It's a bloody mess | Brian Conmy

Brian Conmy discusses the controversy surrounding Deep Silver’s latest offering.

 The first thing that grabs the eye with the Dead Island: Riptide “Zombie Bait” special edition, that’s currently exclusive to Europe and set to come out in a few weeks, is the included statuette. Needless to say, the disembodied torso of this particular female zombie is fairly well endowed. When a corpse is reduced to only its secondary sexual organs I’m not really sure where else to look at or what purpose it supposedly serves.Dead Island for the uninformed is a zombie survival game entirely about dismembering the undead with melee weapons. So it is possible in game to remove the limbs of an attacking zombie to just its torso however while that is for survival the only purpose of this bust is purely for display.Why did the developer of this game release a special edition like this? What must they think of their audience to think this would sell? While I can’t answer this question; when media outlets started reporting on how offensive this model may be, not all immediately threw publisher Deep Silver to the wolves, Deep Silver themselves actually issued an apology stating that they regretted their decision to create this special edition content. That was it; there was no mention of pulling the piece from shelves or replacing the (possibly) offending item - just a mild apology and nothing else.What this all really comes down to is not whether this piece is actually offensive or not, all in all that’s down to personal taste and personally I don’t think it is intentionally offensive to anyone. What’s more important and maybe being discussed far less than it should be is what this all says about the gaming media and gamers in general. To those looking in and seeing this kind of item being available as part of fairly standard game release what may they think of games in general? Even though this may be an unfair means of judgement it is not one we can ignore, in a time when the media is scrutinising gaming and gamers very closely, in respect of videogame violence leading to real world violence, why do some publishers still make moves as silly as this? Dead Island Riptide cost millions of dollars to make and is the culmination of a huge amount of labour hours not just from its developers but also its marketers and studio executives. With so many people and so much time involved why can such an apparently stupid move made in such a public forum?I don’t mean to condemn Deep Silver here, having played the original Dead Island and liked it somewhat I know they are not bad developers and assume they are not bad people. When their bad decisions affect the medium as a whole though it’s hard not to be disappointed and expect better. While we should not have to defend ourselves as gamers for what we enjoy, be it a statue of a mostly naked corpse or not, we must also realise that these things may negatively affect our medium overall and question their real worth.Gaming as a medium is capable of so much more than it currently is. New forms of storytelling, fully realised and interesting characters that couldn’t exist in other places and endless hours of entertainment can all be achieved, but not if we’re spending our time questioning the sexual politics or a small number of plastic figurines.