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Dead Islands Trailer

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So I have opinions.

There's an upcoming game called Dead Island. It has a very disturbing trailer. In that trailer, a little girl runs from zombies, gets caught, gets bitten, is pulled into a room, and then turns into a zombie and attacks her father, who throws her out a window. It's done with a very sad musical track and it's played in reverse, so you start with a dead zombie girl and slowly go back to when she was alive and scared and her father was rescuing her, so you see the full tragedy of what happened. It's emotionally wrenching, and very well done on that level.

While I know there were complaints about this before, I didn't agree with them. It deserves an M (or even stronger than M) rating, but that kind of emotional story has a place. I can imagine a book or a movie doing it well, and I wouldn't shy away from having it done in a video game. I wouldn't want to do it as a writer, and I wouldn't want to play it as a player, but I also don't want to read books or watch movies where parents tragically lose their children. Those particular dark places don't interest me much -- I know they would hit me hard, and I acknowledge that, but I don't feel a need to go there and make sure. So: not my thing, but I'd defend its existence.

Except that now it turns out that that little girl doesn't actually exist. It is intended to be an emotional look at what happened when the zombies first rose on the island where the player will be, not a reflection of gameplay.

I don't know if this is some weird moral jujitsu going on in my mind, but at that point, we've got a different story. I mean, both Assassin's Creed and Gears of War had commercials with artistic slowness and different-mood-from-game music to make an artistic point, so I can see the point that they're making a statement with some artistic license. Two things, though:
  • First,the characters in those videos were, as I recall, actually in the game, so while the tone was different, it was more closely related to the game
  • Second, and much more importantly, they didn't kill a kid for marketing purposes
They're not doing it to show you what kind of grim and unflinching game you're going to play. They're doing it like the TV execs who have female characters get raped for ratings.

So yeah, this is kind of despicable.

Which is a damn shame, because as far as emotional button presses go, it was very effective. And if they'd actually had the guts to make a game like this, I would likely never have played it, but I certainly would have defended its existence.

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