Zombi Forgets that People are Usually Good Actually
Is Zombi a libertarian prepper power fantasy or an example of collaborative resilience?
This essay was written for the Waypoint 101 videogame club.
In my playthrough of Zombi the world was saved by Jasper Cooper, a career general manager who succeeded in delivering the newly minted zombie vaccine to those who could make use of it. But Cooper was only the anchor in a relay of survivors who contributed to that success. Cooper merely picked up the proverbial baton from the border guard Zara Griffiths. To acquire said vaccine, Griffiths had infiltrated the former living quarters of the Queen of England, only to later fall mere meters from escaping and reaching the game’s end credits. Cooper’s contribution was pretty light in comparison to Griffiths’, he merely had to courier the vaccine to the waiting escape helicopter. But thinking back, Griffiths’ role was likely less crucial than the policewoman who crisscrossed London to find the vaccine’s formula or less crucial still than the janitor who found the nail bat, the game’s most useful weapon.
Success in Zombi is something that is passed from one character to the next. Every time a player character dies, the player must guide a new avatar back to the recently deceased one, kill it and loot their important items back. After which the new survivor can continue on as if no death had ever took place. Mission items, gun upgrades, and backpack upgrades all carry over to the next interchangeable player character. It’s a true team effort, but this is where Zombi gets thematically indecisive. Because simultaneously Zombi tries to be the ultimate conspiracy theorist/prepper fantasy. And it can’t have it both ways as the game’s plot argues for lone wolf isolationism while all its mechanical design emphasizes the collective power of the many.
Zombi is pretty clear about its plot being rooted in prepper culture, a lifestyle (hobby? subculture?) centered on being prepared for impending disastrous events. For many this is merely a “better safe than sorry” approach for being able to withstand events that are nearly guaranteed to happen at some point, hurricanes, blizzards, power outages. Others take this to the extreme, these are the people preparing for an imminent end of the world or total collapse of civilization due to political crisis, nuclear war or in the case of Zombi a medical outbreak of some kind of super plague.
Zombi largely centers around one of these doomsday preppers. The player is constantly directed over the radio by a man named John, but who calls himself quite literally “The Prepper”. Preparation is John’s central tenant, every time a player assumes a new avatar they wake up in John’s safe house and the very first thing he asks them is “Are you prepared?” Through John, the game uses a lot of prepper culture terminology and concepts, for example referring to the backpack as a bug-out bag. Zombi represents a kind of the ultimate prepper fantasy. Through their own foresight and cunning, only the prepared can be relied on to save the day when the shit hits the fan. This idea is that having a fully stocked bag will allow one to raid some of the most heavily guarded places on earth and survive odds that kill 99% of other people. The game plays into the idea that when things go bad there exists a kind of person tough enough and prepared enough to not only outlast all other individuals, but communities at large.
But the game’s depiction of a collapsing society doesn’t reflect about what we know about how groups react to traumatic events. When hurricanes swept through the Gulf Coast last year you saw people driving towards the disaster with boats to help, not the other way around. Resources get stretched and shared amongst those who need it. Disasters have a way of bringing cities together in ways few other events can. But in Zombi, helping others just gets people killed. The secret society of the Ravens who exist to prevent the plague are comically inept (except for their safe houses that were built by John “The Prepper” himself). Vikram’s attempt to care for his zombified wife gets him infected and sees him kill and try to eat his own son. The children in the nursery were supposed to be protected by the staff but they seem to have burned to death, their resting place disturbed by some unexplained ghost zombie.
Zombi’s seeming celebration of the anti-social and conservative high horse traits of prepper culture could be tolerable if not for this repetitive moral that helping others is bad. It’s a shitty thematic core of a work in that it’s simply untrue to human nature. As outlined earlier, the game’s daisy chain of survivors creates a great sense of collaboration. This is true of the zombies as well, even the strongest boss zombie is easily dispatched with the starter equipment but even two basic zombies that attack together end up killing the player very quickly The gameplay design of Zombi is clearly an argument that groups of people can be greater than the sum of their parts. So there is a direct conflict between the game’s plot, the details in its setting and the message imparted on the player through play. Yet I wouldn’t go so far to say the mechanical design is meant to refute its plot’s themes and arguments. If the game was confidently trying to support collaboration Vikram wouldn’t have eaten his kid’s face.
Well, it should be said that this is only true of Zombi’s normal mode. But there is another mode in the game, survival mode. In survival mode there is no relay of survivors, no baton of loot that one survivor carries forward from their predecessor. When the player avatar dies in survival mode it’s an instant game over, end of story. The game’s producer Guillaume Brunier goes so far as to call survival mode the way Zombi was meant to be played. But without the game’s collaborative elements the game loses its conflicted messaging. It becomes the simple, prepper fantasy the plot thinks it is. Those who prepared will prosper, and those who don’t will suffer. People survive entirely on their own merits, happenstance is irrelevant or meaningless. In this harder mode, John “The Prepper” is just someone who’s advice is always right, while in normal mode it’s a point of view the player can take or leave based on their gameplay experience.
And that’s the core Zombi’s dissonance, is it a game that supports or condemns helping others? But that question completely fails at creating intriguing or compelling thought. We know that people collaborate, we know that people help each other even in the most dire of situations. For most this isn’t a even an off hand question worth pondering over, let alone one to hinge the entire text the size of a AAA videogame on. It’s only a debate for those already itching to leave others out in the cold.
Because Zombi’s plot seems to lack any real grasp on the game’s interesting indecision, I can only be left to think its presence is simply accidental. That in the quest to make a fun silly launch game for the WiiU, game directors Jean Philippe Caro and Florent Sacré created something that doesn’t even bother to explore human nature. This is more abundantly clear playing Zombi’s PC version, which lacks the physical novelties of ZombiU’s use of the WiiU gamepad. So, five years later there is little reason to come back to Zombi, unless you’re that person with a fallout shelter who can’t wait for the day everyone else is dead.
