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Dead people aren't especially interesting. But the minute they stand up and start shuffling around, gurgling for brains, they become absolutely fascinating.As terrifying as the walking dead are, in principle, there's also something morbidly comical about their monstrous clumsiness, their slowness to twig that you're just about to cleave them open with a stove-pipe.Zombie fiction has reached new heights of popularity in recent years, and games are no exception. But why do we like to encounter these oafish corpses?One common belief is that zombies tap into our deeply ingrained fears of a total societal breakdown, a possibility we face every day with issues like climate change, the rise of terrorism and the dangers of biological warfare.Others will tell you that zombies are a metaphor for the consumer culture that we live in, pursuing human flesh with the same relentless drive that spurs our own desire to acquire material possessions.While we are only passively involved with the menace in traditional media, video games create an entirely different level of engagement. The walking dead are still equal parts comedy and horror, but games force you to take an active role.We consume zombie games with abandon, even when they tread on familiar ground. Valve's Left 4 Dead introduced us to the idea of working cooperatively to fight an overwhelming force, an idea which has since been expanded in Call of Duty's Zombies mode and Dead Island We asked some zombie game producers for their opinions.Call of Duty: Zombies Creative Lead Jimmy Zielinski says, "There's a line in one of our maps, Call of the Dead, with George R. Romero where he says he actually likes the zombies for being recognizable as [former] humans. I think there's something there."You're able to kill a human and 'get away with it,' but it's not really a human. So it's kind of okay, this killing that you're doing. And yet it's also like a hero kind of thing, you're killing something that's out to kill everyone else. So I think... maybe it's something primordial."Dead Island producer Sebastian Reichart adds, "The question came to my mind often during the development of this project. Why do we do this again? It's not like we have the most amazing, new, creative idea ever. Killing a zombie is not as bad as killing a human. So from a gamer's perspective, there's this nice satisfaction to it, that it's okay to kill a human, as long as you call him 'zombie.' I think that's something pretty dark, but still funny, and I think it pretty much hits the point."Reichart adds that the zombie threat is also just, simply, easy to understand. Whatever the origin of the outbreak is, it can be broken down into very real world terms. "It's like rabies, but it's on humans and they're just turned loose. It's very simple to understand and it's something that you know from your real life: don't get bitten by a creature that has rabies."Dead Island's notorious trailer played with this idea of humans becoming inhuman, through the zombification of a young girl, of a loving family turned into non-humans. In any given zombie situation, kill-or-be-killed is the way to survive, but there's still an inner emotional turmoil."While you still have your justification to do it and you can be as brutal as possible," Reichart explains, "there's still this last glimpse of question in there that makes you think, 'Is it really the right thing? In Dead Island, and in all zombie situations, you have no other choice. You can deal with that question later…"