Notes on Zombie Horde
Zombie Horde is a modification for Counter-Strike: Source which seeks to recreate the chaotic struggle of a group of humans attempting to defend themselves from a mindless onslaught of the undead. Or perhaps not so mindless, since not only are the humans in this scenario player-controlled, but so too are the zombies.
Just a few simple rule changes from normal Counter-Strike - the zombies get only a knife and regenerating health, up to four times that of the human players, and of course, immunity to headshots - and the use of Half-Life 2’s zombie models and a brand new game is born. A very fun one at that - it’s impressive how those small modifications generate the desperate and tense situations that are best summed up by these screenshots (1).
Out of this setup, two distinct strategies for the human team emerge. The most obvious is to get yourself out of the way of the zombies - to climb onto any box, ledge or other hard to get to area of the map. That way, you can make use of the way that, in Counter-Strike, a player is slowed down when hit, to stop the zombies being able to get anywhere near you and to stay safe and healthy. The other strategy is to stay on level ground, since to takedown a zombie you need to hit them in the head several times in rapid succession and, unless you’ve got superhuman aiming abilities, level ground is the best place to do that.
It’s the fact that these two strategies are largely incompatible that interests me most in this game, from a design perspective. The player is forced to make a choice over which strategy to pursue, and that choice is based on which metric a player values. Which is more important - killing enemies, or staying alive? Logic suggests that you can’t do the former without the latter, but the problem arises that the more you prioritise the latter, the less your ability to achieve the former. I’ve sat in many a server and watched this pushed to its extreme - players on the human team happy to sit in their inaccessible location for the entire duration of a five minute round, even when they are the last person on their team left alive and when the zombies have left them and their tent well alone. At this point, the question on the table isnt one of ‘kills vs staying alive’, but seems to turn into a more fundamental one - do you want to win, or do you want to have fun?
What part does winning play in having fun? “It’s not the taking part, it’s the winning that counts” for some players? (You could say that singleplayer games teach a player to expect that as long as they keep winning, the designer will keep making things fun for them.) This reflects back on some of what Raph Koster had to say in A Theory of Fun (his GDC 2004 talk, at least; I don’t have the book to hand): “Players seeking to advance in a game will always try to optimze what they are doing. If they are clever and see an optimal path - an Alexandrine solution to a Gordian problem - they’ll do that instead of the ‘intended gameplay’. They will try to make the gameplay as predictable as possible. Which then means it becomes boring, and not fun.” The problem here is that the game presents various local maxima of performance - strategies that you can perfect - but not all those maxima are made equal. So when you find yourself in one maximum that’s proving inadequate (from what I’ve observed, sitting on top of a box is pretty ineffective for the most part, it just delays dying), it’s easy to try and push yourself further into it - e.g. finding progressively more remote hiding spots and staying there even more stubbornly. To get to the other maxima (in this case, level ground and headshot nirvana), you have to de-optimise before you can re-optimise. You have to get worse at the game before you can get better again. Not a good thing.
Playing the game also made me wonder what place the notion of ‘safety’ has in a multiplayer. In a singleplayer game, a designer will play on a player’s sense of safety as part of the experience - make them feel scared to heighten the excitement, and then let them feel safe for a while so they can emotionally recuperate, etc. But in a multiplayer game, you’re going to die sooner or later, so can you really feel safe, and should the extent of that feeling be given any consideration in the design? In the case of Zombie Horde, I found that the sense of safety was a very important factor in my enjoyment of the game. Playing a zombie was great because of the knowledge that, in most situations, nothing could really hurt me. Sure I might take a few bullets, but my generous helping of regenerating health made sure that I could get out of harm’s way most of the time. Playing a human was similarly satisfying - since I had guns and the zombies didn’t, I’d be able to hurt them (and hopefully kill them) far sooner than they would be able to do the same to me.
