Thanks to their innocence and the unending soppiness of human beings, children have become sacred in media. It's very rare to see a child suffer or die in movies, TV shows and videogames, which is especially weird in zombie-themed media -- the world would realistically be crawling with zombie kids during an undead uprising!
With that in mind, it was refreshing -- and quite chilling -- to see Dead Island's hot new trailer focus on the massacre of a family and the zombification of a young girl. Judging by the response around the Internet, it was quite effective. The Guardian, however, asks if the trailer is set to be known more for its controversy than its emotional power.
The article quotes MCV editor Ben Parfitt, who wrote, "I just can't get away from the fact that I'm uncomfortable watching a graphic depiction of the horrific final moments of the life of a young girl ... perhaps from time to time we do need to ask questions of what we choose to glorify and what elements of our industry we choose to defend and to celebrate."
I am personally in the camp that loved the trailer, and I respect that a developer had the balls to do what it did. Just like that opening of the Walking Dead television series, there is undoubtedly an increased amount of horror when dealing with children. It might be manipulative in a way, but damn if it doesn't work.
Parfitt argues that we need to choose our battles carefully, that we should be more selective when it comes to defending videogame controversy. The implication is that this is one thing we should not defend, and I completely, utterly disagree. This is exactly the kind of stuff we should be encouraging from the videogame industry. Something with some bloody spine.
Other mediums are allowed to address controversial subjects when they see fit. Subjects such as 9/11, religion, sex and, yes, sometimes violence towards children. If you're one of those people obsessed with videogames being "taken seriously" or if you'd just like to see the industry get interesting and tackle some more socially relevant themes, then we shouldn't cower and cringe the moment a trailer gets just a little bit edgy.
It would have been easy for Deep Silver to commission yet another commercial where some chiseled man in a vest smashes zombies in the face with a baseball bat. We'd have watched it, sighed, and written it off as one more zombie game for the pile. Instead, Dead Island played its marketing smarter, and it worked, as evidenced by the fact that The Guardian is giving it some great mainstream exposure.
Dead Island's trailer will go down in history, alongside the famous Halo 3 "Believe" video and the Gears of War's "Mad World" commercial. Yes, it's true that the resulting videogame may be nothing like it -- the bar has been set unreasonably high by that footage, and the skeptic in me says that the final product won't be half as emotionally engaging. That doesn't matter right now, though. What matters is that a beautiful, engaging, utterly spine-tingling piece of digital art was released this week, and we should applaud it. We should not be afraid of it.
If we stopped doing things because we were worried that they might offend somebody, we'd barely have a culture at all. Fear of offending people is one of the biggest barriers to progress that I can think of. Yes, there are fathers and mothers out there who have lost kids, and as The Guardian notes, they may not enjoy seeing a child brutally flung from a window. I hate to be callous about it but ... so what?
Pretty much any form of violence in media, any kind of joke, and any type of sensitive material is bound, by the laws of probability, to upset or offend somebody in some part of the world. If the potential for offense is what governs our entertainment, we might as well close every TV station, shut down Hollywood, and never develop another game again.
We shouldn't pick our battles carefully when it comes to videogames. Provided it doesn't break laws in its creation (actual child abuse would, of course, be dreadful) then we should have the guts to say that it's either all okay, or none of it is. That's a black-and-white stance, but anything less than a stark line in the sand is little more than craven cherry-picking.
You condemn Dead Island for its trailer, and you condemn the potential of all games to do something a little more interesting than "Bald space marine shoots some bullshit."
Contest:
12:00 PM on 02.18.2011 | 
He's got the power glove.
But some people enjoy. They have the right to.
Is it sick? Sure. Would I do it for fun in the game? Probably not. But if you can kill defenseless crying women all you want in Fallout 3, what's the difference? To avoid lawsuits?
I LOVED the focus on the little girl in Dead Island. The whole point of the trailer is that the family is literally being ripped apart at the seams by zombification. People aren't dying because of some *random* "monsters" - they're dying because of their OWN family. The innocent little girl was just left on the bed, and sprung up to murder the very man who gave her life. It was great on so many levels, and people rarely experience it!
I mean, Snyder did it with the opening of Dawn of the Dead (2004), but it was a lot hokier and slasher-like. Dead Island's trailer did it with a certain grace I would not expect out of a video game trailer - and that's exactly the point - it's pushing the envelope.
I came home and watched this video and found it so amazing I had to watch it twice.
Even while having something as horrific as child abuse on my mind while watching this video, I never once made the connection the Guardian is trying to make.
"Would I do it for fun in the game? Probably not."
There are always exceptions like that informant kid in Deus Ex who should go choke on a LAM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekVI_UoEYRc
Well said, I completely agree.
The point, you have missed it.
If you had shown me this trailer 2 years ago I wouldn't have flinched or given a shit.
Seeing it today with my little girl currently tearing around the house like an unstoppable cyclone I have to say that this trailer hit some discordant note with me. I value life in general more now than I have ever before, especially the innocent lives of children.
As a gaming parent I want to say that I fucking loved this video. Having a child and watching this trailer just made me feel more immersed and appreciate the story to the game so much more.
Hopefully the game will contain the same amount of gravity that the trailer shows.
Also. Zombies aren't picky, they're gonna chomp on who they damn well please.
It's not exactly courageous to pick an effective, manipulative way to get an emotional reaction. It's actually quite unimpressive and hackneyed. Monster closets work. Tits work. Killing children works. Drowning puppies works. Pardon me if I'm not going to cheer them on as they head down that road.
DEATH EXISTS
GET OVER IT
fucking PG
my response
If they decided to generate hype by zombifying and killing a young girl - it might be considered an offensive manipulation.
No really, the trailer is pretty much out of context right now, i won't judge it yet:)
It's not some brutal event we see, it's actually really sad to watch and tells a story about this family on vacation. Even though we all know it's CGI and fake it still tugs at the hearts strings and that girl is already a zombie at the end soooooo technically not a child anymore *sticks tongue out*
The Walking Dead has dead children in it, get over it.
LMFAO
ALL attempts in fiction or edited media to get an emotional response are "manipulative". You are intentionally using one thing to get a desired response in the reader, viewer, player, whatever. It's no less manipulative to have an adult woman get beaten up on camera than it is to have a little girl get beaten up on camera. If it's been included in a work of fiction or in some sort of media that the creator knows people are going to watch, it is there to "manipulate" them in to feeling a certain emotion.
However, for some reason or another, children are beyond this kind of thing. It's OK to have a prostitute set on fire and then shot in the head but even having an option to slap a child in the face would provoke apocalyptic outrage in the average person. So it's ballsy to do this, not because it's innately a fantastic idea but because the way our culture is means it's going to be more heavily criticised, more heavily analysed and provoke much more volatile reactions.
It's almost like it's calling the moral majority out on their inconsistency. You can't even strike a child in Fallout 3/NV but you can set a woman on fire, stab her to death, hold her up by the head and then shoot off all her limbs with a shotgun before stripping her and throwing her off a cliff. But make the head larger in proportion to the body and raise the pitch of her screams and it's all suddenly very immoral and certainly not the sort of thing we want in this game. MAKES SENSE TO ME!
We hear outcry about videogames desensitizing us to violence.
And we hear outrage about videogames sensitizing us to it.
We should have more powerful trailers that are about something. Not less.
If it were a short, it would have been praised instead of sullied.
Penn & Teller have it all right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPhje8wepyg
How about a game that doesn't involve shooting, space OR zombies?
Most zombie games or movies alway filtered out the children in some way or form, but Deep Silver doesn't excuse the little people from this appocolypse.
It's a vacation paradise, people take their children with them to the vacation paradise, the zombie outbreak happens while people are having a good time with their children in the vakation paradise. Excluding them would be a lame excuse. Like it or not, if a world wide zombie apocalypse would happen, children will be involved as well, they're just painting the most realistic "what if" scenario taking all things in account that could happen in such a location, and there are children there so deal with it.
I'm not in the camp that videogames should free reign over what they depict or even trailers for these videogames. I never want to see a cg rendering of a kid being mutilated either.
You need to understand what type of things you are opening the door to when there is no line to cross.
Several films based around 9/11 have been critically successful, but a video game is never going to be able to address that until at least 10 years from now.
People simply fear the unknown, and there's more of a divide between people who do and don't play video games than other forms of media.
Yeah, bullocks on blocking this thing. I could understand if the gruesome death(ing) of an "innocent" (or at least undeserving) child was played up for laughs or "FUCK YEAH"s, but this had as much emotional impact as someone would expect to have after getting through an attack that took your daughter. It was tasteful to the subject, even though the subject is hard to witness.
So what if it's an advertisement? Take it on its own, if you must. I won't be getting this game, but damn if this trailer's not an instant win.
I think it's because we're taught that killing younger people is somehow worse than killing an older person. As if their "innocence" gives them a ticket to avoid the reality of death.
All that being said, I don't think kids should be in games as something you can "kill". The demon babies of Dead Space and Doom are about as far as it should go in my opinion. Their presence in the games is unsettling, adding to the atmosphere, but it drifts into the realm of creepy when you start throwing kids into a GTA like game.
There are WAY too many pathological creeps in this world, not to mention the addition of children would almost definitely lead to the desensitization of violence to children in the real world in the long run, and we don't want that. It's good that we as humans have at least a FEW morals. :)
That said, even with as tenderhearted as I can be, when it comes to art, I think that's what makes the BEST art - the opposing ends of the spectrum always do. Our lives as human beings can be both indescribably beautiful and joyous, and horrific and brutal, and I think that's why a Dead Island's trailer dropped so many jaws. Media of that kind always does.
I don't see why children should somehow be "spared" in media, though. We're trained to FEEL more tenderness towards children for very genetically grounded reasons, sure, but does a child's life truly, inherently have more value than that of an adult (who I would assumed are killed en masse in Dead Island and games like it)? Not really. A death is a death.
This, however, is fiction. A story about zombies. They have no morals, they have no tact and they are disgusting, vile, primal monsters that attack and kill everything. It's the canon. It's what zombies are. Including children in this has been done before, in books, movies and tv series. Now it is being done in games, in a mature fashion that does not glorify death in the SLIGHTEST.
It's ok for me to read 'The Road' and have the father jamming a gun in to his kids throat every two chapters and constantly telling him he's probably going to have to kill himself one day, but it's not ok for a developer to reach out a little further with their medium of choice, in terms of story, design and characters?
Anybody opposed to this trailer is blinded by a dense veil of hypocrisy. You can be offended, you can not like it, you can ignore it, whatever; thats your choice and you are entitled to it. But videogames have every right to explore this territory, as much as any other medium.
In the end, it might not be pretty, or as emotionally driven as intended. But it has to start somewhere, and as far as I'm concerned, this is the best example we've had thus far.
The fact that it had a child in it, is just that. Jim is right, the hypothetical zombie outbreak would be full of child, toddler & baby zombies... and yes... it would be heart breaking