In addition to being a game where you run around a mall murdering the living dead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 is a clownish satire of tacky tabloid photojournalism. It expresses this through its scoring system, in which you earn “prestige points” for taking photos that fit into one of five categories: “brutal” scenes of characters being killed; “horror” moments, such as the spectacle of an approaching horde; comical “outtakes”, such as characters captured in bizarre poses; “drama” moments, such as people’s reactions to discoveries; and “erotic” photos of dead or undead women, which range from shots of exposed underwear to close-ups of cleavage.
However, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster has removed the Erotica tag, which Capcom carefully suggests is not “a response to the changing cultural climate,” but rather a reflection of the notion that earning points for such shots is “not a proper reward for survival or a skill required of a journalist trying to survive.”
The removal of the tag is due to some necessary corrections to the game’s writing and quests. According to VG247the early graphic mission where a rival photographer tasks you with taking high-quality erotic photos has been swapped out for a request to take an Outtake photo.
The Erotica tag removal was discovered last week by Famitsubut Capcom has just released an official statement. “In creating Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, we tried our best to create a game that would satisfy returning die-hard fans and appeal to new players,” it reads. “As development progressed, we inevitably discovered that we couldn’t include everything from the original game. In the case of the Erotica points system, it was something we discussed at length and decided to remove; not so much as a response to the changing cultural climate, but because we felt there was no need to create a reward points system based on that.
“Additionally, given Frank’s situation, this isn’t an appropriate reward for survival, and it’s not a skill required of a journalist trying to survive the next 72 hours in a zombie apocalypse,” he continues. “Players will still have the right to freely choose the subjects of their photos, and even if they don’t receive points, it’s up to them to decide what photos they take to represent their journey.”
Oh boy, there’s a lot of very careful talk around the subject in that statement. I think the unspoken gist is “we don’t want to have a mechanism in our game that actively rewards sexual harassment, but we also don’t want to upset people who get angry when they can’t see “vaginal bones”so remember, you can still take pictures of women’s bodies – you just won’t get any points for it.”
The removal of the Erotica tags from the game has drawn mixed reactions—and to be fair, not all of them are the predictable diatribes about evil femiwotsits doing the censoring. Some point out that removing the tag ruins the satire: Frank is meant to be a promiscuous and immoral creation, and the entire game is a parody of the male gaze. Others argue outright that getting rid of the system goes against the idea of preserving the game embodied in the remaster.
I can understand those last two arguments a little, but I also have a few counterarguments: First, Dead Rising’s satire is very often indistinguishable from a giggling schoolboy’s wish fulfillment. Unlike, say, the player-butt videos in The Crush House, the game never expresses anything complicated or compelling about Frank’s professional sexism. It’s just low-cost, crude humor, gleefully modeling the fact that women are are much more likely than men to be exposed to sexual harassment.
Playing the game as a kid, I don’t remember feeling enlightened about how tabloid journalism works – I just felt like the game was trying to encourage me to be a snickering pervert. As for the preservation argument, the original Dead Rising is still availableso if you want to get Prestige in exchange for your zombiboobies photos, you can always buy them.
It’s been at least a decade since I played the original Dead Rising, and I may be missing something vital. Here’s Nic’s more informed take on the Erotica tag being thrown out, after a few hours with the up-to-date version. “It was completely gendered and completely empty, and the Remaster is better for it,” he wrote. “You could make an argument for keeping it, but the 2016 version will continue to exist, so this is the best option unless they’re going to democratize the process and let players amass an album of artistic dick shots.”
