ABSTRACT
This chapter examines uncertainty as a vital component of playing and understanding videoludic zombie narratives. Concentrating on the zombie video game Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, this essay analyzes inconsistent information regarding the voracious undead zombies that drive and disrupt interactive play and scripted story. More specifically, this essay analyzes the game’s decaying ludonarrative framework by dissecting incoherent zombie elements such as contradictory representations and simulations of zombie infection, resurrection, and death among other highly-dissonant fictive and procedural features of the undead. Rather than dismiss these features each and all as detrimental to Undead Nightmare’s possible zombie gaming experiences, the chapter ultimately argues that the presence and emergence of uncertainty and disruption duplicate the monstrous undead zombie’s subversive and paradoxical nature in the inconsistent, decomposing form of the game.
