‘Fido’, which I’m working on screenshots of for a full review for the ZRC blog, famously explored the concept of abusive humans using Zombies as slaves, and what might happen when one little boy treated his Zombie more like a pet, and eventually, a member of the family instead. It was an interesting, outside the box way to get people to reexamine their prejudices about the Differently Animated…

Some people however seem to take the ‘Zombie pet’ metaphor a bit too literally, and as a result we get things like ‘My Pet Zombie’:

My Pet Zombie is a free game for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. It launches in the App store worldwide Thursday July 14th, 2011.

Zombies have never been so cute.

These zombies don’t just shamble around and moan about braaainz. You can dress them up, change their hairstyles and facial features, and watch them dance. There’s even a minigame inside the game that lets you earn “cursed coinage” to buy more cool stuff for your pet zombie.

There’s a trailer available too:

Every time I critique something like this I tend to get responses like, ‘Well, they’re not SHOOTING the Zombies, isn’t that progress?’

And of course, it might very well qualify as progress, yes… and that’s terrible. It’s truly terrible that treating a group of people who happen to share a vitality status as PETS could be construed as a kindness and a step up, but such is the world we live in.

Sigh.

Here again, with a little tinkering we have a product that could have been Zombie Friendly. Why not ‘My Zombie Friend’ instead of ‘My Pet Zombie’? You could still have your adorable little customized on-screen avatar; heck, Xbox Live and the Wii love those things. But instead of the negative treatment of the Differently Animated as some sort of domesticated animal you would have a positive, coalition building sort of interaction.

Language choices are important, people; I cannot stress that enough.

For now, the ZRC must sorrowfully criticize this project, which had so much potential, instead of praising it for forward-thinking and an enlightened attitude toward the Differently Animated. For shame. For shame.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.