Appalachian Necropolitics within Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Fallout 76

This paper examines how two digital games, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024) and Fallout 76 (2018), depict West Virginia and Appalachia as populated by zombies, and reads these depictions through Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, the power to determine who may live and who must die. The author argues that the zombie figure literalizes the "living dead" status that necropolitics describes, and that this resonates with the region's history of extractive exploitation and its contemporary opioid epidemic, in which West Virginia has led the nation in overdose death rates since 2013.

The analysis situates these games within Appalachian studies, drawing on scholarship on internal colonialism and the region's peripheral status relative to industrial metropolises. Black Ops 6's Zombies mode is set in the fictional town of Liberty Falls, whose real-world counterpart sits in Jefferson County, among the most overdose-vulnerable counties in the state. Fallout 76 is set across West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, and southeastern Ohio, and its zombie-like "plague" follows a government experiment with irradiated bats. The paper's central claim is that these metaphors can be read as commentary on the suffering caused by the opioid crisis, but that they also risk dehumanizing Appalachians or normalizing their dehumanization.

The author identifies specific narrative elements supporting this concern. Fallout 76 justifies resettlement of the region by an external elite without regard for existing inhabitants, implicating the player in violence, and frames less-developed Appalachia as an obstacle requiring eradication. Both games depict government betrayal and state violence against zombies, which the author connects to the real-world allocation of opioid settlement funds toward law enforcement rather than harm reduction. The paper is a single-author, interpretive study that does not present original survey or quantitative data; its evidence consists of textual analysis of the games alongside secondary sources on public health, regional history, and critical theory.