Thought that the Halloween month would be the perfect time to bring this topic up.

Gaming, like most entertainment media, is usually centered around conflict.  Be it the two colors of Chess, mute crowbar wielding theoretical physicists against the oppressive Combine, or tetrominoes versus gravity, ours is a hobby always searching for good antagonists to toss against our Hiro Protagonist. 

Now that our little Pongs and 2600s have grown up into PS3s and 360s and Grandpa has a Wii at the nursing home, the larger public conscious has honed in to the fact that us gamers have been shooting, stabbing, eviscerating, decapitating, exploding, maiming, impaling, jumping on, poking, and sticking our tongues out at a variety of things for decades.  Our preference tends to go in waves; we've seen the loose Cold War allegories of space aliens, the patriotic duty to eradicate the Nazi regime, the ever present threat of technology turned bad in evil robots, the popular and topical terrorist scum, even the role reversal of revolutionary or anti-hero.  With high-def digital representations of human faces to shoot/hit/punch/kiss replacing solid blocks of single color and a lot of imagination, our industry is now having to take greater care in literally choosing our targets for fighting. 

EA's new Medal of Honor game recently came under fire for offering the ability to play as the Taliban against the U.S. military in the multiplayer element of the game, causing a name change to "Opposing Force."  This is a pretty interesting development; while other games such as Counter Strike (released originally in 1995) allow you to specifically select 'terrorist' as the faction team to play on, in recent years our western mainstream media sensitivity has heightened so much that the U.S. military refused to sell the future Medal of Honor title at military bases.  (As far as I could research, there was no such ban on Counter Strike or other similar games, past or current.) 

Us gamers have mowed down countless men in uniform both online and off since before the days of Wolfenstein 3D, and while criticism of simulated violence is once again a hot political topic contested in court, the industry is always searching for the next perfect, generic, we-can-all-agree-to-kill-these-guys adversaries.  Each classic set of virtual villainy has its baggage: 

     Space aliens can come in a wide variety of flavors, but often degenerate into cliched generic evil doers who have little connection to our reality and therefore become uninteresting.  Or, they represent some human-themed agenda that reduces them to simply different people groups who are actually like us and we need to learn from (our generation can call this the 'Avatar Syndrome'.  Our parents could have called it the 'Star Trek Dreck.')

     The classic evil regime, such as rogue Russian militias, Nazis, terrorist factions, or demonic cults (or any combination!) can help with the overall 'obviously these are bad guys' mind frame, yet the recent push for realism in gaming demands that either this direction addresses our current world mentality in some fashion, or risks being dumbed down to nonsense or unattached silliness.  The new Medal of Honor will likely fall somewhere in between these, as do the Call of Duty series.

     With the ethical challenges opened by our rampant technology growth state, unfeeling robots and extermination-minded AIs are a ripe candidate for adversaries, even obvious given the very nature of our hobby.  Yet while the meta-themes of humanity's own poor choices are often the real backbone of these narrative elements, the theme has waned in recent years because the very technology we would fear has become so comfortably entrenched into daily life.  It becomes too much a stretch to wonder if our microwaves are really sentient machines planning world domination; more likely the burrito inside is the one with the sinister plot about to unfold.

     Fantasy genres tend to give us good epic potential between worthwhile oppositions, but as with sci-fi, where there is an enormous potential for originality we are all too often given the same few characters, events, and battles repackaged with a different set of pointy ears, wings, or skin colors.  The motivations behind our enemies are all too often either 'we didn't know you were actually doing this for the greater good' or 'wow, you're just an evil power-monger.'

I'm not griping about having to replay the same stories: we all know there's nothing new under, around, on top, or inside the Sun.  Except Noby Noby Boy.  But that becomes a particular challenge for game developers:

Who are we fighting, and why?  Its a question most of us gamers have probably never really cared much about.  Sure, we can get into a good story, maybe even invest in some of the characters, but more often than not the game simply has to point out that the other guy will shoot you if you don't shoot first.  Most of the time we're fine with that.  Some games are far more intriguing for making that mindless acceptance an introspective point to the game narrative (BioShock and the Metal Gear Series come to mind) but most games just except that gamers are more interested in the action in the conflict than the reasons for the conflict.

After all, it's just a game, right?  Who cares?

Well, more and more people, in fact.  Many of whom don't play games.  It may have been fun to use good old Jack Thompson as a whipping boy, but now that his personal crusade has done about as much good for his cause as the actual Crusades, the vacuum created in his absence combined with the continuing mainstream acceptance of video games has brought our apathy of digital empathy to the limelight.  Now gamers are being asked, as we blast away at the Locust Horde, slam sports cars off the road, and run over prostitutes in a stolen Hummer, what is the context behind our actions?  And the common gamer answer of, "uh, I don't care, it's just a game!" is unlikely to hold up in the  currently debated California bill that judges our industry's content as completely different than movies, music, and other media.  An examination of the domino effect of that bill or the eleven other states that formally support it is way outside of the scope of this post, though I always welcome such discussions.

What piqued my thoughts on this actually stems from my gaming purchase last week.  Without much thought about the related source material, I picked up Dead Rising 2 and Plants Vs. Zombies.  It literally didn't cross my mind until I got home that I, a person who has absolutely no consistent enjoyment, fear, or real interest in zombies just bought two games in one day that featured said creatures as the antagonists.

You see, despite my absolute love of the Castlevania franchise and a few other 'horror' gaming staples, I've never really been a fan of werewolves, vampires, 'creatures of the night/darkness', or the undead.  They just don't do anything for me; I have to overcome a certain mental apathy to them to enjoy the media containing them.  Oh, there have been plenty of media featuring such things that I enjoy, but often that enjoyment is in spite of, or at least indifferent to them.  The psychological underpinnings of a Silent Hill interest me far more than the camp-scare of a Fatal Frame, and I get much more out of the crisis survival piece of Left 4 Dead than the weird critters those survivors are pitted against.  Which is why I'm beginning to theorize that zombies may be the perfect video game bad guy; if a person like me can have fun with pop culture's recent zombie fetish, it says a lot about their staying power.

And boy, is our pop culture going through a zombie phase.  Resident Evil (films and games), 28 Days/Weeks Later, Zombieland, Romero's recent set, Planet Terror, Colin, Fido, Shaun of the Dead, World War Z, Monster Island/Nation/Planet, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising/2, Plants Vs Zombies, the list just goes on.  We now have fast zombies, shambling zombies, biting zombies, mutating zombies, Nazi zombies, Hazmat zombies, zombonis, zombie meals with fries and a diet Coke.  We're so obsessed with zombies we shoehorn them into completely different properties like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption.  We even put them into space and call them strange names like 'the Flood.'

They seem like the perfect enemies, don't they?  No nationality to object to, no reason to sympathize, no moral issue with destroying what's already dead to begin with.  That last attitude is a far more recent development; whereas the dead and things related to them were once treated with a great deal of dignity, respect, and cultural or religious sensitivity, our modern era has come to view corpses as biological shells and meat bags we medically treat to last for three quarters of a century or so.  Upon release in 1968, Romero's Night of the Living Dead was unnerving and shocking, and still remembered today as a landmark horror film that pushed past taboo.  Nowadays, we watch open heart surgery on daytime television that includes a thoughtful text blurb about content that 'some may find objectionable', and news affiliates paste up graphic crime and accident footage that 'may offend some viewers.'  I wonder sometimes if the Roman Coliseum had the same warning billboards over the entrance, but I digress. :p

The cultural acceptance of the zombie concept is no more obvious than my recent purchases, Dead Rising 2 and Plants Vs. Zombies.  Many gamers are somewhat familiar with these games:  one of these allows the player to use everything from projectile weapons to lawnmowers to crush, burn, freeze, dismember, and decapitate a zombie horde.  The other is Dead Rising 2.  And while the latter is certainly far more gory, graphic, and easily offensive, Plants Vs. Zombies makes the onscreen action of similar events so goofy, sanitized, and endearing that it's hard to remember both games contain themes of cannibalism, heads popping off, limbs falling off, and eyeballs hanging loosely.  It's just so darn cute. 

The kicker? Plants Vs Zombies is rated E10.  And I haven't heard anything about Congress putting publisher PopCap up on the stand to defend itself.  (Not to imply I think they should.)  If the cartoony presentation of Plants Vs Zombies were replaced with a different art style and the trademark humor replaced with a dour presentation, the game couldn't get by on that rating even if it remained relatively bloodless.  Compare that with Dead Rising 2, whose M rating would be guaranteed just due to the violent content alone.  Please don't think I'm picking on either of these excellent games, just pointing out that zombies are so ubiquitously accepted in our culture that these extremes exist in the first place.  Parents flipped at the Atari 2600 VCS version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet now mommy giggles at the crunchy eating sounds (complete with screaming) coming from the house in PvZ. 

So for now, it appears that zombies have earned their rightful place as our bad guys of choice, standing in line with Nazis, Russians, Space Aliens, and Congress.  They can be ultra gory to satiate bloodlust or be cleaned up and painted in day-glo colors to hook housewives into spending countless hours on the family PC.  We have our safe villain of the day, until the next wave crashes over and we forget why zombies were so big before, because obviously Corporations were our worst enemy all along.

Me?  I'm just glad we're past vampires as the 'in' thing.  Oh, hello new Castlevania...   

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