Besides being a game about running around a shopping mall slaughtering the undead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 was a buffoonish satire of run-of-the-mill tabloid photojournalism. It expressed this through a scoring system in which you earned “Prestige points” for taking photos that fit one of five categories: “Gordiality” scenes, in which characters are killed; “Horror” moments, such as the spectacle of an approaching crowd; comical “Out of Shot” moments, such as characters caught in odd poses; “Drama” moments, such as people reacting to discoveries; and “Erotic” photos of dead or undead women, ranging from their nude underwear to intimate cleavage.
However, in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, the Erotica tag has been removed; Capcom gently suggests that this is not a “response to the changing cultural climate” but an expression of the view that earning points for such photos is “not a suitable reward for survival, nor is it a skill required by a survival journalist”.
The removal of the tag brings with it some necessary adjustments to the game's writing and missions. According to VG247, an early-game mission that tasks you with getting a high-quality Erotica shoot from a rival photographer has been replaced with an Outtake photo request instead.
The removal of the erotica tag was discovered by Famitsu last week, but Capcom has just shared an official statement. “While developing Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, we did our best to create a game that would please returning core fans while also appealing to new players,” 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 in response to a changing cultural climate, but instead because we felt there was no need for a reward points system on this basis.
“Additionally, given Frank's situation, this is not an appropriate reward for survival, and it's not a skill needed by a journalist trying to survive the next 72 hours during a zombie apocalypse,” he continues. “However, players will still have the freedom to choose their image subjects, and even though they won't receive any points, it's up to them to decide what photos they want to take that represent their journey.”
Oh my gosh, this explanation is so carefully skirted around the issue. The unspoken point, I think, is that “we don't want a mechanism in our game that actively rewards sexual harassment, nor do we want to upset people who are upset because they can't see “vagina bones”, so please remember that you can still take pictures of women's bodies – you just won't get points for them”.
The removal of the Erotica tag from the game has drawn mixed reactions – and to be fair, it's not all predictable rants about evil femiwotsits censoring. Some people argue that removing the tag ruins the satire: Frank is seen as a lecherous and immoral piece of work, and the entire game is a satire of the male gaze. Others argue more explicitly that getting rid of the system goes against the idea of game preservation as embodied by a remaster.
I can sympathise with these last two arguments to some extent, but I have some counter-points: first, Dead Rising’s satire is often indistinguishable from giggly schoolboy wish-fulfilment. Like the playful images of butts in The Crush House, for example, the game never says anything complex or interesting about Frank’s professional sexism. It’s just cheap jab humor, gleefully modelling the fact that women are far more likely to be sexually harassed than men.
I don't remember being enlightened about the mechanics of tabloid journalism when I played the game as a teenager – I just felt like the game was encouraging me to be a pervert. As for the argument about preservation, the original version of Dead Rising is still available, so if you want some Prestige in exchange for your zombie photos, you can always buy it.
It's been at least a decade since I played the original Dead Rising, and I may be missing something important. Here's Nic's more informed take on the Erotica label's garbage after spending a few hours with the remake. “It was completely sexist and completely empty, and the Remaster is better for not having it,” he wrote. “There could be an argument for it being preserved, but the 2016 version is going to continue to exist, so unless they're going to democratize the process and let players amass an album of artistic schlong shots, this is second best.”