Sunday, July 17, 2011

Dead Rising 2: Morality

I've made it to the final fight in Dead Rising 2 and the plot was interesting though short. It's obviously just there to force you to kill a lot of zombies all over the place which is fine. There was a twist near the end that I saw coming a mile away. At any rate, there's an interesting morality play going on in the story along the lines of 'the good of the many vs the good of the few'.

The basic idea is there's a disease that turns people into zombies. Get bit by a zombie and you'll turn into one yourself in a short period of time. There is a drug you can take which keeps you from turning into a zombie, for one day. So if you get bit you need a shot every day for the rest of your life. That's fine. The tricky part is in order to make the drug you need to gather materials from zombies. But if everyone who gets bit uses the drug then there are no more zombies. So there's no more drug. So everyone who is infected turns into a zombie, biting lots of people. Now we have new infected people and new zombies for drugs.

This seems to be a bad cycle. If you don't have a source of the drug then everyone who gets bit will turn into a zombie. What else can be done? You could kill everyone who gets bit before they turn into a zombie, and if you manage to get them all then you might be able to wipe out the disease. Lots of people are infected though, so this would essentially amount to killing an awful lot of people, many of them supposedly important to society. What happened in the game is they intentionally infected a city and then farmed the new zombies for drugs to use on previously infected people.

Would you kill off a city filled with people you don't know in order to keep yourself (or someone you loved) alive? How about to make a lot of money selling the drug? The main character's daughter is infected and needs the drug and he gets outraged when he finds out the current outbreak was intentional to generate the drug to keep people, including his daughter, alive. But what can he do? Let her turn into a zombie? Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one?

It sounds terrible, but I think I might be one the side of the bad guys here. Forcing a contained outbreak to generate the drug keeps a lot of people alive. We're trading some lives for others and it's terrible to need to make that choice, but some set of people is going to die no matter what we do...

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