Undead Ecologies: Reconceptualising Zombiism in Videogames

Lawrence May's paper, presented at DiGRA 2025, argues that zombies in contemporary videogames are shifting from embodied figures into distributed "undead ecologies" that reflect the ecological crisis and the material conditions of the Anthropocene. Building on ecocriticism and the "material turn" in game studies, the paper contends that the necrotisation of Earth, linked to late-stage capitalism, is intricately connected to this new form of ludic zombiism. Its central claim is that videogames, whose production relies on extractive mineral sourcing, exploitative labour and fossil energy, are unusually well placed to make players notice the entangled lives, deaths and temporalities of a damaged planet.

The analysis is a qualitative textual study rather than an empirical survey, and it rests on close readings of two games outside the conventional zombie canon: Timberborn (Mechanistry, 2021), a beaver colony-building game whose contradictory temporality exposes the undeath beneath ecological interdependence with exhausted resources, and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022), a fantasy role-playing game whose status as a networked artefact draws attention to how technologised communication estranges people from their ecological relations. No quantitative data or sample sizes are reported.

The paper situates its argument within a lineage of zombie scholarship that treats the undead as allegories of humanity's repressed and destructive ills. It draws on earlier work framing zombies as critiques of neoliberalism and capitalism, as well as the "eco-zombie" and "greened" zombie concepts of Lauro and Oloff. Its distinctive move is to shift the figure from a bodily threat to a diffuse, ecological one, which the author links to Woodard's notion of the "darkly productive monster" in Earth's geology. The work concludes that undead ecologies can turn players' attention toward planetary catastrophe in unfamiliar and novel ways.