For instance, the Civ games are basically Whig History: The Game, presenting liberal capitalism as the ideal end point for all societies. It even includes uncivilized "barbarian tribes" whose sole purpose is to be exterminated so you can take their land for the glory of capitalism.
Almost every single zombie game reinforces genocide and the restructuring of society into a fascist organisational structure to combat the existential threat. It also reinforces dehumanising sick human beings who clearly have an illness as something that needs exterminating, and players are made to uncritically kill hordes of them as if they're nothing.
There are lots of things to be criticized about in the zombie genre, but I don't think this is really fair lol. They're written to be hostile and trying to kill you, so logically it would make sense to kill them before they could kill you. I think the more valid criticism is the nihilism of it all. Like you said, almost everyone is portrayed as a fascist on his own killing each other to scrap for basic supplies. Finding a cure is rarely a possibility because everyone has already turned on each other
Defending yourself is fair, but it has to develop to that point.
Nobody is going to just start stabbing people in the head because someone is lumbering around in a delirius daze. It would take several days/weeks for people to move from confusion about the matter to a societal acceptance with outright self defence in the form of killing infected people.
There's never any world building whatsoever. "Zombies exist go kill them" that's it. And when they're killed it's entirely uncritical, they're sick until scientifically proven otherwise and the act of killing a sick person is still the act of killing a sick person. To portray that with no emotional response and no critique is ideology.
For comparison, Goblin Slayer is an anime with what I would call the same ideology as most zombie games have, and that ideology is fascism. Unfortunately the really good analysis video that laid out the case for that is currently set to private but I'll throw it here on the offchance it goes back to normal later.
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I wish that video wasn't private because it was a 1hour+ analysis of the fascism in the show and it was a banger.
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:cringe:
Fortunately I have only seen the first season of the Shield Hero anime, not through choice mind you.
but if you can get past that, you can enjoy the main character (slaver) doing bog standard 5/10 isekai stuff for the bits before the point where even the people who liked all that shit admit the show sucks
People do in fact summon men with guns to brutalize people suffering from mental incapacity all the time. And they're terrified of anyone exhibiting mental illness symptoms.
Fair, but I mean nobody's going to do that to their loved ones or someone just acting a bit strange at a bar. That takes build up and by the time it gets to calling the cops they'd already have chunked someone's arm or leg or whatever.
Also fortunately that's completely outside my experience as people with guns don't get sent to see disabled people (or anyone) and the cops here are trained for 2-3 years. Not to say they aren't shits, but at least comparatively they're not usually psychos to the disabled.
Hmm. You've got a good point. I do think there is a very American grounding for a lot of American made Zombie movies. Things like the ending of the original Night of the Living Dead are a strong commentary on contemporary America, for instance, that would need to be reworked at least a bit to make sense in other contexts.
The whole idea of zombie movies seems to play into gun culture and Shaun of the Dead demonstrated quite well that the zombies have to but utterly useless to work in other settings. That or you can do 28 days later and demonstrate complete and total societal collapse in just 4 weeks.
This is a good point. Though if my memories are correct, I do remember one example of the opposite of this, or at least in one of its game. The Walking Dead by telltale has several moments where key characters - sometimes awful, sometimes close to you - have been infected, or supposedly so, and you're given the choice to either kill them or having some compassion and being cautious. Of course this isn't that much better tbh since there's obviously a "correct" choice, but I do think there's some emotional weight to it compared to most zombie games.
Yeah the problem with putting that choice in the hands of the player is that the player has a pre-existing ideological foundation for what to do in a zombie scenario. The player has been taught by the vast majority of the genre to kill them without mercy because any kind of mercy or hesitation gets people killed.
And we're not even getting to the issue that zombie games reinforce the need for borders and walled societies, reinforce keeping even good people out because they might be infected, and reinforce the idea that the entire of humanity(now zombies) is an enemy, that the only ally that exists is your small society with hard borders and men patrolling the walls with guns. It is you and your society vs the world. It reinforces fascist ideology.
The original Night of the Living Dead is based and worth watching. The hero is a black man who keeps it together when everyone else is losing it. And the twist ending is worth the entire watch.
When it started the zombies were capitalist consumers shambling towards a mall. Somewhere along the way they got swapped out for immigrants crossing the border and/or poor people.
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Oh it's even better than that. In the book the Israelis are the only nation that takes the emerging zombie threat seriously and they immediately build a huge, heavily defended border wall around Israel while the rest of the world laughs at them. But get this; They Let the Palestinians in. And then fight a civil war with the ultra-right wing Hasidic factions!
That book has so many liberal brainworms. The virus starts in China when someone gets bit. The Chinese government, of course, covers it up. Then it spread to the rest of the world through illegally harvested Chinese organs and Chinese migrants. Because we know that in the threat of a massive, incredibly dangerous disaster China would of course totally fail to control the spread and then cover it up so no one knows.
Yeah, also the book has a chapter where a Palestinian boy is yelled at by his father for trying to violently resist the occupation
Also the outbreak is all Chinas fault and it spreads worldwide through the massive yet never detected Chinese organ trade black market.
It is quite amazing how successfully it was coopted.
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It was kind of ok as a power fantasy at first. It seems fine when you're only dealing with zombies around a single shack conjured by a magic book and using a chainsaw and a shotgun. There's less ideology when the zombies are literally monsters that just climbed out of the fucking grave too.
The problem is when you scale it up to civilisation and societal commentary. The "existential threat" and "we need hard borders and strict military control" as a survival mechanism plays directly into fascist ideology.
I think there's something to be said for how large the difference is between magical zombies and human beings that recently got infected and might possibly be curable.
One is the undead, the other is a sick human being. They create very different scenarios.
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I never played it but in Stubbs the Zombie you play as the zombie. I wonder if they turned the perspective around in that wone.
Counterpoint: Death Road to Canada's primary politics is about anime not being real, and getting Too Swole To Control.