The Dead Island or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the trailer

By now it is statistically likely that you have seen the trailer. If not, it is stastically likely that a friend, a family member, or a loved one has seen the trailer. If not, statistics are irrelevant because you’re lying face down on a lawn, cold, zombified and dead.

That was in poor taste.

If there is anything in this world that will send a relatively non-existent item to the stars, it is the power of marketing; rabid and virulent as the undead themselves as they claw at our brains for another sweet ounce of flesh. But this time it’s opinions, as the philosophy zombies doff their caps to their shambling, distant brethren, and couple with our minds and nerves as we realise that we were the zombies all along, stumbling in unison to the clarion call of morality.

Rapidly decaying allegory aside, The Dead Island trailer presents our fevered minds with the death and reanimation of a child; her parents futile marionettes amongst her fatal steps, as seen in reverse. This is obviously an issue that games have been sidestepping for generations with the uncanny inclusions of invulnerable children, midgets or no children at all, but heartstrings aside, what importance does this trailer hold in the context of the game?

It’s just a trailer, right?

The Developers of The Dead Island have a gift in their fickle fingers that not many developers have chanced upon. The gift of influence. Ultimately, The Dead Island will be another game about bashing various skulls in with various pieces of scenery, but that’s when this cerebral activity has the chance to metamorphosise into something personal; something emotional.

The Dead Island’s narrative has the opportunity to behave on two codependent levels here that I scream and pray to the dead night sky, will work. Already they have exposed the world to an unimaginable horror, and faced reactions that they probably never expected, but now that the world has been made vulnerable to the main character’s struggle; the game only needs to frame that struggle in a way that shows emphatic character development.

Suggesting that the trailer should be an extension of the narrative may sound absurd, but it has already been achieved. People everywhere are shocked, appalled and sickened, but they may still buy the game, and chances are that their reaction to the trailer and its characters are what will add an additional dimension to the way it is played. What if the player takes the stance of self loathing, pity, anger or quiet desperation? What if the player simply adopts a cavalier attitude toward their goal and emotionally detaches themselves from not only the character’s history, but their own involvement?

The result could go both ways depending on how they communicate the character’s condition throughout the game. If the vignette we’ve seen so far has managed to arouse such a powerful, and lasting response, then plot elaboration of any complexity within the game may ruin it completely. A narrative like this needs to be played out not on the screen, but in the mind.