RND/ In which one considers the aesthetic feelings of how ‘being dead sucks’ online, andor why ‘playing a zombie’ is the worst role in the whole / hole of videogame culture.
This sub-project exists mainly for Gaming Culture archiving / Digital Archaeology purposes. Randomly peppered with edited screenshots and (thankfully silenced) video from Garry’s Mod Zombie Survival game modes and Half Life 2 / Counter Strike Zombie Survival mods, playing merrily on classic Noxiousnet servers (RIP.)
ZOMBIE GAMES ARE UNDEAD
The first thing to realise is that Zombie Games are themselves actual zombies. Pretty much impossible to kill for good (the correct term for this is ‘permadead’) they just keep coming back to haunt the living – or the unliving, since one has to be at least slightly brain undead to keep grinding on through these infinite hordes of crappy ZZZ titles (‘Triple Z’ as opposed to the holy and industry anointed ‘AAA’.)
Perhaps what one plays is not just the game itself, but the collective idea of Zombie Survival it represents, skin hanging off its sagging putrid frame in dried bloody shreds – role playing through one who is (/often somehow inherently) ‘good enough’ to Survive; that is, zombie games as some kind of dark, mutated Social Darwinian power fantasy made digitally manifest.
At a more practical and mundane level however – why does playing a Rotter in any multiplayer videogame have to suck so much undead ass? The answer lies in one word; passivity. (If there was another word, it would be “DayZ.” More on this later.) Whether ‘Fast’ 28 Days Later, John Romero classic ‘Walkers’ aka ‘Inexorable Like Lava’ – or even awful ‘Brad Pit Dogpiling’ World War Z style zombies, the role of a deader seems unbearably slow and defensive when compared to the ‘active’ role of zombie apocalypse Survivors;
While both Zombies and Survivors may run around mindlessly on a server at roughly the same speed – or even faster with B.S WWZ zombies – the philosophical basis of their inner motivations clearly differs. Living people have motivation to Survive but Zombies have no psychological motivations. The opportunity to hungrily om-nom on the brains of smug idiot Survivors is motivation enough for most (live) players to keep on playing on Zombie Survival servers – but never long enough for them to finally shuffle away from the experience without feeling bored and sick of the whole thing (feeling what we in the scene call Dead Bored.) In the somehow always-on-the-verge-of-dying underworld of Zombie Survival Gaming, there’s a rapid (flesh-like) falling-off from Total Zombie Fun to Total Zombie Grind. In such games, the meat is always quick to sour.
For outsiders, newbies and general passers-by, the question foremost in their minds is “Who the fuck still plays these games / this crappy game mode?” A fair question.
To answer that, one needs to understand the willing exploitation – on both sides – of players initially keen enough to take on the role of The Dead. Like the unnamed masses of fanboy Extras, keen to put on crusty makeup and shuffle through in the background of shows like The Walking Dead, unknown and unloved by anyone except themselves. The living are always the ideological focus of such shows – apparently it would not be much of a show otherwise – yet many [citation needed] would rather watch random virtual abandoned megacity camera feeds of endless rotting hordes shuffling past, rather than (say) be subjected to multiple seasons of Jesse’s hated son Carl and his stupid fucking hat.
In Zombie Survival, Player Vs Player games however, there’s a distinctly unequal power dynamic at play. Despite often getting to play ‘both sides of the undead equation’, everybody still rapidly realises that Being Dead Sucks, that The Living and The Dead are not equals.
Even at their height in the 90s, there was the notion that being a zombie online meant you were on some kind of inherent loosing streak. Only in movies do the dead ever truly win out – long term. (Just think of the ending scene in Fluci’s 1979 cheese fest Zombie 2.) In games, being Dead is almost always equivalent to being a Looser, and as modern gaming culture often tells us, all games are meant to be Won. Even when the dreaded message THE DEAD WIN flashes across the top of the screen, it is read by the living.
And yet, despite this there’s still the lingering background sense that these zombie games and zombie game modes have something to do with the dying and the dead – that they somehow express the Electronic Afterlife – hence the modern notion of “Dead MMO’s”, “Digital Archaeology”, “Digital Urbex” (Urban Exploration) , “Digital Ruins” and “Digital Ghost Towns.”
The Aesthetic Chaos Of Zombie Survival
The look and feel of classic Zombie Survival is that of what Theorist Robert What terms Aesthetic Chaos. Multiple fractured overlayed fragments of movements, general disorganizion and.. raw existential panic? There’s usually a lot happening on screen at once – its difficult to pick apart the treads. A strange immediacy and colorful rawness results.
Zombie Survival ‘Aesthetic Chaos’ Gallery
3840 x 2160 .jpg – Ideal / Idealized Cost for such Conceptual Work: £10K each (contact Robert What today for details.)
Here are some other useful terms for approaching Zombie Survival aesthetics:
“Simular”: A sarcastic net term used to describe the overwhelming undead majority of Zombie Games. “Wow these new zombie games on Steam sound pretty simular, huh?”
“Finding A Good Room” (to defend against the dead): there are no good rooms. But there are better ones; apparently a good room is any room survivors can haul copious amounts of quality furniture into, in order to use as a makeshift barricade. Large metal bed frames are a favorite.
“That Cold Sinking Stomach Feeling” (C.S.S.F) of “Existential Zombie Dread” (E.Z.D): No game developer to date has fully managed to convey the terrifying cold sick feel of utter Sudden Undead Isolation (S.U.I.) Bill from Left 4 Dead comes kinda close when he says “Son, we just crossed the street.” It’s as simple as that. You old safe suburban nowhere life is over, buddy boy – if indeed it ever really began. You’re now and forever on your own in a fetid, oozing urban sea of endless Rotting Blue Faces. One of the better movies to convey this feeling of Undead Dread is a scene in Romeo’s Day Of The Dead – the sight of all the lights starting to horribly go off one by one in a nearby downtown city building. Gulp
D.O.T.D Note: the first video nasty to give you the serious heebie-geebies when you saw it looking down at you from the top shelf of that old mom n’ pop video store in the middle of suburbia behind the bead curtains of the Adult Section and you suddenly wanted to get the hell of of there considering dusk was fast approaching and you didn’t want to be shut in with it because you imagined the contents might come alive. “It’s like.. it’s like their faces have all horribly melted and rotted together or something.” shiver
Ironically, one of the best-worst games to convey E.Z.D. is the truly stinking Land Of The Dead: Road To Fiddler’s Green. The sheer violent bare Spartanism of the virtual surroundings makes one feel all cold and empty on the inside – precisely just like those beings which constantly seek to (passively, inertly) feast your dead idiot flesh. When the flimsy cardboard facade of your old life is revealed for the mere empty movie set backdrop it always actually was, the true horror of Dead Space is laid bare before thee.
“Everybody go Headcrab”: an idea in Zombie Survival that The Dead may win if only everyone switch to this particular player model. The effectiveness of such a strategy is still highly debatable.
“Cading”: No game developer has yet got this facet of Zombie Survival even remotely correct, or where it actually needs to be. Due to the messy vagaries of Videogame Physics, anti-zombie barricades are simultaneously impossible to create or maintain – and indestructible for zombies to break down, or through. The very notion of Cading may be in fact an ‘Entirely Wrong Problem’ to solve, given that it rests on extremely dubious / entrenched notions about digital physics, architectural design and utilisation of Digital Space, and the (modern, synthetic) nature of Zombie Survival.
Amateur Postmodern Internet Theorist ‘Robert What’s response is to suggest entirely bypassing such a ‘problem’, and instead reconsider Zombie Survival (indeed video games generally) in an entirely new paradigm that he terms “Abstract Encounters.” (In short, “Fuck Realism.TM”)
“The Knife Wielding Dead”: they make little knowing ‘stabby-stab-stab’ type motions in your direction. Perhaps the most terrifying kind found in Zombie Survival games – along with those with Glowing Eyes and Rotting Blue Faces.
“Glowing Zombie Eyes”: a contentious issue within the undead Zombie Survival gaming community (or should that be gaming underground – given how rare / endangered the genre is / is becoming / always was?) Traditionally, only Black Ops Fanboys seem to appreciate and enjoy the Glowing Eye’d Undead. For some however, such zombies are Supernatural Zombies and therefore (somehow) don’t count as Real Zombies.. whatever they are.
“Rotting Blue Faces”: as in the classic (deadpan) Zombie Survival face, “Wow, look, a rotting blue face at the window” or, as an impromptu architectural critique, “Those are the kind of windows rotting blue faces look through.” A very rare type except in Japanese videogames and 90’s arcade rail shooters. The faces themselves are actually a horrible blue-grey and look like waxy rubber masks. The best picture of the rotting blue faced undead is the front faded VHS cover of George Romero’s Day Of The Dead. Truly, amazingly grody – and still an aesthetic feature yet to be fully game developed by anyone.
“Somebody throw a nanite bomb, right the fuck now”: The classic Zombie Survival notion – that someone should do this, right now, in order to deal with all these undead. Of course nobody has one, wouldn’t even know how to make one, and (given our Undead Luck up until this horrible point) it probably wouldn’t do squat in any case. Still, as a random desperate fake solution suddenly shouted out loud to anyone living within range, it kinda sounds cool.
“Pushback”: The popular in-game idea of having guns with infinite ammo, which then push zombies back. Pure “Because Videogames” horseshit, which almost all players playing Zombies start to passionately hate after thirty seconds or less. Much like Cading, probably a false problem to solve. The fact nobody’s come up with a better idea may simply be that Videogame Zombies themselves are a bad idea that cannot be improved upon. The seemingly living continually push back the forever advancing embrace of the impossible dead. In gaming terms, pushback mechanics feel like getting a thousand automated shit-job rejection letters per minute. It truly sucks.
“Braindawgs”: impossibly ancient / dead internet meme / reference that nobody (‘nobody alive, that is’) remotely remembers – eg. Goddam Eric Clapton Hawkwind Jumbo-Legs. Put that in your asshole and “Cut em’ up!” You are from Norway. What to disturb andor annoy other players – just drop in a few ‘Braindawgs’, applied directly to forehead. (Oldskool interwebs flava, boyeee.)
The Withering Screenshot Gallery
“!stopsound” & “!ztele”: the two most important commands on any classic Zombie Survival server. The first stops that brain destroying noise of a thousand guns firing at once, and the second teleports you back to spawn. Those poor unfortunates unaware of the existence of these commands – or even worse, unwilling to use them – are doomed to suffer needlessly.
“Secret (Zombie Survival) Rooms”: probably the single most contested andor hated philosophical aspect of Zombie Survival. Most happens on servers running custom maps, which feature several secret rooms andor means to access them (eg. keypad codes, secret b.s ‘shoot this particular spot twice’ and other nonsense.) Such rooms are meant to entirely bypass the whole idea of Zombie Survival for those with the correct ‘insider knowledge’ – mostly server clan members andor ‘Friends Of The Admin’. (Fuck the admin’s ass kissing sycophants, just let me in – pulling on this particular coat hook does nothing, dammit!)
Thing is, the question of ‘why even bother to have a particular game mode (eg. Zombie Survival) and then immediately incorporate the very means to circumvent the whole point of that mode?’ is precisely the ideological point; the whole notion of ‘Secret Rooms’ often appears as an inadvertent statement on the inherent existential absurdity, dead-headed dumbness dread-ful ontological inertia and ‘malignant uselessness’ of both The Dead, andor Zombie Survival.
“Light Jazz”: the idea within the (dispersed, isolated, fragmented, forever wandering) online Zombie Survival community that ‘Light Jazz’ can sooth the experience of either taking part in online Z.S – or even sooth the painful experience of merely watching play Z.S in oldskool Youtube videos with zero views.
“Dead Server” – a forthcoming classic ‘weird internet shit’ simulator / movie about an (apparently) empty server for a low-fi Zombie MMO title from the 90’s PSX era. “It’s dead – and yet it lives!” Also, watch out for the Crazy Server Admin.
“Zombie Survival vs Zombie Escape”: technically the same, however Z.S is basically hide and seek and Z.E is basically ‘get to the choppa’ with regular pauses for relevant doors to open while you fend off the dead, that is, the tactical combat and special operations process of removing Survivors from a targeted hot site when it’s considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of said hostile environment and taken to a (forever only temporarily) secured area under friendly control. Another term for this is “ZEXFIL.”
These two modes represent the two sides of Zombie Survival – ‘defend’ and ‘run’. In Undead Actuality however you can do neither. (Who has the use of a fully fuelled helicopter to get to a large, functioning, easily defended shopping mall?) Philosophically speaking, the only statement worth admitting while either hiding or running from the flesh eating undead is the fact that “They are us: p-zombies.”
Zombie Survival Gallery
“DayZ”: a dirty word, even for Zombies. The core dead symbol of all that is ‘too little, too late, too crap’ – arguably killed off zombies in online multiplayer single handedly. Except remember that new game with the Techno Zombies you could hack en-mass and redirect against other players? (No, me neither.) See, zombies simply refuse to leave us, because they are the unconscious dreams of rotting society which haunt our waking American Mall Nightmares. Their soft shuffling shadows follow in our hyper-consumerist shadows.
Onion-Style Rant by Mr ROFL Waffles: aka “Freakishly Earnest Black Ops Zombie Fanboy Shares Deep Franchise Concerns.” The following bizarre transcript is from someone on LOLtube raving about some kind of Ancient Roman Empire-esque fall from grace of Black Ops Zombies – and his subsequent b.s ‘spiritual reassessment’ of his whole ‘career ark’ and personal spiritual relationship to the whole (B.O.Z) cult. Frankly astounding how entirely serious he seems about it – like any of it’s even remotely real or alive. [“Robert What suddenly knew something about Kurtz that wasn’t on the file.”]
The terrifying cosmic scale unimportance of Black Ops Fucking Zombies hangs above this fanboy’s rotting skull – a Mars sized ball of molten iron and nickle hyperfluid superheated to 9000℉ – but/and (for the un-live of him) he simply cannot see it; he outright refuses to admit in any sense or to any degree that Shit Like This Simply Does Not Matter. The vacuous nonsense he spouts about, something so fantastically trivial he seems utterly self-flesh-consumed by – it all seems like an updated, Gamer Culture version of Zimsky’s Last Transmission in crap sci fi flick The Core (Jon Amiel, 2003) aka: “For here in the great infinite unknowable.. man can come to know the most important thing of all: Himself. He can understand.. – What the fuck am I doing?” [chuckles, dies.] He even talks about ‘zombie youtubers’. (Many have long suspected they exist.) It’s like watching a penitent digital flagellant cry forth his existential Zombie Franchise based wrongdoings to an Indifferent (/Undead?) Gamer God! Amazing:
Hi guys Mr. Waffles here I have been trying and trying and trying to figure out how to make this video but I just haven’t been able to get it so hopefully this is the take that ends up making the final cut the zombies community is changed permanently and it’s changed in a way that I never expected to be caused by Black Ops 4 of all games I thought that this game was the safest bet I thought that this was the one the compared to all call juries in the past would have the best zombies offering and be the safest time and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a second the safest time to be a zombies content creator safety in terms of regularity of contents so you can feel like you’ve always got something to talk about safety in terms of the positive bright future ahead safety in terms of a cohesive and positive community around you.
I really thought this was the one and it just hasn’t been and the reason splat I’ve been talking about for months and we’re all intimately aware of exactly what’s wrong with the game exactly how Treyarch missed all our expectations and ended up delivering a product that the community by and large felt was subpar and continued to be subpar for a long time and updated in a subpar manner but the fact of the matter speaking only for myself okay is the Black Ops 4 basically blew the doors off my love for Treyarch because of their track record of work ok and what I mean by that is the I was in a position during Black Ops 3 where I’d love Black Ops wanna I love world war and I love Black Ops 2 obviously right and I put so much time into those games the Black Ops 3 came around and it felt like nearly everything they did was amazing it felt like they kept just hitting home run after home run and there were little mistakes here and there and there were bumps in the road for sure and I’m not pretending that they didn’t exist but I was very are you willing to give trout the benefit of the doubt when they needed it to give Treyarch time to breathe when they needed it to give them second chances.
Okay because of the fact that their previous body of work and their work up to whatever point I’m talking about in Black Ops 3 meant that I had faith I had faith in that company to deliver a product for the next wherever it was full year or six months or remaining DLC or even surprise TLC five I had faith in them to deliver and yes just like any game there would be little things that I didn’t like here and there and they’d be decisions that I would wish weren’t the way they were but I was there for the journey I was down for the ride I was in my seatbelt was locked I was ready for anything for whatever they had coming I was willing to give it a go and very eager to be excited for it very very eager and then Black Ops four came along and I applied that exact same thinking to the entirety of the marketing campaign and I was left with this weird feeling of emptiness like I went to comic-con I flew myself out activision didn’t pay for it I paid for my flight I paid for my Air B&B; I took the time to go there and the reveal at comic-con compared to the one at Black Ops 3 was devoid of any real soul that’s the way it felt to me.
It felt like they weren’t really saying anything and it was just this really weird atmosphere but I couldn’t quite identify the time as to why I was feeling that it was strange but I knew something was off and then the game came out and it was the same sort of thing of like oh my goodness this formats on disk that’s incredible I’m really excited by that and that’s really great to see but there was this underlying question mark about the game that I couldn’t quite figure out and that I don’t think anyone else in the community quite could figure out at the time on launch as well and then weeks went by and the puzzle pieces started to kind of fall into place and I realized that this Treyarch that I was seeing do work in the zombies community was just not the Treyarch by feel like I once bought DLC from boat games from red community updates from whatever right it just didn’t feel like that old kind of classic zombies that I knew and loved and because of that I think my illusion about Treyarch as a company and what they were capable of and the game that they were making and the scope of that game and the resources they were willing to put into the zombies component that illusion I think was shattered and I was left in a place that I really did not expect.
And that was one of I feel like at least deeper insight into where call of duty zombies sits within Black Ops 4 and that within call of duty as a series and that within Activision sort of array of published titles etc and that within the industry at large I just feel like I’ve had an epiphany and it’s it’s it’s nothing deep right it’s not like a Eureka moment I’m not the next Einstein for thinking this but I feel like my own perception has been widened by the fact that I was so willing to be really excited about everything previously because I was a really happy fan and that was a really positive and enjoyable State of Mind to be in that has basically been completely taken away now and I’m in a position where I at my core still deep down love zombies right I love zombies as a game mode I love the experiences that I’ve had with it in my life they’ve been fantastic and I mean dead of the night controversy aside we ended up being the first team to stream the Easter Egg if I didn’t love the game I wouldn’t be putting myself through that sort of thing I was up for like 40 hours or something getting my guide up for you guys for that map I just wouldn’t be doing that if I didn’t enjoy what I was doing right.
I clearly enjoy zombies a lot still in certain moments but what I’ve realized is that there’s so much else to it so much to the bigger picture though is either not so good all would be better filled with other things and is this kind of insight there’s a new vision of how things are that I think has separately dawned on every single zombies content creator that I’ve spoken to every single one of us who kind of had our own moment of reflection our own personal kind of space away from things and our own little decompression from what it means to be an ongoing zombies content creator and we’ve all sort of stepped back and gone damn maybe the thing that I thought that I was playing maybe the thing that I thought was gonna be a standalone game one day maybe the thing that I felt like could be one of the biggest games on the planet or whatever.
You want to sort of say was people’s perception of zombies before Black Ops war that now has been brought down to earth and put into much more realistic terms zombies is a game mode the probably about 5% of Call of Duty players actually play and as such Treyarch is maybe a 300 350 something like that person studio they’re gonna only be able to put us an amount of time into the zombies mode as a result zombies is only gonna get a certain amount of content and the reason that we see multiplayer getting everything and blackout getting little bits of things here and there is because both of those respectively have more players than zombies tenfold and I think the thing that’s really interesting is the way that everyone in the community has reacted to these moments of realization and reflection and kind of thought about this game every single person in the community has treated a little bit differently when I first kind of had this realization my reaction was holy cow nobody is saying anything I’m gonna make a bunch of videos making a bunch of noise about the fact that the game is broken and it needs to be fixed or there is like a prophecy that I’m putting out there right now the things are gonna get a real rough if this problem isn’t solved like straight away and I made those videos.
I mean it just kind of has descended from there into chaos right because the game I mean it’s sort of better now it’s not screening now but that wasn’t the core problem I don’t think the core problem was not the blue screens the core problem is much deeper set than that I think and over the last couple weeks you’ve seen other creators reacting in their own way as well for example Noah Noah is a really good friend of mine obviously Noah is also the biggest zombies content creator out there and that’s a fact I’m pretty sure I mean you’ve got people like vanoss who make videos on the zombies maps every now and then and that’s great they’ll be one video whereas Noah is a zombies content creator and he’s the biggest one you also have people like JC you have people like Lex you have people like pizza you have people like Dalek and every single one of these people have reacted to zombies being in a very weird place in their own separate ways so Noah is now realizing as many of us are that being a Zombies Youtuber is only ever gonna hold you back right and that there’s so much more to life and there are so many other communities and there are so many other people and so many other games that being a Zombies Youtuber doesn’t really make sense for him anymore and so he is kind of birthing his channel again and turning into something that he’s more happy with playing a wider variety of games JC has moved all of his streams to twitch now that’s a drastic thing right and I’m saying these things and being like ya know has done.
The SGA seized on that I’ve got to kind of really try and convey how big a deal this is right these are people’s careers people’s entire careers that they are completely pivoting right now because of the way they’re feeling about this game JC he’s taking all of his streams over to twitch doing no more streams as far as I’m aware on YouTube and playing a variety of games on there rather than just on B’s as well and he’s doing really well by the way so I’m really really happy for him cuz JC is my bro it’s great so you’ve got creator sort of doing things like that you’ve got other creators who are very much doubling down and sticking with zombies Pete’s is one of these people you okay his videos for the past months and it’s just zombies zombies zombies zombies zombies zombies so he is very much to this day really sticking with black gospel zombies being the thing that he’s playing every day he’s streaming every day he’s myth-busting it’s actually doing the sort of things that he would normally do and it’s really interesting I think there you have this kind of separation of different parts of the community into different areas right now I’m absolutely categorically not saying that one is right and one is wrong and one is better than one as well so anything like that I don’t want to say Noah is like a traitor I don’t to say that pizza is a fool for staying with zombies.
I don’t say any of that right I mean literally not saying it at all I’m saying is that people are doing their own thing and as a result a lot of people are saying yeah okay the zombies community is dead and I kind of hesitate to say it but I also kind of agree like I think that the zombies community as it once was is dead because zombies as it once was is also dead that game that we were all perceiving to be a certain way like I said is no longer the current game that we’re playing right we’re all looking at it and viewing it from a completely different angle now and that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna be all making zombies videos for dlc 2 and all making really exciting videos about a surprise dlc 5 if there is one and all those sorts of things it doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna be making Easter Egg guides and Story videos etc etc it just means that the experience that there once was in zombies years back won’t be the same anymore and this is something that has given me lots of reason to think about my place on YouTube right I’ve been making videos for 10 years and for the majority of that time like 3/4 of my time on YouTube I’ve been making zombies videos.
Now 3/4 of my time on YouTube let’s call that seven years that’s basically a third of my life so for a significant chunk of my entire life I’ve been making zombies videos and now I’m in a position where I look up like ups for zombies and I’m like yeah I right now just don’t really feel inspired to make videos about this game I just don’t the passion that I had the spark that I had the five I had right now is burning very very low and like I said it’s gonna flare up again as soon as DLC because it always does that’s just something that I absolutely know is going to happen but whether we’ll be there again a week after the DLC comes out or not is another question I mean four dead of the night that spark completely evaporates straight away because there was always controversy suddenly people were attacking me for playing the DLC on launch and it was just like a reminder of all the things that I don’t like about this game and so in the last couple weeks in my time away I’ve been thinking a lot and I want to put it on the record right now that I am not quitting the zombies community I’m not doing anything in that vein because there’s an entire year of content to come and when that contents there I’m down to cover it.
But the thing is there’s gonna be a lot of gaps right and so I am also going to be putting other things in those gaps it’s something that I’ve been doing anyway for the last couple months that you probably will have noticed I streamed PT for example and that did really well on the channel you guys really really enjoyed it and I completely lost my mind because I was so damn scared I posted smash I posted a little been a fortnight I’ve posted just little tiny tidbits of things here and there and that’s gonna continue but what I was gonna say is in my time away one of the things that happened obviously was New Year’s and at New Year’s everyone’s like okay what am I gonna do for next year what’s my new year’s resolution and I was sort of thinking where do I want to go with my life like what do I want to do because if you’d asked me three years ago I would have said I want to make zombies videos for the next ten years right if you ask me that today and I said I want to make zombies videos for the next ten years I would be lying to your face I would be completely lying to your face cuz the thought of making zombies videos for another ten years oh god it’s so awful and it’s just not gonna be sustainable as a career.
Obviously right I mean I’ve got to figure out how to actually make it living doing what I do I’m in a place where for the last week or two I’ve been really thinking about what might come next because I have a degree I have a physics degree in fact and it’s a damn good one so I could get a job doing physics pretty much any time if I wanted to and then completely separate to that I have this entire body of work that I’ve brought up on YouTube there’s nothing to do with physics and there are ample jobs in the gaming industry that I suspect I could try and sort of scrap we fight my way through for if I wanted to as well so there’s saw two career paths there that I could jump into as like conventional careers and then in the middle there’s the sort of arrow that I fired and have been writing ever since of making the videos themselves not just the sort of conventional career path but the sort of entrepreneurial adventure of my own there’s that in the middle between those two things as well.
I’ll be honest with you I don’t know where I want to take things I don’t know basically I’m gonna be still making videos for the next year two years three years whatever it is right I’m not saying I’m stopping making videos I’m just saying that now I’m done with my degree I’m finally able to actually reflect a bit on what I want to do in my life and I thought that what I would want to be doing with my life this year was making a zombies video every single day in hell making two videos in it something like that and instead we’re in this weird content drought and the game has been as it has been and the community’s reaction has been as it has been and I’m here like wow goddamn that’s just not what I thought was gonna happen at all and I wonder if I should be doing something else like one of the things that I’ve wanted to do for a long time long long time is make games right and I’ve never really gone in that direction as my channel I’ve never really gone in that direction with my education I mean did physics that puts you in a good position but making games are something that I’ve always been interested in kind of in the background maybe I’ll make my first game this year maybe.
I’ll just do a little side project maybe I end up finding something else that I really enjoy and I start doing that alongside uShip I mean the sort of cliche is music right like a lot of youtubers start making content and they’re like minecraft youtubers or something or maybe they played GTA or whatever right they get a big channel and then they suddenly turn into a musician I mean like filthy Frank public example right because he had some audience there he was able to sort propel himself and to actually found success doing what he really loves to do is I guess his other hobby right his other thing that gets him out of bed in the morning and I’m just really in a position now or it’s I just got his weird feeling like man I wonder where things are gonna go for me and I’ll be honest with you I don’t have the answer to that and I don’t think I will for a while but I wanted to make this video because I thought it was important to have a chat like a little heart-to-heart just sort of talking candidly and honestly about what I think a lot of zombies creators are thinking right now like what’s next Black Ops for zombies missed the mark and it missed it in such a way that I’m actually needing to kind of accelerate my little timeline of figuring out what comes afterwards and I don’t think any of us are gonna have a really good answer for a while.
I think that you’re gonna start to see people trying to experiment and do things in various different areas and I guess if there’s one thing that I hope that you would take away from this video please when you see people trying these new things when you see these new beginnings on various channels and you see attempts at new content try to just let them screw up a couple times let people be a bit rough around the edges allow people to give things a shot and be bad at them because at the end of the day we’re all trying to figure out how to make you guys happy how to entertain you how to make your day better and we as content creators right now are having to completely change what we need to do in order to do that and as such there’s gonna be some growing pains right but in the back of your mind hold on to the fact the things are only gonna get better from here this is only gonna improve everyone’s content it’s a new challenge it’s a bump it’s a speed bump it’s a sleeping placement but it’s only through little challenges like this and it’s through kind of times of difficulty that you grow as a creator as a person as an entertainer whatever right as an orator whatever it might be and so this is an exciting time as scary as it is especially because like your career hangs in the balance.
If you’re a Zombies Youtuber right now it’s exciting and I just wanted to convey that to you guys in a video what comes next in the immediate future well for me January is a month that I undertaking a little slow I’m gonna be putting my feelers out in two different areas and trying to figure out what I want to bring to my channel in the immediate future anthem is one game but I’ve definitely got my eye on I also have just played through the entirety of God of War that game is now my favourite game of all time it’s a masterpiece a complete masterpiece honestly phenomenal and I’ll be making a video about that later this week there’s some other games I want to bring to the channel I also want to try and figure out some kind of zombies content that I can stomach as well and generally I’m gonna be still around I’ll still be on Twitter etc but I’ll be locking a little bit more than usual and just trying to figure out what comes next hopefully you guys can be patient with me if you’re in the UK and your university right now you probably have exams best of luck that basically wraps up the video from me moral of the story the zombies community has changed permanently and now we get to see if that is a change for good so thanks for watching guys drop a like if you enjoyed I’ll see you next time very soon bye for now *sudden low moan outside window*
Example Undead Hyperlinks
- Videogame Screenshot Paintings Of Zombie Panic Source (Game)
- Journal Of American Popular Culture – Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead
- Reddit – DayZ is Dead: Four Years in Early Access
- Wikipedia: Philosophical zombie
- The Atlantic: What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?
- The Escapist: Do people still play Dead island?
- Geek And Sundry: This Abandoned MMO Is A Digital Ghost Town With A Single Survivor
- Atlas Obscura: Exploring A Decade-Old, Abandoned Fantasy Game
- MMO Huts: The MMO Graveyard – Dead MMORPGs
- Digg: Exploring The Digital Ruins Of Second Life
- LOLtube: [Vinesauce] Vinny – Active Worlds Exploration (Are You Lost?)
- Kotaku: When An MMO Dies
- Games Industry Biz – Back from the dead: The people keeping old MMOs alive
- Indie Games Plus: ‘PAGAN: AUTOGENY’ Explores the Haunting Void of a Dead MMO
- LOLtube walkthrough: Land of the Dead Road to Fiddler’s Green
// how to play big science