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Aside from being a game where you run around a shopping mall murdering the living dead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 is a clownish satire of sleazy tabloid photojournalism. It expresses this by way of its scoring system, where you earn “Prestige points” for snapping pictures that fit one of five categories: “Brutal” scenes of characters being slain; moments of “Horror”, such as the spectacle of an approaching horde; comical “Outtakes”, like characters caught in bizarre poses; moments of “Drama”, such as people reacting to discoveries; and “Erotic” photos of women alive or undead, which range from snaps of exposed underwear to close-ups of cleavage.
The Erotica tag has, however, been chopped from the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, in what Capcom gingerly suggest isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”, but expressive of the view that earning points from such photos is not “an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive”.
The tag’s removal accompanies some necessary tweaks to the game’s writing and quests. According to VG247, an early-game quest where a rival photographer tasks you with taking a high quality Erotica shot has been exchanged for an Outtake photo request instead.
The Erotica tag’s removal was discovered last week by Famitsu, but Capcom have only just shared an official statement. “When developing Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, we tried our best to create a game that would please returning core fans and appeal to new players alike,” 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, this was something we discussed at length and decided to remove; not so much as a response to a changing cultural climate, but because we felt there is no need to have a reward points system on this basis.
“Additionally, when considering Frank’s situation, it is not an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive for the next 72 hours during a zombie apocalypse,” it continues. “However, players will still have the right to choose their picture subjects freely, and even though they won’t receive points, it is up to them to decide what photos they will take to represent their journey.”
Gosh, there’s a lot of very careful talking-around-the-subject going on in that statement. The unspoken gist, I think, is “we don’t want to have a mechanism in our game that actively rewards sexual harassment, but also, we don’t want to upset the people who get mad when they can’t see “vagina bones”, so please remember that you can still take pictures of women’s bodies – you just won’t get any points for them”.
The removal of Erotica tags from the game has attracted a mixture of responses – and in fairness, not all of them are the predictable diatribes about evil femiwotsits doing censorship. Some people point out that removing the tag spoils the satire: Frank is supposed to be a lecherous and amoral piece of work, and the whole game is a send-up of the male gaze. Others argue more straightforwardly that getting rid of the system is contrary to the idea of game preservation embodied by a remaster.
I can sympathise a bit with these last two arguments, but I have some counterpoints: firstly, Dead Rising’s satire is very often indistinguishable from giggling schoolboy wish fulfilment. Unlike with, say, player footage of butts in The Crush House, the game never says anything complex or interesting about Frank’s professional sexism. It’s just cheap punchdown humour, gleefully modelling the fact that women are far more likely than men to face sexual harassment.
Playing the game as a youngster, I don’t remember feeling enlightened about the workings of tabloid reporting – I just felt like the game was exhorting me to be a creep. As for the argument about preservation, the original version of Dead Rising is still available, so if you want some Prestige in return for your snapshots of zomboobies, you can always buy that one instead.
It’s been at least a decade since I played the original Dead Rising, and it’s possible I’m skimming something important. Here’s Nic’s better-informed take on the Erotica tag’s junking, after a few hours with the new version. “It was entirely gendered and entirely vacuous, and the Remaster is better for its absence,” he wrote. “There might be an argument to be made for preservation, but the 2016 version will continue to exist, so this is the next best option if they’re not going to democratise the process and let players amass an album of artful schlong shots.”