Superstore of the Dead

First Person Shooter Alternate Ending



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“Gotta go.”

Janine can hear in my voice that something’s very wrong. “What’s happening?” she says.

“Our friend just discovered House of the Dead Two.”

I never played zombie shooter games when I was a kid. “Too violent,” my mom always said. Plus, the first person view always made me a little queasy. I stuck to Madden.

I always make fun of Janine for how much she loves House of the Dead Two - it’s a bad sequel to a terrible game. But of course we sold it at Worldmart. We sold everything at Worldmart.

I approach Pretty Zombie Lady carefully, and stop a few feet behind her. We both stand there watching the demo for a while, limbs being blown off, exploding heads, and when she turns around I see that, in her blank-eyed kind of way, she looks hurt. Betrayed. Which, I suppose, is understandable. She started off tonight excited for a date, and then she comes in here and sees this game, and now who knows what’s happened to her self-image. Can a zombie realize what she is?

Pretty Zombie Lady turns back to the screen, and I begin slowly backing away until I’m at the end of the aisle. On the screen, zombies overrun the player, and the demo fades to black. When she turns to face me again, Zombie Lady’s expression is unmistakable, a dull tired anger. Zombies are always dull and tired, so it’s that last one I’m worried about. I’m not wondering what she’s thinking anymore. This is what I am to you?

Zombie Lady begins dragging herself down the aisle toward me, her shuffle more pronounced now. She’s mimicking the zombies she saw on the screen. “No!” my voice waivers. “That’s not you! You’re not like them!” She doesn’t stop.

I stare at her, paralyzed by fear and wonder. Her eyes, once human, are now cold and unfeeling. As she nears me, she extends a decomposing arm, nearly grabbing me. She saw House of the Dead - she knows what she’s supposed to do.

Janinie knows what she’s supposed to do too. She turns the corner into our aisle shaking under the weight of a hand cannon. She fires two shots in quick succession. The first blows off the zombie’s arm, and the second removes her head. The zombie’s collapse is the fastest I’ve seen her move.

We stand there for a while, staring at her headless body. Her arm, minus one finger, lies motionless a few feet away at the base of the House of the Dead screen. “Got ‘im!” yells the game’s protagonist through the expensive sound system.

The words come out before I can stop them. “Would you like to go see a move on Thursday?”

“Yes,” Janine says. “Yes, I would.”

We stand there quietly, noting the mess we made in the entertainment aisle. “We should probably tell Burt,” she says.

“About our date?”

She elbows me in the side.




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While reading “First Person Shooter,” I kept wondering what the point was. Yu created a brief dramatic narrative, but it felt like there was an allegory hiding beneath the surface layer of his story, and I couldn’t quite discern the message. On page 39, I thought I finally figured out this allegory when Pretty Zombie Lady sees her kind depicted in House of the Dead Two - I expected the zombie to suddenly turn malicious and begin attacking Janine and the narrator, inspired by the actions she saw in the game. The message, then, would be that we are what society makes us, and that the media we consume can shape our thoughts and behaviors. This ultimately didn’t end up being the case, of course - House of the Dead instills Pretty Zombie Lady not with malice but with sadness, and the message of the story turns out to be quite different. However, I was intrigued by the ending that I predicted while reading the story, so I wanted to write an alternative ending with that moral in mind. I honestly haven’t thought too much about this idea of media shaping who we are - of course, our environments play a role in who we become, but doesn’t this idea seem to support the debunked notion that video games make children violent? I’m not sure what I think about this, so I’m just going to spend the rest of this blog post discussing the choices I made as I wrote this alternative ending. Feel free to debate the validity of the message in the comments if you’d like :)

One idea I wanted to explore with my alternative ending was something that I wrote my essay about - how the narrator, initially receptive to Pretty Zombie Lady, stops seeing the humanity in her towards the end of the story. On page 40, the narrator says that “whatever flicker of awareness I might have seen behind her eyes a moment ago isn’t there anymore,” and I tried to mimic this sentiment by discussing how her eyes became cold and unfeeling. My only explanation for why this happens in Yu’s version is that the narrator starts to feel more human, and no longer believes that he is “partway” through the “degrees of zombification” that he described on page 39. This alternative ending presents a different idea - perhaps the zombie herself changed after watching House of the Dead, and her human-like behaviors that fascinated the narrator fade in favor of the behaviors that the video game modeled for her.

I also tried to document the narrator’s fading recognition of Pretty Zombie Lady’s humanity by changing how he referred to her as the story progressed. At the beginning, she is “Pretty Zombie Lady,” but when the narrator no longer identifies with her, she becomes “Zombie Lady” and finally just “the zombie.” As I wrote this, I forgot that the author does the same thing in his version of the story, but in fact, Yu’s Pretty Zombie lady becomes just “Zombie Lady” after she sees House of the Dead Two. Again, I think that the idea that Pretty Zombie Lady changed after she saw herself depicted in media explains this transition well - in my alternate ending, the narrator stops seeing themself in Pretty Zombie Lady because the flickers of humanity that she’s shown disappear as a result of the video game characters that she’s mimicking.

One other way I tried to highlight media’s role in shaping a person’s thoughts and behaviors was by using this idea to explain the vast difference between the narrator and Janine’s initial response to Pretty Zombie Lady. This was one aspect of the story that I didn’t quite understand, and I tried to make it more comprehensible in my alternate ending by stating that Janine had been exposed to violent depictions of zombies in film and media. In contrast, because he hadn’t been exposed to games like House of the Dead Two, the narrator did not think that Pretty Zombie Lady could pose a threat to him. Because Janine and Pretty Zombie Lady’s views of themselves and each other were shaped by House of the Dead, the scenario presented in the game came true as Janine and the zombie imitated the game’s roles in real life.

Again, I’m not sure if the message presented in this alternate ending is useful or accurate. Feel free to discuss!!