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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

No kidding. The implication seems to be that boys play video games with zombies is because the biggest thing boys are afraid of is zombies. Or wild pokemon. Or what have you.

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Maybe zombies are a proxy for sociopathic, unfeeling bully automatons.

They aren't, though. Zombies are vastly inferior in all ways (including destructive potential) to their videogame-playing foes. You shoot them down in their thousands.

Perhaps (in line with the opening comment) having a formidable foe that activates real fears and buried pain would no longer be amusing.

Indeed, perhaps it is concealment and forgetting that we long for by playing video games where thousands of zombies are slain.

If you compare one zombie to one bully. But if you think that one bully = all the zombies in the game, then it is not so easy to overcome all the zombies.

I think zombies are a proxy for other teenagers. They travel in packs.

Nothing of the sort. As already said by Liesmith, you shoot them down in the thousands. In the vast majority of personal combat games, a huge amount of enemies come at you, in an endless procession. Zombies are an easy plot point to explain why so many, and there's no moral question about killing lots of them - no-one is seriously going to write an article complaining about zombie feelings in light of such a game. They're implacable foes that just keep coming, and people don't care as much if the AI is very simple. Why would a human foe just come at me without considering cover? Oh, hang on, it's a zombie, no need to ask the question.

Zombie games build self-esteem. Because the zombies are all the other people in the world, who aren't you. It's a judgement on how we look at others.

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