I've put off writing about Dead Rising in the context of journalism and games for awhile. It pained me to think of the negative review I might have to give a game that I enjoyed so much. Luckily, in the past few weeks Capcom has released some information that helped get my ball rolling: Dead Rising's port to the Wii (Dead Rising: Chop 'Til You Drop) will not feature the ability to take snapshots with Frank's camera. Cue Chris Hecker sound byte about the Wii's processor not being able to handle a virtual camera (also, the Wii won't be able to render nearly as many zombies in one location as the 360 could).
This news begs the question: does the exclusion of the photography mechanic in the Wii version of Dead Rising change anything about what the game says about photojournalism as a practice? Let me first explain what the game is.
Dead Rising is a survival horror third-person action game produced by
Capcom, the makers of the popular Resident Evil series. You play a
photojournalist stuck in the middle of a zombie outbreak in a shopping
mall. Much of the gameplay is hack-and-slash: the mall is littered with
hundreds of consumer goods that the protagonist Frank can use as melee
weapons (hockey sticks, baseball bats, antique samurai swords). Gunplay
in the game can be frustrating at times, as anyone used to the shooting
in Resident Evil games can attest. Being a photographer, Frank can also
snap shots of the zombies terrorizing human survivors. The idea is that
he's going to eventually leave the mall via helicopter and break a
news story about the zombies to the outside world.
This news begs the question: does the exclusion of the photography mechanic in the Wii version of Dead Rising change anything about what the game says about photojournalism as a practice? Let me first explain what the game is.
Dead Rising is a survival horror third-person action game produced by
Capcom, the makers of the popular Resident Evil series. You play a
photojournalist stuck in the middle of a zombie outbreak in a shopping
mall. Much of the gameplay is hack-and-slash: the mall is littered with
hundreds of consumer goods that the protagonist Frank can use as melee
weapons (hockey sticks, baseball bats, antique samurai swords). Gunplay
in the game can be frustrating at times, as anyone used to the shooting
in Resident Evil games can attest. Being a photographer, Frank can also
snap shots of the zombies terrorizing human survivors. The idea is that
he's going to eventually leave the mall via helicopter and break a
news story about the zombies to the outside world.
My formative opinions on the subject of photojournalism and media ethics come from a
dinner I shared once as a college freshman with UGA journalism
professor Conrad Fink, the author of Writing Opinion for Impact.
The opening words to this book are almost inflammatory:
Let's not overestimate the imagination that went into incorporating the
camera mechanic into the gameplay. The system of scoring points is
identical to its earlier implementation in games such as Pokemon Snap.
This N64 safari-on-rails game allowed players to goad various Pokemon
into striking poses that one then attempted to snap photos of at ideal
times. Extra points were awarded for capturing herds of the animals or
catching them in interesting situations (eating, doing a mating dance). Snap was innovative because the N64 was one of the first consoles that allowed players to move through realtime 3D environments. What's most interesting about the mechanic in Dead Rising is the tight
coupling between taking pictures and the overall goal of the game: to
break news of the zombie uprising despite government black-boxing. Now,
what changes the Wii port of the game by taking the camera away from
the player?
One can assume that this decision will streamline the action of the game and reward proportionately more experience points for battle prowess. Just as in the Resident Evil 4 port to the Wii, I expect that the shooting controls will improve with the Wii's ability to point and shoot like a mouse; the difficulty of aiming a gun in the original 360 version was incredibly frustrating, especially considering how seamless the photography controls were (we can assume that these would have been more intuitive with the Wii-mote as well). Melee fighting will in the Wii version will, of course, be comprised of shaking the remote - though the coupling between shake and game action will be more akin to Mario Galaxy's simplistic spin attack than the tightly matched controls of Wii Sports.
Besides these gameplay changes, it becomes more difficult to see greater effects to the game's rhetoric. This is because the game's narrative embraces the ethic of Fink and Linklater that I'm only approaching here quite vaguely: a (photo)journalist in the field has the duty to insert themselves into a crisis (somehow).
Running around the mall in Dead Rising, players are constantly given "scoops" or changes in the game state that provide meaningful action to the player. Without these scoops, there would be little to do in the game beside the objective of survival (Frank must wait 3 days for his helicopter to return). Scoops can include any of three things: survivors located in temporarily safe nooks and crannies of the mall that must be escorted to a saferoom, psychopaths slaughtering zombies and survivors alike in their PTSD-induced mania, and story progression points. There is a strong narrative motivation for these scoops: two NSA agents in the saferoom constantly monitor the mall through security cameras and send information to Frank via walkie-talkie. The idea of a working journalist having too many stories that need reporting - and too little time to cover them all - is modeled compellingly by this game.
Trying not to spoil much, the player does not merely collect the interviews and photographs required to discover "The Truth." Rather, Frank becomes the key figure striving to prevent a terrorist attack that threatens to spread the zombie plague outside the no-fly zone cordoned off by the military. This thoroughly mainstream third-person action game somehow manages to model the experience of being a photojournalist in a way that we don't see in many explicitly educational games. Dealing with stringent deadlines, finding the safest or quickest course through potentially hostile territory, time management, the idea of missed journalistic opportunity, and the sometimes tedious necessity of arriving for a scoop prepared with adequate battery power and room in one's camera for enough shots to capture the situation - all of that is there.
The act of taking photographs of the slaughter does help couple the photojournalistic narrative trappings of the game with its gameplay, but the game's more important argument about media ethics will likely remain intact when the game's Wii port goes to shelves. One can certainly subvert the narrative of the game's current Xbox 360 iteration by avoiding involvement in the crisis altogether and just snapping evocative photographs for three days - in fact, this strikes one as a much more intriguing utilization of the game's affordances than, say, pretending to be a snap-happy tourist in a Grand Theft Auto game; however, this would be an exercise in purposefully arguing against the interventionist rhetoric of the game.
At the end of the day, the question still remains unanswered: "To what degree is a photojournalist morally compelled to become an agent of goodwill during a humanitarian crisis." Because Dead Rising takes place during a fairly cut-and-dry zombie apocalypse, Frank's decision to act for his survival is trivial. It will take newsgames that incorporate the strong points of this game to truly delve into the question of how far a photojournalist can go before risking manufacturing news through her ethically-motivated action. I'm sure Fink's books go into details and practices that would help make this decision more clear, but an analysis of these works escapes the scope of this article. What I can say is that it is a shame that the Wii version of Dead Rising will only incorporate the photojournalist's role in narrative as opposed to coupling it to gameplay with the camera mechanic and the realtime scoop system. Luckily, the narrative's connection to the media ethic I'm suggesting is hiding beneath the thin veneer of zombie horror will likely remain intact.
"The first thing to learn in opinion writing is that you must unlearn one thing probably central to your idea of what a journalist is all about. You've picked it up in journalism courses: A journalist must stay out of the story, stay objective, stay dispassionate. Right?
Well, that was then - in reporting or newswriting courses - not now, when you must move from objective into subjective writing, when you must insert your ideas and your emotions into your writing, not eliminate them."
Fink (pictured in the middle) has numerous other publications on the subject of media ethics
under his belt. The night I met him, he goaded me with a question while
I stuffed my mouth with baked ziti; I paraphrase:
I had no idea how to answer. A few years later I attended the premiere of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. Julie Delpy's character can barely contain her contempt for her photojournalist boyfriend:
In Dead Rising, your character hitches a helicopter ride past a military
blockade and into a shopping mall at the epicenter of a zombie
holocaust. The scenario is familiar to any fan of zombie films: Dawn of
the Dead famously features a helicopter landing onto a mall occupied by
the zombie horde. The setting immediately associates consumerism with a
braindead mentality; zombies are drawn to the mall, because in their
undead stupor they seek the solace of the only place they were happy
when they were alive.
The game begins with a tutorial on how to take photographs. Frank, hanging out the side of the helicopter, snaps a few shots of the zombies slaughtering the few remaining humans and coursing toward the shopping mall. Extra points are rewarded for viewing greater numbers of zombies, zooming in to frame the shot properly, and capturing particularly gruesome or otherwise evocative (sexual, pyrotechnic) imagery. Players raise their camera at risk of being attacked while framing their shot (they cannot shoot/bash while taking a picture). The basic controls allow zooming in and panning/tilting/tracking to set up the shot; focus and lighting are adjusted automatically. Being a Japanese game (har har), you gain experience points for taking better pictures and slaughtering zombies; these points lead to gaining levels that grant health, combat, and inventory bonuses.
"You're a photojournalist, right? In another country. And there's this humanitarian crisis going on. Do you try to help out, or is it your duty to just take the pictures now and hope they influence policy later?"
I had no idea how to answer. A few years later I attended the premiere of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. Julie Delpy's character can barely contain her contempt for her photojournalist boyfriend:
"Well, once we were in New Delhi and we pass a bum, that was lying down the sidewalk... Anyway, like, he looked like he needed help, but his first reaction was to photograph him!
He went, like, really close to his face, fixing his collar, to make it look better. He was like totally detached from the person.
You know, I'm not... I'm not judging him for it, you know, what he does is essential and incredible.
...All I'm saying is that I could never do it."
In Dead Rising, your character hitches a helicopter ride past a military
blockade and into a shopping mall at the epicenter of a zombie
holocaust. The scenario is familiar to any fan of zombie films: Dawn of
the Dead famously features a helicopter landing onto a mall occupied by
the zombie horde. The setting immediately associates consumerism with a
braindead mentality; zombies are drawn to the mall, because in their
undead stupor they seek the solace of the only place they were happy
when they were alive.The game begins with a tutorial on how to take photographs. Frank, hanging out the side of the helicopter, snaps a few shots of the zombies slaughtering the few remaining humans and coursing toward the shopping mall. Extra points are rewarded for viewing greater numbers of zombies, zooming in to frame the shot properly, and capturing particularly gruesome or otherwise evocative (sexual, pyrotechnic) imagery. Players raise their camera at risk of being attacked while framing their shot (they cannot shoot/bash while taking a picture). The basic controls allow zooming in and panning/tilting/tracking to set up the shot; focus and lighting are adjusted automatically. Being a Japanese game (har har), you gain experience points for taking better pictures and slaughtering zombies; these points lead to gaining levels that grant health, combat, and inventory bonuses.
Let's not overestimate the imagination that went into incorporating the
camera mechanic into the gameplay. The system of scoring points is
identical to its earlier implementation in games such as Pokemon Snap.
This N64 safari-on-rails game allowed players to goad various Pokemon
into striking poses that one then attempted to snap photos of at ideal
times. Extra points were awarded for capturing herds of the animals or
catching them in interesting situations (eating, doing a mating dance). Snap was innovative because the N64 was one of the first consoles that allowed players to move through realtime 3D environments. What's most interesting about the mechanic in Dead Rising is the tight
coupling between taking pictures and the overall goal of the game: to
break news of the zombie uprising despite government black-boxing. Now,
what changes the Wii port of the game by taking the camera away from
the player?One can assume that this decision will streamline the action of the game and reward proportionately more experience points for battle prowess. Just as in the Resident Evil 4 port to the Wii, I expect that the shooting controls will improve with the Wii's ability to point and shoot like a mouse; the difficulty of aiming a gun in the original 360 version was incredibly frustrating, especially considering how seamless the photography controls were (we can assume that these would have been more intuitive with the Wii-mote as well). Melee fighting will in the Wii version will, of course, be comprised of shaking the remote - though the coupling between shake and game action will be more akin to Mario Galaxy's simplistic spin attack than the tightly matched controls of Wii Sports.
Changing Frank's camera batteries presents quite an aggravating task for the player in the 360 version; one constantly finds oneself running out of power and having to trudge back to a few key points in the mall with hobbyist camera shops. The bigger change may come in yet-unseen changes to the storyline to make the game more linear (instead of having objectives emerge and disappear in realtime, players will be able to take their time and accomplish all the game's many goals).
Besides these gameplay changes, it becomes more difficult to see greater effects to the game's rhetoric. This is because the game's narrative embraces the ethic of Fink and Linklater that I'm only approaching here quite vaguely: a (photo)journalist in the field has the duty to insert themselves into a crisis (somehow).
Running around the mall in Dead Rising, players are constantly given "scoops" or changes in the game state that provide meaningful action to the player. Without these scoops, there would be little to do in the game beside the objective of survival (Frank must wait 3 days for his helicopter to return). Scoops can include any of three things: survivors located in temporarily safe nooks and crannies of the mall that must be escorted to a saferoom, psychopaths slaughtering zombies and survivors alike in their PTSD-induced mania, and story progression points. There is a strong narrative motivation for these scoops: two NSA agents in the saferoom constantly monitor the mall through security cameras and send information to Frank via walkie-talkie. The idea of a working journalist having too many stories that need reporting - and too little time to cover them all - is modeled compellingly by this game.
Frank only has a short time to complete the tasks sent to him. Most of
the gameplay is a difficult yet mentally stimulating exercise in time
management. If Frank fails to reach a survivor in time, their blockades
are overrun and they become zombies; psychopaths will disappear into
deeper recesses of the mall to either perish or continue torturing
unseen survivors. Missing the story progression points has a more
concrete consequence: players are given something similar to a "Game
Over" screen telling them one thing only: "The truth has faded into
darkness." One can continue to play out the three-day survival
experience, but your failure to uncover the governmental-conspiracy
causes of the zombie outbreak will result in a highly unsatisfactory
ending.
What this means is that sometimes a player (unless highly skilled or already familiar with the state changes of the game) must choose to let someone die in order to pursue "the truth." This ethical decision highlights the fact that the discipline of verification, no matters its shortcomings, is the primary duty of journalist; on the other hand, saving lives is something that is pursued by the player based simply on whether they want to or not. They are allowed to take on the interventionist mantle to the degree that they desire.
What this means is that sometimes a player (unless highly skilled or already familiar with the state changes of the game) must choose to let someone die in order to pursue "the truth." This ethical decision highlights the fact that the discipline of verification, no matters its shortcomings, is the primary duty of journalist; on the other hand, saving lives is something that is pursued by the player based simply on whether they want to or not. They are allowed to take on the interventionist mantle to the degree that they desire.
Trying not to spoil much, the player does not merely collect the interviews and photographs required to discover "The Truth." Rather, Frank becomes the key figure striving to prevent a terrorist attack that threatens to spread the zombie plague outside the no-fly zone cordoned off by the military. This thoroughly mainstream third-person action game somehow manages to model the experience of being a photojournalist in a way that we don't see in many explicitly educational games. Dealing with stringent deadlines, finding the safest or quickest course through potentially hostile territory, time management, the idea of missed journalistic opportunity, and the sometimes tedious necessity of arriving for a scoop prepared with adequate battery power and room in one's camera for enough shots to capture the situation - all of that is there.
The act of taking photographs of the slaughter does help couple the photojournalistic narrative trappings of the game with its gameplay, but the game's more important argument about media ethics will likely remain intact when the game's Wii port goes to shelves. One can certainly subvert the narrative of the game's current Xbox 360 iteration by avoiding involvement in the crisis altogether and just snapping evocative photographs for three days - in fact, this strikes one as a much more intriguing utilization of the game's affordances than, say, pretending to be a snap-happy tourist in a Grand Theft Auto game; however, this would be an exercise in purposefully arguing against the interventionist rhetoric of the game.
At the end of the day, the question still remains unanswered: "To what degree is a photojournalist morally compelled to become an agent of goodwill during a humanitarian crisis." Because Dead Rising takes place during a fairly cut-and-dry zombie apocalypse, Frank's decision to act for his survival is trivial. It will take newsgames that incorporate the strong points of this game to truly delve into the question of how far a photojournalist can go before risking manufacturing news through her ethically-motivated action. I'm sure Fink's books go into details and practices that would help make this decision more clear, but an analysis of these works escapes the scope of this article. What I can say is that it is a shame that the Wii version of Dead Rising will only incorporate the photojournalist's role in narrative as opposed to coupling it to gameplay with the camera mechanic and the realtime scoop system. Luckily, the narrative's connection to the media ethic I'm suggesting is hiding beneath the thin veneer of zombie horror will likely remain intact.
Dead Rising is one awesome game! When I first picked it up (for the XBox 360 that is) I didn't expect it to be much, because just like Zombie Films, they're all pretty much the same kind of thing to be honest. But it surprised me how cool it is. I hope that the Wii port was pretty good, I didn't really enjoy the 'taking' pictures part of the game anyway to be honest, so it wouldn't have really bothered me.
You definitely highlighted the things that kept me coming back to Dead Rising. Your role both as survivor and truth champion was a lot more fullfilling than so many other 'save the day' roles in other games.
That coupled with the fact that no matter how hard you tried you were going to fail someone at some point, even though it was unusually frustrating for a game to be structured like that, was very addicitive.
It's one of a few games, Left 4 Dead, ironically another zombie game, thats actually made me feel bad for surviving to the end myself and thinking, 'I could have saved more people'.