App: Zombies, run!
Feb. 21st, 2014 12:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI've just completed season 1 of the Zombies, run! mobile game. On the whole, I'm pretty impressed.
The idea of Zombies, Run is that you run in the real world and a game / story unfolds in the virtual world of the game, which is as the title might suggest set a few months after the zombie apocalypse which is such a trope at the moment. It's a pretty impressive and innovative use of the power of smartphones; this is something that simply couldn't have existed a few years ago, it's not just adapted from desktops and consoles by tweaking the interface.
I picked up the app because I'd seen several posts around where people enthused about how good the story is. And it really is quite impressive. There's some complex and interesting world-building, and a nice little mystery, and plenty of drama, and characters I cared about. I learned after I'd started playing the game that the chief writer is in fact a professional novelist, Naomi Alderman, whose writing I'm already a fan of. I mean, it's not the most amazing zombie story ever, but considering it's a completely new medium for story-telling, it's better than I expected.
It's also very clever how it combines the game setting with the real world; as the protagonist, you're running missions for Abel township where a motley group of characters are trying to hold out against the zombie hordes, so having a voice in your ear giving you instructions is part of the game, it doesn't break the immersion. It also very cleverly avoids any hint of the protagonist's gender (beyond just the fact of being told mostly in the second person), which is far better than making players pick male or female at the start and having a variant story depending. The other characters are in fact reasonably diverse, with regional accents from different parts of the UK, a mix of male and female, straight and LGB characters, and some who are specified as being non-white.
When I read about Zombies, Run, I expected more gamification. Levelling up, escalating awards for chains of achievements, that sort of thing, and I had hoped that would help with motivation for running. But it's not really a game in the sense I've come to expect, it's more of an interactive story. Although I was disappointed at first, in some ways this is a good thing, because the thing is set up so that it's not possible to lose. On reflection I think the negative reinforcement of breaking a streak or failing to meet a speed target or whatever might well be so demotivating it would outweigh the benefit of having gamified goals. There is a cursory "game" structure to it; you can pick up supplies to build your base, which is purely random as a factor of the amount of time spent running, but as far as I can see what choices you make for the base make no difference at all. I suppose the "you have found some supplies" thing works as a random reward. You can get some achievements for various things including speed and chains, but they're a bit miscellaneous and again, don't really affect the game. And there's the zombie chases (which you can choose to include or not); at random, the game tells you zombies are approaching and you have to sprint for a minute. If you go fast enough you get a success message, and if you don't, you get a message saying that the zombies nearly caught you but you distracted them by dropping some supplies, ie you don't "die".
In fact the reward is the story itself, the plot and background information unfolding as you spend more time running. I found it interesting enough that it really helped break up the monotony of running for half an hour. Having bits of narrative between tracks was much more fun for me than just listening to music. It's in some ways a downside to the game that you absolutely have to have a playlist set up for it to draw from, but I suppose most people do have playlists on their smartphones anyway. And I enjoyed trying to pretend the randomized tracks were actually the background music for the story, looking for tenuous or overt zombie or running connections :-) I also found it a lot of fun imagining myself as the story protagonist and fetching supplies for my comrades while avoiding danger. The level of tension is pretty well-chosen, I think; it's exciting but never terrifying, it's not trying to emotionally manipulate you into a real panic, which wouldn't be good for running.
I should note that it's really set up to work via GPS. It's been too cold for me to run in the several months I've been playing with the app, and I've found that the accelerometer which it uses as a fallback if you're running on a treadmill doesn't really work well enough. (This is partly because my phone is a physically oversized Galaxy Note; if you had a smaller phone that you could wear in an armband or similar it might well do better than using a bumbag, as I have been.) So if you do run outside you get a bit more in the way of stats, which can be very rewarding, and there are a few achievements related to things like setting a speed record or covering distance milestones which I couldn't get.
The game is completely neutral in terms of ability. As long as you do something for half an hour (or an hour, if you choose the long missions setting), you complete each episode. You can choose whether that's running or jogging or walking or even doing general cardio. There are some race missions which I haven't played with yet. This is good in that nobody is too slow (or too fast) to get something out of the game. But it does also mean you have to set up or find your own training regime, and decide for yourself if you're going to push yourself on the speed or the distance or whatever. And you still have to find your own motivation to get out there and run, the game doesn't really help with that although I suppose wanting to know what happens next was somewhat encouraging.
The app is relatively expensive, but I think good value considering that you're getting over a hundred minutes of good quality voice acting telling a well-written story, plus a pretty well realized game + internet infrastructure. You can log in via FB or Twitter, but the game doesn't in any way push you to do so, you can also have a completely separate account. And there's at least some privacy options for whether you want to do social or keep your run data private. Season 2, which I haven't started yet, but am looking forward to, does have some purchasable DLC. But you're actually buying content in the form of side-missions, and I'm assured that the story makes perfect sense if you play the core missions only. If you have download limits you'll probably want to pre-load the episodes over wifi, because each episode is several MB as you'd expect from substantial sound files.
My main criticism is that the ending of the final episode is really disappointing! It's a total cliffhanger and doesn't really give any closure at all or tie up any of the loose ends from earlier in the season. I would have expected that they were keeping things open for season 2 but it would have been better to have a partially self-contained arc as well.
The idea of Zombies, Run is that you run in the real world and a game / story unfolds in the virtual world of the game, which is as the title might suggest set a few months after the zombie apocalypse which is such a trope at the moment. It's a pretty impressive and innovative use of the power of smartphones; this is something that simply couldn't have existed a few years ago, it's not just adapted from desktops and consoles by tweaking the interface.
I picked up the app because I'd seen several posts around where people enthused about how good the story is. And it really is quite impressive. There's some complex and interesting world-building, and a nice little mystery, and plenty of drama, and characters I cared about. I learned after I'd started playing the game that the chief writer is in fact a professional novelist, Naomi Alderman, whose writing I'm already a fan of. I mean, it's not the most amazing zombie story ever, but considering it's a completely new medium for story-telling, it's better than I expected.
It's also very clever how it combines the game setting with the real world; as the protagonist, you're running missions for Abel township where a motley group of characters are trying to hold out against the zombie hordes, so having a voice in your ear giving you instructions is part of the game, it doesn't break the immersion. It also very cleverly avoids any hint of the protagonist's gender (beyond just the fact of being told mostly in the second person), which is far better than making players pick male or female at the start and having a variant story depending. The other characters are in fact reasonably diverse, with regional accents from different parts of the UK, a mix of male and female, straight and LGB characters, and some who are specified as being non-white.
When I read about Zombies, Run, I expected more gamification. Levelling up, escalating awards for chains of achievements, that sort of thing, and I had hoped that would help with motivation for running. But it's not really a game in the sense I've come to expect, it's more of an interactive story. Although I was disappointed at first, in some ways this is a good thing, because the thing is set up so that it's not possible to lose. On reflection I think the negative reinforcement of breaking a streak or failing to meet a speed target or whatever might well be so demotivating it would outweigh the benefit of having gamified goals. There is a cursory "game" structure to it; you can pick up supplies to build your base, which is purely random as a factor of the amount of time spent running, but as far as I can see what choices you make for the base make no difference at all. I suppose the "you have found some supplies" thing works as a random reward. You can get some achievements for various things including speed and chains, but they're a bit miscellaneous and again, don't really affect the game. And there's the zombie chases (which you can choose to include or not); at random, the game tells you zombies are approaching and you have to sprint for a minute. If you go fast enough you get a success message, and if you don't, you get a message saying that the zombies nearly caught you but you distracted them by dropping some supplies, ie you don't "die".
In fact the reward is the story itself, the plot and background information unfolding as you spend more time running. I found it interesting enough that it really helped break up the monotony of running for half an hour. Having bits of narrative between tracks was much more fun for me than just listening to music. It's in some ways a downside to the game that you absolutely have to have a playlist set up for it to draw from, but I suppose most people do have playlists on their smartphones anyway. And I enjoyed trying to pretend the randomized tracks were actually the background music for the story, looking for tenuous or overt zombie or running connections :-) I also found it a lot of fun imagining myself as the story protagonist and fetching supplies for my comrades while avoiding danger. The level of tension is pretty well-chosen, I think; it's exciting but never terrifying, it's not trying to emotionally manipulate you into a real panic, which wouldn't be good for running.
I should note that it's really set up to work via GPS. It's been too cold for me to run in the several months I've been playing with the app, and I've found that the accelerometer which it uses as a fallback if you're running on a treadmill doesn't really work well enough. (This is partly because my phone is a physically oversized Galaxy Note; if you had a smaller phone that you could wear in an armband or similar it might well do better than using a bumbag, as I have been.) So if you do run outside you get a bit more in the way of stats, which can be very rewarding, and there are a few achievements related to things like setting a speed record or covering distance milestones which I couldn't get.
The game is completely neutral in terms of ability. As long as you do something for half an hour (or an hour, if you choose the long missions setting), you complete each episode. You can choose whether that's running or jogging or walking or even doing general cardio. There are some race missions which I haven't played with yet. This is good in that nobody is too slow (or too fast) to get something out of the game. But it does also mean you have to set up or find your own training regime, and decide for yourself if you're going to push yourself on the speed or the distance or whatever. And you still have to find your own motivation to get out there and run, the game doesn't really help with that although I suppose wanting to know what happens next was somewhat encouraging.
The app is relatively expensive, but I think good value considering that you're getting over a hundred minutes of good quality voice acting telling a well-written story, plus a pretty well realized game + internet infrastructure. You can log in via FB or Twitter, but the game doesn't in any way push you to do so, you can also have a completely separate account. And there's at least some privacy options for whether you want to do social or keep your run data private. Season 2, which I haven't started yet, but am looking forward to, does have some purchasable DLC. But you're actually buying content in the form of side-missions, and I'm assured that the story makes perfect sense if you play the core missions only. If you have download limits you'll probably want to pre-load the episodes over wifi, because each episode is several MB as you'd expect from substantial sound files.
My main criticism is that the ending of the final episode is really disappointing! It's a total cliffhanger and doesn't really give any closure at all or tie up any of the loose ends from earlier in the season. I would have expected that they were keeping things open for season 2 but it would have been better to have a partially self-contained arc as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-23 05:21 pm (UTC)(NOT a common occurence)