Dead Inside

[Fearzone]

Does it really make it more artful that a production of any media should be a voice of the authors own personal values and try to influence the way we think, however forced or subtle?  

This would be particularly problematic of videogames, where the game designers create the entire videogame universe, all the contents of it, so there would be little opportunity to challenge the authors assertions or find a balanced viewpoint. A stawman reality could easily be created, to be understood that it applies to the actual world, when it doesn't. 

One can say there isn't much problem with the moderate left subtly infusing a game with a certain point of view, but just as easily it could be the far religious right being not-so-subtle. In either case, I don't support that in games. 

 

[Woodsey]

"but rather by turning the traditional model of zombie story-telling upside down and using the infection apocalypse as an opportunity to take a videogame experience deeper into the larger questions of human nature and society itself than almost any game ever made."

Not to be picky, but this could do with being broken up a bit.

OT: Interesting piece, I study English Lit and so spend forever thinking about how much thought writers, designers and filmmakers (and poets, the miserable, boring bastards) put into this sort of thing, and how much of it is essentially an accident.

As for Dead Island, the Steam Holiday Sale needs to hurry up so that I can get on and play it.

 

[Baresark]

I find this article very enlightening. I don't know if that was what the crafters of the experience were going for, but even if it's not, there is some clear view of what you are saying. Just because something isn't intentional, doesn't mean it isn't there. I was a fine arts major in college, this is a very basic concept. I don't really understand all the malice on this thread about the game. People are confused about what was originally offered and what the final product was, so I guess they feel burned. The sad part is that the game was actually pretty good and fun. The locations were vastly different from each other. And I feel the beautiful island setting is over done at this point. Also, I felt the different characters were extraneous, if for no other reason than nothing changed except offered perks of the character. They could have easily just had one character and offered 6 different trees to work off of (everyone's perks were essentially the same in respect to health and rage meter... or whatever it was called, and the different ones were the weapons perks). But, the game did offer a lot of what you were talking about.

 

[Mozza444]

Dead Island is an absolutely amazing game.
This article is an amazing read.

However the two are not linked at all. The story in dead island is terrible, i have no idea how somebody could even come close to seeing it like this article did.

For me dead island thrived on:
Large, varied maps - being vastly different keeping things interesting.
Great combat - I know others may... WILL disagree but i just loved it, its nice to see a zombie game focus on melee.
Weapon/Weapon mods - For when all else fails kill fucking zombies!!! Insane amount of varied weapons and mods and not by "cheating" like borderlands did.
Perks - While not being the best thought out, it all add to experience.

But story.. Haha no.

 

[Iron Lightning]

Dead Island is far too tonally incongruous to intentionally posses the qualities which you described. A game about survival and global socioeconomics would not revolve around joyfully dismembering zombies with flaming, razor-bladed, baseball bats.

The Void does not have a dance party. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream does not have a scene where the main character fights off baboons with a giant dildo. Cargo! The Quest for Gravity does not have a graphic rape scene. Dead Island, however, mixes pathos with camp brutality. It's like mixing Evil Dead 2 with Se7en.

Additionally, how in the fuck can Dead Island be about survival when getting killed just respawns you a few meters away MMORPG-style. If you want to make a game about survival then the worst thing you can possibly do is make the protagonist immortal, don't be an idiot, Russ.

If Dead Island is a condemnation of western decadence and capitalistic exploitation then Techland are the biggest hypocrites in the world for making a multi-million dollar AAA extravagance that sells for $60 and can only be played with $300-$500 luxury items. That's like a hardcore Marxist working on Wall Street or a guy who uses Microsoft Word to write an e-book on the evils of technology.

Seriously, Russ, are you trolling the last Editor-in-Chief or are you just being trying to justify your admiration of Dead Islandby deluding yourself into thinking it's some grand work of art? It's okay to just want to hit zombies with sticks, Russ, but it's not okay to lie about why you like it. No one who plays football claim that they enjoy it for its intellectual merits.

 

[Zefar]

Meh, the game was fun in the start but after some hours it got kinda boring. Pretty much only having a normal Melee hit just wasn't fun.

Think like Devil May Cry without all of it's extra skills. That's Dead Island. I know it actually tries to be real but it still fails.
The guns wasn't that fun either. Shotgun got completely random at some points. By either instant kill my enemies or doing no damage at all. I can carry a tons of mauls but extra ammo? No way man, that's too much for me.

Things breaking to the left and right after some hits also doesn't add to the fun. Oh my blunt IRON PIPE got broken. Yea right, that iron pipe would be able to kill to every zombie on the island without breaking to being bent too much.

 

[ultimateownage]

You're looking way too far into the game. The developers cared way less about it than that.

 

[Cousin_IT]

A* on your creative writing homework, master Pitts.

 

[jobu59749]

Give Russ a break, they guy has had some free-time in that he was able to find a deeper meaning, we don't see it because we aren't superheroes like Russ is...that's right, call back to Susan's recent article...Russ is a super hero.

 

[walrusaurus]

That was a fascinating read, and it may well be true for all i know. I have yet to actually make it more than halfway through the game, as i can't get through more than 20-30 minutes of game time in before i turn it off out of shear boredom. The game is 100% combat, theres literally nothing else to do. Run here fight zombies pick up item fight more zombies rinse repeat for hours and hours. Which, wouldn't necessarily be a gamebreaking issue if it weren't for the fact that 80-90% of the combat is spent spamming the kick button. The story could be the greatest epic ever put to page and it wouldn't matter if the gameplay sucked. Its an interactive medium.

Also I'm curious as to why this articles been held for so long? The game came out more than a month ago. Is it like a Halloween thing?

 

[Snake Plissken]

Alright, Mr. Pitts. You get my undying respect for quoting Henry Rollins. I haven't even finished reading the article, but any mention of Henry Rollins deserves "mad props, yo".

 

[InGrindWeTrust]

I hate to disagree with such a well-written article, but I just fundamentally didn't think as highly of Dead Island as you do. I found the characterisation pretty forced and unengaging, with everyone playing some sort of established stereotype (tough female cop with gun, big strong black guy, alcoholic misogynist prick, overly-kindly lady, "go-on-without-me" father figure, etc).

The story that was actually there and in your face was somewhat bland, and more often than not I just felt like it was trying to make up excuses for me to go out and do missions while it was secretly because none of the NPCs could be bothered doing it. Go and clear out zombies so the survivors have somewhere more permanent to stay? Yeah, that seems worthwhile. Go down a deserted street to gather car parts, mere feet outside the safe zone and very far away from any zombies whatsoever? I guess that's the sort of thing I should be doing... Find a necklace? Bring champagne an already drunnk woman? Open a door? Hmm, these quests are starting to get ridiculous. Travel through the jungle to kill a tribe of rifle-toting criminals for no reason other than that their rival tribe of rifle-toting criminals asked me to? No, you lost me there, Dead Island. I wasn't thinking about any greater social or geo-political issue here; I was just wondering why everyone on the island - regardless of wealth, gender,etc - was a lazy, manipulative dick who refused to do even the simplest task for themselves, even for a quest-driven RPG world.

Don't get me wrong, the audio logs are pretty interesting, but that raises another question for me: every audio log you pick up details the interesting story of a person struggling in the face of a zombie onslaught, at the exact moment when human society gets overtaken by shambling undeath. I found all of these stories to be gripping, albeit only a tiny window into each instance. Contrast this with the main characters' stories: they literally just went to bed one night, and woke up the next morning to find everyone is a zombie; the little nuggets of background story are much more intriguing than the main story the whole experience is being built upon, and it leaves everything else just feeling a little stale - incidentally, the exact same problem I had with Brink. The "facts" you can unlock verge from banal to mildly interesting, but the unfriendly font and the identical, text-obscuring "splattered blood" decal on each and every sheet of paper turned me off them considerably.

Tl;dr: Not to diminish your efforts, but I think I had more fun reading your article than I did the last time I fired up Dead Island.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I'm sorry, I won't go so far as to say that article was well-written like some other people: I found it incredibly pretentious and constantly promising more than it actually delivered. I think it was epitomised by your referencing Dostoyevsky without explaining how it was relevant. Oh, so you go to a prison. Big deal. I must have played at least two dozen games in which you go to prisons. What you have failed to elucidate is how the prison section acts as the kind of microcosm of society you're implying it is, turning that quote into nothing more than an exercise in name-dropping.

I disagree almost entirely with those few assertions which were backed up by examples from the game. The scene with Jinn was awfully melodramatic, as was every single cutscene in the game. Even if it were an incredibly subtle blend of restraint and pathos, it would still be completely incongruous with the tone of the main game. As soon as you can jury rig a buzz saw onto the end of a baseball bat with little more than some duct tape and a battery, then use it to sever the heads of zombies who are, in at least one instance, in the process of shooting a home porn flick; any gravitas the game might try to assume is going to seem utterly out of place.

This whole thing strikes me as trying to justify the game through a 'have your cake and eat it too' explanation for everything from the characters to the setting. On the one hand, it claims that the game purposefully crafts enough of itself as a blank slate to let people have their mindless shooty fun, but at the same time it suggests, with minimal evidence, that despite this you can find a really deep portrait of society at hand. In the lack of any convincing arguments, I'd invoke Occam's Razor: it's just a crappy, poorly developed storyline in your average zombie game, and anything philosophical you can find you would probably also find in a copy of Playboy if you looked hard enough.

 

[Haris0]

I normally wouldn't weigh in on something like this, but the know-it-all attitude of some of the comments here are a little irritating. I worked on Dead Island with Techland and everything that Russ mentioned in his article was absolutely intentional. Banoi is based on Papua New Guinea; one of the most dangerous and beautiful places on Earth. (It's no coincidence that we set our zombie apocalypse in a place famous for cannibalism.) Since its game with four player co-op, we knew that many of the players would spend more time laughing and decapitating zombies with their friends than paying close attention to an overarching story. We did however want to create a world. For us it was about dropping the player in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with all the fear and tragedy and black comedy you would find in such a scenario. The tone was intentionally grindhouse, but we also intentionally added all the social, economic, and political tensions that exist in third world countries like Papua New Guinea. It was always meant to be more about the breakdown of society and what people do in those circumstances. Most of the narrative is communicated by the art and atmosphere, the NPC?s, collectible recordings, and editions of the Banoi Herald you find as you fight your way through the game. We wanted the player to have the feeling of being caught in a chaotic situation and struggling to make sense of what was happening. Not everyone would want to delve that deeply and that?s fine. Obviously, the narrative that was there worked better for some people than others, but none of it was an accident. Every bit of it was intentional.

 

[Bishop99999999]

"Who do you voodoo, *****?"

That is my response to this article.

 

[Sean Deli]

2 Haris0
"World War Z" is about breakdown of society: where every scratch means certain death, enemy is invulnerable to most common weapons, governments continue to hide the truth to prevent all out terror and thus helping the infection to spread. It is literally about humanity ceasing to be the dominant lifeform on the planet.

If you read WWZ, can you imagine making a game out of it that would center on curb-stomping zombies to death???

It would be ridiculous. It would ruin the narrative. It would make no sense.

If gameplay contradicts story in tone or content, gamers trust the gameplay. Immortality, invulnerability to infection, money-based economy (crumbling society is lack of trust - in governmental institutions, in laws, in each other. And you are honestly proposing to upgrade weapons for MONEY?!) and safe zones on an infected island? Breakdown of society my ***.

 

[Flippincrazy]

Yep, somehow I think this is a troll post.

Don't get me wrong, I freakin' love Dead Island - but for the sheer hilarity of the four-player co-op gameplay, not for the subtly placed philosophical commentary on the human soul.

Made me laugh like hell though, nice job there Mr Pitts.

 

[Fasckira]

Er, Russ, you jumped on a certain company's payroll recently....?