Project Zomboid, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zombies

When you first boot up Project Zomboid, the developers make you read a little warning, explaining that this is not the full game. In fact, it’s not even a demo. In fact, it’s not even a beta test, or an alpha test. This is a pre-alpha tech demo, whatever that means. In most cases, such hedging would sound alarm bells, but there’s a woeful tale behind this early release which I won’t relate here but which inevitably led to myself and what I imagine to be hundreds of others hurling money at the poor dev team, The IndieStone (www.rockpapershotgun.com has some excellent explanations of the issues).

Project Zomboid is about zombies. Alright guys, there’s no need to yawn so rudely in my face. I know zombies have been done to death (I would apologise for the pun, but you yawned at me. If you think I’m boring, you get cheap puns. That’s how I roll). But they’ve never been done quite like this.

The IndieStone team have managed to distill MineCraft's best narrative elements- that feeling of trying everything to desperately survive, of sitting in a hole in the dark while zombies scratch at the walls, and have transplanted it into a bleak and emotionally traumatic world. This isn’t a cutesy Lego box of goodies, but a Lego box where all the Lego has been taken out and replaced with blood, guts, and a stark reminder of the inevitability of death.

In the game world, that reminder is the moaning and banging at the door of your supposed safe house by the zombie horde outside. "I was sure they hadn't followed me!", you cry as you frantically count your shotgun shells. You take a gulp of some soda for a slight energy boost and wait for the horde to smash through your barricade. Then you open the door and let rip. Brain matter flies everywhere, and in the confusion you rush out the door. You don't emerge unscathed, however, for a lone zombie scratched you on your way out.

In search of medical supplies, you happen upon a supermarket. Inside, you are met by a fellow survivor. He seems less than friendly, however:stay where you are or ill shoot! I don't give him a chance to. This game has turned me into a murderer, though I try to justify it to myself by suggesting he would have shot me first. My barbarity is rewarded, as he has loads of shotgun shells, allowing me to survive just that little bit longer.

Of course, you don’t start the game off with a shotgun. I only got the shotgun after a fantastic and heartwrenching tutorial, probably one of the best tutorials of recent gaming times. In it, you are caring for your wife, who has broken her leg while escaping from assailants. The game teaches you the basic mechanics by making you craft bandages, find some painkillers, and then board up the house to make it safe. You go out in search of food and find your first zombie, an experience which made me jump out of my own skin. After quickly reattaching my skin, I managed to thwack the zombie in the head with my trusty hammer, sending brain matter flying everywhere. Satisfying, but also an indication of the difficulty level of this game-it took me two very slow swings of the hammer to fell a lone undead, so I immediately began to worry about how I would take down a horde of them. I put these fears aside and returned home, informing my wife that I had made soup. In my first playthrough, I rather stupidly left the soup on for too long and burnt the house down. The fact that such an act is even possible in this game highlights the emphasis here on survival. You are not an action hero, but a simple guy who makes mistakes, like everyone. Leave an oven on for too long, forget to board up a window, leave your painkillers at home, and you’ll soon be rat food. In my second more successful playthrough, I boiled up the soup, turned around, and was met with a shotgun in my face.

‘Howdy, neighbour’, he said to me jovially, though I think the shotgun in my face possibly counteracted his apparently friendly tone. He forced me upstairs after I stupidly revealed that I was not alone, and he stood by the side of my wife’s bed, point his gun at the both of us. At this point my palms became sweaty, and my mouse cursor edged towards equipping my hammer. I knew that if I equipped it, he would shoot me the first chance he got, and then he’d have his way with my wife, which I simply could not allow to happen. But I kept the mouse cursor there, because something in me knew that this man was not going to leave us in peace. The tension began to mount as I waited for a sign that he was about to shoot.

It came. I equipped the hammer and smashed his head to bits; although he let off a few shots, they seemed to miss me. Rarely have I felt such tension and then subsequent elation at the goings-on of a video game. The key to the success of this game on an emotional level is that it places you in literally the worst place imaginable, but unlike many games you don’t merely have to fend for yourself. You have to be almost entirely selfless; after all, there was no necessity for me to stay at home with my wife. In fact, I could have simply skipped the tutorial by smothering her with a pillow to save her from having to die painfully. That act filled me with regret, made all the more palpable by the fact that I foolishly left the house after doing so (carrying with me a framed photo of my recently deceased spouse), and died a stupid death surrounded by a horde of the flesheaters. This is a game about death, its inevitability and our futile attempts to stave it off. No matter how much I board up my house, they eventually get in. No matter how many shotgun shells I accumulate, I eventually run out. Perhaps it was better for my wife to die by my hands, with love, rather than have her gobbled up by a bunch of brainless zombies. These are the kinds of issues touched upon in this pre-alpha tech demo, and I can’t wait to see these ideas fully realised.

I have played through this pre-alpha tech demo many times now, and each time I have felt a variety of emotions that are often reserved for the best of literature and cinema. Few games can do that. But this isn't a game, its a PRE-ALPHA TECH DEMO, and its one of the most exciting things I've ever played.


(Project Zomboid can be purchased, via some Google Checkout tomfoolery, on http://projectzomboid.com/blog/ for £5, £10, or £15!) 

Storytelling in Video Games: Why LA Noire probably won't change the world

Last night, a couple of inebriated fellow students stormed into my room whilst I was shamefully attempting to replicate the economic policies of the Hanseatic League on Patrician III, and made me watch an episode of The Twilight Zone, because “they don’t make shit like that these days”. As you can probably tell, we’re all a bunch of nerds/geeks, and so the conversation (after watching 25 minutes of excellent early science fiction television) inevitably turned to video games, and particularly LA Noire. 

LA Noire is an upcoming vidya game for the PlayBox and X-Station that is absolutely nothing like La Confidential. It’s main draw is its revolutionary new means of capturing the performances of actors and translating them to the screen. Rather than conventional motion capture, which requires actors to dress up like characters from Tron, this new method simply uses lots and lots of cameras, translating the actor’s every facial twitch into a 3D model in real-time. As a result, this creates much more realistic facial animations, enabling players to see every movement of the nose, eyes, mouth, and so on, with frightening accuracy.

My drunken friend argued that this level of accuracy is a revolution in video games; that it will not only change gameplay (by allowing for players to act as human lie detectors, for example), but more importantly will dramatically increase the emotional connection between the player and the characters on-screen.

I am more sceptical, and I believe that my scepticism is well-grounded, for several reasons. Firstly, the technology required to achieve the level of realism of LA Noire is brand new and incredibly expensive. LA Noire, I’m guesstimating, has the budget of a huge Hollywood blockbuster; such production costs are simply out of reach for most games developers. While in the film industry, a couple of guys can go out with a camera and make a guerrilla film on a small budget that has great emotional depth, albeit without the special effects or production values of big budget titles, video games do not work that way. Indie games developers do not have the resources or technology to create photo-realistic games like LA Noire with top-notch actors and scripts, and thus their emphasis has always been, and will always be, on creating unique forms of gameplay, often with simplistic but stylised graphics. This highlights a fundamental difference between films and games, and is one of the reasons that games can never be like films; in films, the actors do not have to be painstakingly modelled by animators, and this simply makes it much easier to create films with both a human element and an accompanying emotional depth. 

My second reason to be sceptical of this new technology is that, alone, it will not revolutionise the video games industry unless it comes packaged with a free copy of ‘Writing for Dummies’ for every games developer. Let’s face it: the majority of games are not well-written. Graham Linehan made an excellent point in 2009’s ‘Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe’ that too many games writers take their cues from films instead of books. They see the fact that images are on a television screen and immediately assume that games should be written like films. This is a fundamental misapprehension of what video games are, or should be. Games are much closer to books in several senses. Like books, games can be taken at the player’s own pace. Many of the best modern games, like Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2, allow the player to explore, examine and manipulate the environment, which allows for a great level of exposition (of the background of the game world, of characters, and so on) without resorting to ‘cinematic’ cutscenes, which substitute that depth for flashy visuals. A film can only last up to around four hours maximum before it starts becoming something quite boring (or ceases to be a film), and is generally watched in one-sitting. Both books and games are supposed to be enjoyed over a longer period of time in multiple sittings, and in books this allows for slow-paced but very detailed character development and world building, which is something that many video games can learn from. 

At the moment, video games are very much leaning towards the cinematic, and yet the critical reception of the recent Call of Duty games, which are the archetypal cinematic video game experiences and yet are often criticised for lacking depth, good writing or interesting characters, can lead us to several very different conclusions. The first is that everything about Call of Duty is fine, but if it were combined with the technology of LA Noire it would be vastly improved. This would be simply misguided; more realistic faces in Call of Duty would have just a marginal impact on the quality of the game. A second conclusion we can draw is that a combination of improved writing and characterisation with the technology of LA Noire would vastly improve the Call of Duty experience. This is a possibility, and yet something is odd about it. The writing of Call of Duty really is no worse than most equivalent films, but the game is spread over a much longer amount of time (even if the campaign is only 5 or 6 hours long, that is still a lot longer than your average film), which means that a ‘cinematic’ form of storytelling is going to inevitably become flat, unstructured, and overly long. 

This leads us to the third conclusion. This conclusion is that the attempts of Call of Duty are misguided, because it is taking a cinematic approach to storytelling when it should be taking a different approach. This is the conclusion that I personally favour, but I am open-minded to being convinced by the second. But I’m not entirely sure what this ‘third way’ is. I said earlier that games are more like books than films, and I stand by that, but at the same time games are also very different to books. They do have a visual element, which is vital, but they also have a gameplay element, which I would argue is the most important aspect of video games (they are games, after all). But gameplay and storytelling do not have to be divorced, and I believe that any ‘new approach’ to storytelling would be an effective combination of gameplay and storytelling that combines the methods of literature, cinema, and gameplay into a coherent whole, without emphasising one over the other as games invariably do currently. The result of this would be the depth of a well-written novel, the visual flair of a Hollywood blockbuster, and the entertainment value of...whatever it is that people do for fun that isn’t a video game.

I wonder if LA Noire is going to pull it off.