Dott. Ric. Dr. phil Eugen Pfister is historian and political scientist and heads the SNSF-Sinergia research project “Confoederatio Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968-2000” at the Bern University of the Arts. He holds a doctorate in the history of political communication, is a founding member of the working group “History and Digital Games” and teaches and researches the history of ideas in and of digital games.
Zombies Ate Democracy – How the idea of democracy and individualism is negotiated in zombie games.
FROG 2024 – Talk
Zombie games are still hugely popular, even if the zombie craze’s peak in popular culture is now waning somewhat. Zombie games, just like films, novels and graphic novels, are characterized by an astonishingly consistent narrative. I would even speak here of a “myth” in the sense of Roland Barthes: The backstory of the zombie apocalypse is usually not explicitly told, but it assumes that the world as we know it – and that means mostly Western democracies – was unable to deal with the zombie threat. Our modern societies are being overrun. Politicians usually react too slowly and incorrectly, the executive fails to protect its citizens. What follows the destruction of democracy is a presumed primal state of everyone fighting everyone else. Homo Homini Lupus, a perverted and abbreviated reading of Thomas Hobbes’ political ideas. For while Hobbes also assumed a violent original state of pre-society, he drew the conclusion that a strong state was needed. In zombie games, however, all attempts to re-establish larger communities of people in the post-apocalypse were often shown to be doomed to failure.
In the post-apocalypse, fascist military forces and insane cannibals quickly assert themselves, and the surviving protagonist can usually only rely on himself. An individualism taken to extremes that corresponds to (neo-)liberalism. So far, the narrative resembles each other across the media forms. What makes digital games particularly interesting sources for the history of ideas here is not only the story and the audiovisual aesthetics, but above all the game mechanics, through which ideology is also communicated. And I would like to take a closer look at these for the lecture and contextualize them historically. This shows that early zombie games such as Resident Evil, The Walking Dead and The Last of Us serve the aforementioned myth of “failed democracy” and propagate an extreme, exaggerated individualism. At the same time, there were also attempts to make solidarity and cooperation a game mechanic, which I find particularly exciting because it shows the possibility of a counter-narrative, like the Survivor Mission in Dead Rising and other mechanics in State of Decay.
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