ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of zombies in videogames that represent the past. Zombie fiction has frequently been understood as a simultaneous metaphoric concealment and negotiation of contemporary anxieties concerning the politics of race, class and consumerism. Given the relationship between history and metaphor (Munslow 2007) becomes particularly explicit in texts that mix the historical with fantasy, it seems to be pertinent to examine how zombies are also increasingly used to make meaning about the past within contemporary media. Accordingly, this chapter examines the use of zombies in historical videogames, with a particular concentration on the trope of the ‘Nazi Zombie’, to explore what the inclusion of the fictional undead might reveal about our contemporary anxieties about the historical process; the past-present comparative relationship; the preservation and loss of personal/collective memory; the representation and negotiation of difficult or controversial histories; and the nature of ideology. This close-reading is contextualised by two further analytical foci. The first, anchored in an awareness of the formal, economic and cultural conditions under which game-based historical representations are produced, seeks to examine and account for the utility that the inclusion of Zombies seems to offer game developers in terms of both videogame form and historical content. The second considers how the agency offered to players by videogames might change the potentiality of meaning of the historical zombie, particularly in relation to the desire for historical catharsis at two levels. Firstly, this agency can be seen to explore the anxieties associated with the minimalisation of human agency in the historical process implied by structuralist theories of historical change that have frequently dominated historical thinking over the past century. In the second more specific (though related) case, this agency can be seen as exploring cathartic narratives of resistance within the broader history of World War II and the Holocaust that, though normally excluded (Chapman and Linderoth 2015), the abstracting distance of the supernatural appears to allow the veiled inclusion of. In this latter case, the inclusion of the Zombie trope functions alongside agency to both construct and distance present Western identity through the final and most explicit ‘othering’ of the Nazi identity in the past, which is simultaneously positioned as mindless ideological slave and ultimate evil. In all cases the problems and possibilities offered by such potential readings are examined in order to explore the meaningful relationship between past, present, undead and play.
