viral (adj.)

What is a zombie exactly, and what does a zombie mean in the era of COVID-19? This is the kind of thing playing Dying Light (2015) has got me thinking about lately.

Dying Light’s single-player campaign follows Kyle (I know, right?), an American hunk parkouring his way through/above hundreds of zombies in the open-world wastes of quarantined Harran, the fictional, vaguely Middle Eastern setting you get from smushing together Istanbul, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro and then apparently, inexplicably, scrubbing the final product of any religious architecture whatsoever.¹ The game’s main draw is its expansive open-world format, inviting players to scramble around gathering ever more ridiculous ingredients to craft ever more ridiculous hybridized zombie-killing machinery.²

The “gameplay loop,” as we say, is fairly addictive. The parkour mechanics are fun and the environments are dense and lush, always tense with wandering enemies—undead and otherwise.

But it’s the story of Dying Light—a melodramatic affair with the same energy and number of moody chads as the 2003 movie Timeline—that keeps churning in my head. Kyle is an undercover agent of the Global Relief Effort (GRE), a very silly name for a sort of evil CDC(?) that has sent him parachuting into the quarantined city to identify a guy (who turns out to be a sort of psychopathic Far Cry villain) who has stolen, like, some kind of partial recipe for a zombie virus cure that could (the GRE claims) kill rather than save thousands of people. It’s all a bit hazy, compounded by the fact that the GRE keeps egging Kyle on to do heinous things for the sake of the mission.

It’s pretty dumb—and especially surreal from the perspective of 2023, as a real-world pandemic has claimed millions of lives; as the real-world CDC has caved to the interests of impatient corpos ready to sacrifice yet more lives to the maws of profit; and as COVID vaccines and medical treatments have become the objects of conspiratorial excess by the right wing.

Lots of zombie movies and games deal in the fantasy of a virus that turns people into shambling, mindless, undead cravers of brains. But for whatever reason, Dying Light highlights for me the ethical weirdness of a game where the main draw is largely to kill, in an ingenious fashion, swaths of the very ill. One “strain” of zombie (“virals”), in contrast to the majority of slow shamblers, rushes at you relentlessly, growling and frothing, but also ducking and dodging from your blows. Often, when hit, they cower, throwing their hands up. For a brief second you can hear them whimper, “Wait!” before recovering their gut-lust and attacking again. The non-zombie characters you encounter seem to vacillate between talking about the zombies as victims and casting them as “not human,” a distinction that would seem to matter all the more in light of the fact that the virus in question here does not turn people instantaneously and is eminently treatable (for much of the game you’re chasing “antizin” that the GRE decided to stop airdropping, you know, because they’re evil). In fact, Kyle himself starts the game enduring a bite and is infected for the entire story, suffering periodic seizures.

Yes, in Dying Light, you are, technically speaking, a functional zombie: a fully cognizant but extremely ill person on treatment for a virus.

In many zombie apocalypses, there is a scene in which a friend begins to “turn,” and the protagonist is “forced” to decide, usually, whether to kill them. Dying Light is no exception. Often enough with this trope, the storytelling signals that there is really no other choice but preemptive violence. It’s you or them, after all, because they’re going to go for your jugular if you don’t kill them first. As in Dying Light, one can see the moment in which the “soul” of the character is understood to have left the body, as it were, leaving only the zombie’s quintessential shambling, brain-seeking compulsion.

One side quest in particular drove this home for me. Halfway through the game, you find a man named Rupert holed up with several children in a former apartment-turned-kindergarten. He asks for help finding insulin while his wife, Jasmine, is off on a different, dangerous errand. After you arrive with the meds, he asks you to take care of the others while he sees to the child, insisting his wife will be back soon. One of the children asks for you to recover the blocks he dropped on the stairs, implying that a zombie is locked in the basement. Returning to Rupert with this information, Kyle (in a cinematic outside the player’s control) confronts the man about deluding himself. Rupert tearfully confesses he couldn’t possibly kill his wife, while Kyle asserts that “it has to be done.” The quest objective reads “Take care of Rupert’s wife.” Here, the only “care” imaginable is violence: You unlock the door in which she is quarantined and execute her to fulfill the quest. Juxtaposed with Rupert’s and Kyle’s care for the lives of the children in the kindergarten, this “care” for a being even the game itself can’t clearly decide is a “person” or not (her status remains “Rupert’s wife” rather thatn simply “zombie,” though not, pointedly, “Jasmine”) asks us to see as tragic what feels somehow perverse.³

I guess what I’m saying is that Dying Light lives in the very uncomfortable ludo-narrative no-man’s-land where the desire to evoke the power of being able to destroy bodies without moral qualm (because they’re already “dead”) meets the theoretical (and, if we’ve learned anything from the past few years, political) capacity to treat, care for, and potentially save them. The zombie as formal device forecloses the potential for recuperation, for treatment and rehabilitation.⁴

If zombies are “no longer human” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), does that give us license to be brutal to them? Within the rubric of viral pathology, can we safely consider a zombie (let alone one who runs and avoids danger and pleads for mercy) to be already dead? Where is the line between life and unlife? Between healthy and sick?

I know I’m overstating my case here, but what I’m coming to is the question: In an age of pandemic and capitalist state negligence, what metaphorical function does the zombie serve? If it serves to reinforce ideas that certain populations are worth abandoning in the face of crisis, or that some people (or kinds of people) are unmournable—already socially dead—then is it time to drop the zombie in favor of better monsters for our moment? If not, can we just tell better zombie stories?

Perhaps Dying Light raises these questions for me in particular because it tries to hold together a milquetoast political/emotional narrative with mechanics that serve a fantasy of growing ever more powerful, ruthless, brutal and creatively destructive⁵ for ostensibly “good” reasons, as opposed to the goons of the game’s antagonist, who do it out of wanton cruelty. Post-COVID, knowing that the zombie as a trope is likely going nowhere fast, I’d rather see games that employ dread along with grief and sympathy (Signalis and Silent Hill come to mind), rather than aggression fueled by disgust, in order to tell stories of zombies as the victims that they are, left behind by the very powers that ensured they were in harm’s way. The zombies of Dying Light are ghosts of a far more deeply haunted society, the alibi of far grislier monsters hiding in the obscure and pervasive fog of bureaucratic violence. Leave the zombies alone. Here be vampires.

1  After a dozen hours traversing the city, it’s genuinely baffling to me that there are no mosques, temples, churches or shrines in what is ostensibly a multi-ethnic portside metropolis in the historic crossroads of Asia Minor. There are some interiors in Old Town with Arabic calligraphy on the walls, but the structures themselves are consistently designed as commercial buildings—hotels or boutiques.

2  With concomitantly ridiculous flavor text, I might add.

3  There is obviously a discussion to be had about the ethics of things like euthanasia and medical intervention for terminal/incurable conditions, but I don’t think that’s exactly the discourse zombies inhabit.

4  Some more recent media (iZombie comes to mind) has tried to reinterpret zombies as cognizant, people who are simply forced into a secretly cannibalistic existence, but I think these stories stretch the zombie beyond recognition. I think Simon Pegg’s argument against running zombies applies here too: “The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.”

5  I know this is the M.O. of many games, including games that feature zombies! But it does feel like the ““sterotypical”” zombie game is more of a survival horror affair rather than a power fantasy.