stand around, lunge at you occasionally, and degenerate into fountains of blood on demand. Lawn sprinklers have more personality and are less predictable.

I felt a lot of pity for the poor virtual Zombies, but progressively less and less outrage as I played. These aren’t just stereotypes, they’re reductions, like a sauce that you cook down all day. Are they even Zombies anymore? I wonder. In a world where we hated technology a bit more, would Dead Rising 2 be about smashing the Talking Toasters instead of the Undead?

The gameplay is so similar to Dead Rising that I sincerely hope they did this on purpose to serve as a bridge to players of the first game, and that the actual sequel will be substantially different. Otherwise, Zombie Rights Enthusiasts, I can say without hesitation that I will be very, very bored playing it. I got bored playing Dead Rising, and I was bored by the second full evening of Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. The residual boredom from the first game came back like a tide, because it’s the same thing!

I never thought I’d say this about a five dollar game, but come on! There’s just no meat here. Five bucks for perhaps five hours of semi-entertaining sandbox play? According to the in-game clock, of late I’ve logged 112 hours on Fallout 3 and I’ve barely touched the first of five expansion packs. The Game of the Year edition cost 50 bucks or so on Amazon. In terms of Zombie games, way back when I was a callow and unenlightened youth, the free demo of Resident Evil 2 that came with the Director’s Cut of Resident Evil gave far more than Case Zero does.

Of course, it wasn’t smirking at you the whole time.

In conclusion: yes, this game is a horrible insult to Zombies everywhere, as expected. It also seems to be an insult to Zombie-killing videogamers, serving up more of the same while pretending to be something it’s not simultaneously. Whether Dead Rising 2 follows in Case Zero’s footsteps remains to be seen, but so far I find myself longing for Frank West. He may have been a smart-mouthed jerk with a penchant for weird costumes, but he didn’t put on a halo while he engaged in his mayhem.

Ok, so the ZRC played the Dead Rising 2 prologue for a few hours this evening over dinner (a lovely ricotta and parmesean stuffed tortellini with a simple marinara sauce, thanks for asking). First impressions follow:

Every videogame series has conventions, at least after a while. Part of this is the need to appeal to players of the previous game, part is branding, part might be simple convenience, reusing the tools and development tricks that were cobbled together the hard way, the first time around. Bottom line, absent extensive effort, gaming conventions are a fact of life. Some even become iconic; Chocobos and Phoenix Downs, 1Up mushrooms and Fire Flowers, quarter circle forward fireballs.

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero marks the second game, or part of it at least, in a new hot-selling franchise of Anti-Zombie sandbox games. Still, being so early in the series, and standing apart from the first one in time, handed off to a new team to develop (the first Dead Rising was an internal Capcom project, whereas Dead Rising 2 was developed by Blue Castle Games) it’s shocking just how… conservative this game feels.

Case Zero doesn’t feel like the prologue to a new Dead Rising game; it feels like DLC for the first one.

A handy example of what I mean: when you lose the game in Case Zero, you get the same message as from the first game, ‘The truth has vanished into darkness’ or something like that. In the first game this made sense; you played an investigative photojournalist working on a mystery. In the second game, there’s no ‘truth’ you’re seeking; you play a father trying to keep his daughter alive while escaping the authorities. Yet they retained the message; why? Homage, or lack of creativity? You decide, I suppose.

The world, story, and objectives in Case Zero are remarkably truncuated. I’d expected as much but it’s still somewhat glaring, even in a five dollar download. The ‘town’ you’re exploring is a single block of two streets of the commercial district in one of those backroads small towns that stereotypically died out after the Interstates bypassed them. All shops and no houses here in Podunk, Nevada; it’s not at all clear where anyone in the town is supposed to have *lived*. It has/had a population of about 700, with no apartments, no houses, no full-service grocery stores. Paradoxically, despite its placement in the Nevada deserts, 46 miles from Vegas, it does have a hunting/fishing store, advertising prominently its focus on bass fishing and deer hunting.

Err… in Nevada?

(Weirder still, said store’s stock consists largely of broadswords, harkening back to a particularly fan-servicey splatter weapon from the first game)

The first Dead Rising took place in a mall, referencing the seminal Zombie-bashing movie Dawn of the Dead. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero seems to forget it’s NOT set in one. It’s kind of distracting.

As for playing the game… the ZRC is conducting a sort of experiment with the Case Zero download: we’re trying to complete the game’s main story mode without killing a single zombie. Is it doable? Hard to say. We’ve completed most of the tasks set out before us, but one survivor has to be rescued to ‘win’ and he seems to insist on your character killing Zombies before he’ll allow himself to BE rescued. Bizarre I know. Perhaps he has psychological problems.

Still, our commitment to non-violence forces us to try our best to resolve the situation. I’ll let you know how that turns out, plus, eventually, a review of just how depraved the game gets in its anti-Zombie violence.

Until next time.

Yes, America. Watch this short film to learn why hating Zombies is, in fact, akin to hating the very United States itself.

It’s important to know who you can trust, in this crazy, 24/7 media environment, where political issues devolve into screaming matches over cable and facts are rare and nearly mythical creatures.

So when the ZRC started getting word of a Zombie Rights party in the recent UK general elections, we were thrilled to hear about their participation. Indeed, initially everything looked quite good.

The upcoming British General Election, has taken an encouraging twist, no more politics as usual.

The regular guys are all there, Labour, Conservative, Lib-Dems., UKIP, and a few minority parties, but we have a new kid on the block and they will be contesting at least five seats in the House of Commons. CURE which is an acronym for Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality. CURE is in effect, the Zombie Party.

Glad to see, at last, someone is taking politics seriously and treating it with the respect it deserves.

Yes, that would indeed have been a positive change, and finally some serious advancement for Zombies in the world of politics. Actual representation in Parliament! What a chance that would be for the Differently Animated.

The ‘CURE’ party has a website, of course, and it takes the form of a blog about their electoral activities. Apparently they managed to run in four constituencies in the recent election, and actually came in ahead of other parties in most of them, though they did not win a seat in Parliament.

So why doesn’t this make the ZRC happy? I mean, sure they lost spectacularly, but isn’t it still a major step forward just to try?

It would have been, certainly… if it wasn’t an elaborate hoax. For you see, the CURE party is, in fact, a front group for Capcom, a surreptitious attempt to undermine Zombie Rights as a movement in order to sell more copies of its latest odious product.

It didn’t take too much digging to reveal this errant fraud, this despicable co-opting of a legitimate civil rights lobby. The signs are everywhere.

First, examine their blog a bit more carefully.

In this image you can see the top left portion of their site. Who is this mysterious CG woman that is used as a site identifying image? The CURE website curiously doesn’t seem to mention her. For that matter, why is a Zombie Rights organization looking for a ‘cure’ for Zombies to begin with?

Coincidentally, I found the answer when using Google to poke around at my own site archive to see where I’d listed something about Dead Rising on the ZRC blog. When you run this search for Zombie Rights and Dead Rising, the ZRC is your top two google results. As it should be.

However, the third result takes you to a Dead Rising 2 discussion page featuring fans poring over Dead Rising 2 images, noting the apparent presence in the game of a ‘Zombie Rights Activist’.

Does this image look familiar?

Yes, that’s right; Dead Rising 2 apparently features Zombie Rights Activists. I shudder to think of how we’re portrayed in the game. More to the point, CURE is nothing more than a front-group to virally market Dead Rising 2.

It gets better though. Not only has Capcom deviously co-opted Zombie Rights to promote their game, even going so far as to field a fake political party (or so they claim – I’m finding it hard to verify the actual election results) in a UK election; they also decided to abuse a Fake Zombie in public at E3 so that their pet Faux Zombie Rights organization could show up to protest the cruelty:

Above is a picture of a sad zombie who has been captured and brought to the E3 Expo this week as an exhibit for Capcom‘s booth. Those that attended the expo pointed and laughed as the helpless zombie growled and was obviously not up to being made fun of. Some even took pictures by the caged undead and surely will be posting their photos on the internet. But a group of individuals weren’t going to sit idle while zombies are captured and treated like (dare I say) animals.

C.U.R.E. (Citizens for Undead Rights & Equality) flooded the E3 Expo with fliers such as this:

…

On the back of the flier was information regarding how zombies were treated poorly and a website (citizensfortheundead.com) with a petition that asks you to get active. It’s quite the impressive campaign idea.

Passing out fliers? Staging protests? Man, next they’ll be raising money for cancer research.

No, wait, I’m sorry; they’re a FAKE civil rights organization, they have no interest in actually doing good or helping people. They’re here to sell a videogame.

Check out CURE’s US website, which, again, purports to be a real Zombie Advocacy organization, though strangely here not mentioning that they’re also supposed to be a political party in the UK.

For a Zombie Rights lobby they’re also awfully keen on spreading unfair stereotypes about Zombies:

“What rights should Zombies have?”

Zombies should have the right to equal consideration of their interests. For instance, a living human has an interest in not having pain inflicted on them unnecessarily, so we’re obliged to respect that rights. Zombies don’t always have the same rights as humans because their interests are not always the same as ours, and because of their inability to articulate their needs.
“Zombies don’t always respect our rights, so why should we apply our ideas of morality to them?”

A Zombie’s inability to understand and adhere to our rules is as irrelevant as a child’s or as that of a person with a severe developmental disability. Zombies are not always able to choose to change their behaviors, but adult human beings have the intelligence and ability to choose between behaviors that hurt others and behaviors that do not hurt others. When given the choice, it makes sense to choose compassion.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll see a strange banner ad:

Crass. In case you aren’t following the marketing for this game too closely, ‘Zombrex’ is a fictional drug found in Dead Rising 2 that can apparently delay or even prevent Zombification. Naturally, it too has a website.

The meat of the site is hidden behind an age-registration barrier, since this game is rated Mature, but the ZRC can offer you a peek at the slickly designed fake Pharma website hawking this anti-Zombie medication.

‘Zombrex’ also has ties to the Dead Rising Sun movie that was mentioned in our post about the Anime News Network interview with the Dead Rising creators, naturally. Zombrex is a fictional sponsor of this ‘film’ about Zombiism, made to ape the low budget Japanese horror style.

Then you have their page on ’symptoms’ to look out for in secretly infected friends and relatives hiding their condition. This bit is amusing at least:

E is for EXPOSURE
Could they have been exposed to infection? Have they been on holiday to zombie-themed resorts recently? Have they been consorting with groups defending ‘zombie rights’?

So now we’re not just advocates for an oppressed minority, we’re plague carriers.

Zombrex even has a prospectus not-too-subtly mocking the pharmaceutical industry’s preference for maintenance drugs (which represent a continuous revenue stream) as opposed to cures for ailments. Nice social commentary there, you Romero-wannabes.

I will give the Capcom marketing demons credit though, they certainly go all out. Their E3 spectacle apparently culminated in having fake security guards violently suppress the Zombie Rights protest. Watch this E3 video, especially starting at around the 1 minute marker:

Wow.

(As a CJUS degree holder and longtime observer of criminal justice practitioners, I might note that, while designed to be shocking, this choreographed event is more than a little over the top. Real security personnel are trained to be calm and keep control of a situation, and even when security or police engage in cruelty and oppression they’ll attempt to maintain a more controlled atmosphere. All the incoherent yelling and shouting? Overdone. Plus the costumes need serious work; what professional security guard in this day and age carries no sidearm of any kind? No pepper spray, no Taser? Seriously? Also, there’s the friendliness with the press; real cops or security hate to be observed on camera, it invites lawsuits… if your targets are actual protestors, rather than fakes, at least.)

To recap: as a stealth promotional campaign for an Anti-Zombie videogame, the marketing minions working for Capcom have embarked on what is without a doubt the most ambitious new media campaign ever waged against Zombies. You have fake political activism in the UK, fake advocacy groups in the United States, fake drugs, fake movies, fake crackdowns on fake protests at videogame events. The sheer scale of the lie on display here is breathtaking.

Less dedicated advocates of Zombie Equality might be given pause, seeing the breadth of this campaign, the power and money involved and the effort expended by Zombie game makers like Capcom to marginalize our voices and diminish our impact. Not the Zombie Rights Campaign, however. We remain committed to The Cause, not in spite of fearmongering and oppression perpetrated by corporate titans like Capcom, but because of it. These stunts will not deter us, and this effort to silence us will only make us more bold and determined to spread the word about Zombie Rights, to anyone who will listen.

That’s one reason I’m taking the time, here and now, to assure you that The Zombie Rights Campaign is not now, nor will ever be beholden to a Zombie Oppressor like Capcom. We are not a front group of any kind; we’re not fakes, we’re not pimping some product, and we don’t get our funding from Anti-Zombie groups, though of course we do engage them in dialogue. We strive for transparency in everything we do here at the ZRC, because we respect both the Zombies we advocate for and the public we speak to on their behalf.

Let me say something else, Zombie Rights fans: Capcom won’t win. In the long run, I assure you, Zombies will get their day in the sun and recognition of the wrongs done against them, and on that proud day, the ZRC will be there. Until then, however, we will not rest, and we will not be beaten back by the forces of oppression; instead, we will remain your tireless Zombie Rights Advocates.

We promise.

(If you’d like to fight back against this propaganda campaign and see what real Zombie Advocacy looks like with your own eyes, feel free to join the ZRC when we protest the latest big budget cinematic spinoff of yet ANOTHER Capcom anti-Zombie game franchise, Resident Evil: Afterlife in Chicago on September 10th)

[Updated a couple of short passages for clarity.]