The Zombie & Gamer relationship.

Zombies, undead, ghouls, the infected or whatever you prefer calling them by have been a large part in our gaming history as games dating all the way back to the days of pixelated graphics.

We all remember playing old games where we fought the undead hordes to progress and even now we remember playing more recent games where we fight them.

We've fought them through the ages, our weapons changing, the means we dispose them have changed, and even how violent their deaths are have changed with time but what hasn't is how we view them.

When picking up the latest zombie killing game we find joy in the killing them by the thousands especially when we make it gruesome, it even got to the point where some give you achievements for getting 53,594 kills.

We revel in their demise and as next gen approaches we look forward to the new ways we get to kill them and the arenas we face them in like Dying Light.

But what we aren't doing is the take the time to see that these creatures were once human, it is a thing we often times overlook all for the sake to murder them by the dozens and never let these actions come to hunt us.

They were once somebodies brother, sister, neighbor, friend, or loved one and yet we take a sick perverse pleasure in bashing their skulls in, cutting them open with a rainbow chainsaw or smacking them with a purple back massager.

The only time we seem to care is when we personally knew this character before turning zombie only then do we stop to think of our actions only for us to later go out and take joy in killing another zombie you don't know.

We always view them as morally bankrupt monsters that kill anyone who crosses their paths and thus we feel no empathy for them and ignoring that they never asked to be like that and that before going zombie they were a somebody to someone.

Sure you can make the compelling argument that these zombies are just program characters they were never really people to begin with and just enemies and always have been. Yet when we play the game we no longer view the game from the perspective of the gamer but of the character.

We become part of that world and for the time we give it that world is as real to you as the air you breathe and in their world the zombie you just decapitated meant something to a person.

The point of this is not to make you feel disgust or disdain to play future zombie games with the intent of having a good time at their expense but mainly to talk about something that doesn't get talked much.