The Persistence of Zombies
We are accustomed to the fact that people we saw alive yesterday are still alive today. We remember the living and the recently dead with equal force. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the past is not a locked room that you could open if you just had the right key.
You may have seen the trailer for Dead Island, Techland's upcoming zombie game ( http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2011/02/16/the-best-three-minute-zombie-movie-youve-ever-seen ). My has it got a reaction. The reaction breaks down mostly into
(a) damn me that's effective.
(b) damn me that's well-produced, cheap and manipulative. And tasteless.
At Failbetter Games we don't do video or animation. We barely do moving images. We're all about the full-contact text. But that doesn't mean we *object* to any of these things. When I saw the trailer today, it knocked me squarely into category (a), and a number of folk whose opinions I respect, like the estimable @jurieongames, into category (b). Spoilers below as to why, so watch it first if you don't mind possible trauma.
A little girl dies in slow motion; there's sad music. That's enough to get softies like me tearing up on a good day, and it justly puts it in the dock for manipulativeness. (If like me you have a small daughter, you're automatically 50% more susceptible to these things.)I don't think that's the point, though, I think it just provides the necessary emotional momentum to go on and make the point.
The point is that we are accustomed to children turning into zombies and, on a bad day, biting their parents. That's the whole zombie drama in a nutshell: the hostility of the familiar, the loss of those still present. And the trailer explicitly references zombie games as well as films - the sunny holiday location from DR2, the hotel from L4D2 - so you see all that ridiculous gore in the context of a gaming playground.
It takes a shake of the bottle to make those familiar elements settle into a different pattern, and Techland have used the shuffling of events to that end. What particularly gets to me is the reversed sequence of the father rescuing his daughter, reconfigured into release and abandonment. You can do this in any medium, and the trailer isn't even interactive, but the medium that's best at this kind of narrative remix is games. That's why the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, one by one.