Dead Island 2

I have been playing a fuckload of Dead Island 2. I like that son of a bitch, goddamit.

Once, I tried to read this thing Pauline Kale wrote about how much cooler she was than people who disliked Bonnie and Clyde out of moral opposition to criminals. I made it through about half of it. She was on some shit about good art and discomfort-- I doubt she was wrong, but in this century neither Bonnie and Clyde nor Pauline Kale, come across as the work of serious people.

A gamer married to a non-gamer, I sometimes forget that my partner can see the TV since they have generally tuned out whatever I’ve been playing for the last seven or eight years. So, I was pretty surprised when they noticed a sequence in Dead Island 2 and were like “holly shit that’s violent.”

Apparently they are not alone: a headline said that ‘the inernet was freaking out’ about Dead Island 2’s gore. I didn’t read the article; I was willing to take their word for it. 

Anyway, Dead Island 2 is really gory-- no one is wrong about that, but I think I keep on coming back to it because most of the NPCs are pretty chill and the heroes are so damn nice. You get six playable characters and the only white guy is a male stripper; the zombie apocalypse was always the place where non-white male heroes got their first shot, but Dead Island 2 is really going with it.

The people you meet are nice, well developed, diverse, seem to care about each other. It’s good shit. I’m very partial to the “blue crab boys,” --some friendly stoners holed up in a restaurant, and Ricky Rex-- an extremely drunk, “was been” (not HAS been, thank you very much) rock star, with an IQ that could defiantly get him put in the produce section, but a genuinely good hart. 

I’m fuckn forty years old killing zombies as an ass kicking Latina, an Asian American para-olmpian, a black dude with a Britich accent...everyone has tattoos and a sense of humor… didn’t always used to be like this, I assure you. 

And there is a connection to the gore. When you accuse a work of being too gory what you are actually saying is ‘they fucked up and told everyone Snowden’s secret.’**

Snowden’s secret is “man is matter.” [sorry for spoiling Catch-22 although it’s your own damn fault for not having read it already] The gore is inside all of us-- literally. We are just stuff, and when the stuff gets hurt we suffer, and then we go away. 

Hacking off limbs, wondering around in zombie guts, is all a reminder of this: man is matter. Limbs, intestines, brains...these are the only things that we will ever really have. And so, as you wonder LA taking humanity apart you are also looking at the very actual stuff that ties us all together, the ONLY stuff of which any human is made. 

The kind of original wrinkle on the zombie apocalypse in Dead Island 2 is that it has astonishingly little effect on human behavior. People just kind of keep on keeping on (except for the ones that turn into monsters that try to eat you). In that they are rotten or jerks they are the same rotten jerks that there always were in LA. 

This matters, because even in the Romoero formulation-- which again, is largely credited for having started to experiment with the non-white, non-male as heroic lead, using gore and violence to advance general humanisim-- the idea is that the real zombies are actually people. And, of course, this is what drives most of the more expansive explorations of the zombocalypse, like The Walking Dead or 28 franchises. Zombies are not great, but it is what happens to humanity, after watching their loved ones come back as undead, removed from the authority of cops and bosses, and when there is nothing to watch on television that you really have to worry about. 

And, while I’m not ENTIRELY sure I buy Dead Island’s take, I’m into it. The idea that we are all just waiting for the government to go away before we revert to survivalist tribalism, spontaneous facisim, cannibalism and rape, is too widely accepted. Dead Island 2 implies the idea that the ‘great struggle would be to retain our humanity’ is kind of silly on a few levels: 1-- probably not that great of a struggle and 2 how worth retaining was our ‘humanity’ in the first place?

And instead of the real zombies being people, it turns out that some of the real people… ARE ZOMBIES. The ethical and moral implications of this are that you get to collect some zombie-type skills, which you can than use to...kill more zombies. It’s pretty sweet.

**I can’t get over that the great spiller of secrets is an actual fucking guy named Snowden. We need to fire the writers.