The game provides a lot of well-designed gameplay and a sense of discovery through the controls alone. Several of the game’s mechanics relate to in-game discovery; the game encourages flipping between the new and improved map in the player’s hand and the hidden items view on the tablet controller to uncover a more complete picture of the world. The map also allows players to drop and make notes on said map, which is useful for later reference. The survivor focus is another mechanic that encourages in-game discoveries. While the player is managing their inventory, they can access their survivor focus, which highlights and displays the name of any usable item currently in their field of view.

ZombiU is a survival horror first-person shooter for the Wii U console that was released in November of 2012. It is a launch title for the Wii U that employs several unique gameplay features of the Wii U, including the tablet controller. The game is set in London during the early stages of a zombie outbreak. The player generally faces limited supplies in the form of various weapons and consumable items as they explore zombified London, looting the safe houses, landmarks, and other various buildings. The game also features a permadeath game mechanic: when a player-controlled survivor falls, the player goes on to control a new survivor, while the now zombified ex-survivor roams the area the player died in, adopting the player’s built-up inventory.

1.1. Overview of the Game

ZombiU is a first person shooter game released on November 18, 2012 as a launch title for Nintendo’s Wii U console (hence the “U” attached to the end of the game title). Although primarily developed by Ubisoft Montpellier, ZombiU contains a combination of Ubisoft’s internal studios, specifically Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Romania, Ubisoft Reflections, and Ubisoft Newcastle. The company wanted to give a group of dedicated developers the chance to build a game specifically tailored to show off the capabilities of the Wii U’s GamePad, and its corresponding software. The unique gameplay features that highlight the new GamePad functionality as well as the heavy reliance on its community to help uncover the game’s secrets and mysteries make ZombiU a noteworthy, original game title worth researching and dissecting.

2. The Importance of In-Game Secrets

In this paper, we explore the importance and weight of secrets and discoverables within the game of ZombiU (2012). Because we are particularly concerned with player emotions tied to indeterminate progress and emotion that is created by unmarked secret spaces that remain hiding beneath a level of the game’s surface, it would be a reasonable misguided – even heresy – to conflate the emergent moments and natural in-game highs that happen with portraying a treating a player’s desire to puzzle and uncover as unworthy of study. To such a terrible end, we delve into the background of game secrets, with particular attention to previous work on secrets and issues related to their design. After this, we explain ZombiU and highlight moments when the game’s design calls and reflects two key events where deep exploration is required by the player.

Many game designs highlight the ways in which players are encouraged to fully explore and deeply engage with the spaces of the games they are playing. Entire vast and mysterious virtual landscapes are sometimes traversed by them, with the hope or expectation that a pitch-perfect or poignant scene or action, or a singular performance will occur at a critical juncture, or a fabled secret or discovery will be found lying in the road ahead. Within individual games, players may fabricate and share secrets about them that remain private, or seldom rise to a point of any great significance until eventually they become stories and moments that are intimate and tender, or even ridiculous and wild to share. As a consequence, there can emerge an assumption that a popular game will always bare its most fascinating parts to the player, or that the possibility of discovering something profoundly precise that has been effectively hidden under the design takes far too great and deliberate a strain on outside effort far outweighing the attention and margins that people place on games currently.

2.1. Enhancing Gameplay Experience

While gameplay is enhanced by explicit actions, like moving and collecting resources, players are encouraged to investigate context-defining objects, determine their meaning path in the narrative, and comprehend the narrative in the game. Implicit readings stimulate satisfying curiosity to which narrative. Unwanted curiosity as a data privacy problem is also explored from the proper denominations in personal data management literature.

This work sheds light on ad hoc definition frameworks for in-game secrets and discoveries for game development with others’ marks and possible consequences. The players inferred hints, puzzles, and the in-game characters’ behavior and dialogue to operate a sequence to solve a puzzle. The name itself contributes to meaningful, required exploration capacity on the path and the destination.

From an empirical analysis of videos of different players’ sessions and face-to-face observation and interviews with chronological game rounds of the ZombiU, we conceptualize in-game secrets and discoveries based on related literature and our data analysis. These can be mapped to specific theories, such as the others’ mark concept and potential support from the causality theory.

Remainders and hidden contexts can support players by improving their exploration experience and providing guidance on satisfying expectations regarding discoveries and context from the in-game environment. Discoveries and secret knowledge are noticed upon, yet entail a privacy-protected beneficial gameplay. The in-game environment comprises multiple mechanisms, resources, elements, and events where players are prompted to pay attention to other objects and actions.

3. Types of Secrets and Discoveries

3.4. Sounds Audio signals from the game can identify sounds. Sounds can be hard to locate and are not always associated with an event or object. They are furious and are not essential to game progression, but they can help the player feel more involved in the game world by giving narrative cues. For example, a voice heard on the player’s radio will give them information on a new gameplay objective, and a scream will alert to the presence of zombies in a specific room, providing auxiliary information about the game world circumstance.

3.3. Messages Messages are various forms of text that provide information to the player. They often advise, warn, or challenge the player. Messages can be written or displayed on a variety of media. They can help the player understand the game story, links between characters, and the backstory. Examples of messages include graffiti, notes, diaries, or posters. The color of the text, its font, and the support used will differentiate the type of message. Case notes are a form of message that releases new rules and objectives when the players meet some goals.

3.2. Hidden Objects Hidden Objects refer to items that are generally not in the usual line of sight of the player. Unlike objects, hidden objects are not found in plain sight. They require the player to closely inspect surroundings and pay attention to their environment in order to notice them. Hidden objects can be of short supply and are usually in some degree of concealment, for example, a locked cell or a hidden locket. Some items are left by the environment, such as finding important documents lying in abandoned metro stations.

3.1. Objects Objects refer to items that can be found by the player. Recovering objects is essential for the player to progress and survive in the game. It includes all items physically present in the game world such as weapons, ammunition, food, or tools. Other unobtainable items, such as litter, are not considered as objects in this classification.

In order to focus on the research problem, a classification of all the different in-game secrets and discoveries had to be established. It follows a brief description of each type. To be included in this list, a type of secret or discovery must correspond to at least one of the provided definitions. Consequently, types of secrets and discoveries such as puzzles or monsters are not included, as they are fully described in the game. The different types of secrets and discoveries found in ZombiU were established through observation in experiments.

3.1. Hidden Items and Weapons

We recognized that the game has several hidden items scattered around in the surroundings, and it was uncertain if those items would respawn later in the level or if it was only part of the essence of the game. This is important because we need to evaluate our strategy on which item to collect and which item to skip for our second playthrough. Based on what we had observed, it seems that the items that respawn are well-thought-of by the developer. We also noticed that they respawn in the same location, and some items only appear after we had defeated the hordes of zombies. Similar to the Resident Evil series, the game has limited bullets, and the melee weapons are breakable. The stronghold also restricts ammo and supplies from being brought along by the player, so the game has certainly raised the difficulty for the game by putting restrictions in place. On the positive side, the game has many Just-in-time (JIT) helpful items located at non-suspicious places. These include First Aid Kit, Ammos, Molotov Cocktail, Agilities Cocktail, and Proximity Mine that plays a big part in the game.

3.2. Easter Eggs and References

As an Easter egg, we have hidden several relics in the Tower of London Data. The relics can only be viewed by finding and scanning the QR codes with a mobile phone or a tablet. The output of the website is only in English, but translations could include the language from the protected site. We created the location using one of the game levels as a staging area. Different QR code readers showed us that we needed Wi-Fi and some room for usable content. In the facial recognition, a spectator helped us out. The Zomedatum project has shown that in-game characters can exist and suggests that threatened sites do not need to be protected by walls if they are surrounded by trespassing zombies. It is so much harder for a map to survive than for a map to be destroyed!

ZombiU is a game layered heavily with British cultural references. The National Gallery, the House of Commons, and the Tower of London are all levels in the game where the player will interact with 17th-century protected sites. In order to refresh the game with some interesting military hardware, we included a World War II Bren gun carrier as an Easter egg. It can only be seen if the player takes alternative routes to some levels. This is a perfect example of how ancillary information can complement original research into threatened sites. Sites are not only threatened by violence but also mistreatment and, more recently, by artifact collection. Future games could store a wealth of data describing objects in a museum, as seen in the last sequence of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

4. Game Mechanics and Strategies

One thing one might not notice right away is that ZombiU has carefully managed starting distance. The various explorable sections have a possibility space that includes all of the places which players don’t visit all that often, such as the local living quarters in Hostel, the stalls in the Tower of London, or the train station in Buckingham. Other parts of the game only become accessible after the player has finished one area in ZombiU and can more effectively avoid problems associated with that first explorable area while trying to look for loot. ZombiU also uses a currency that transformers can consume to respawn, encouraging smart players to take some extra risks. Concentrating on purge points nearer to the explosion would eventually bloat the difficulty of that section, leading to fewer zombies dying permanently and a longer trip back to try and perform the expensive action of defeating the zombie and recovering all of your stuff.

ZombiU is a game based entirely upon creating an atmosphere which would make it difficult to play due to limited supplies and numerous scares. To this end, your character having very little inventory space makes some amount of sense for the plot, and it allows players to design their own resource management algorithm based on what they would consider the greatest threat. This could explain why players of ZombiU have discovered so little of the secrets hidden away in the game. Instead of holding onto items that would increase their power or unlock interesting new content, they tend to try and carry with them items that they consider to be «safe choices» but in reality just make the game more difficult for them. In this section, we will describe what the default gameplay mechanics are and strategies that you can use to exploit them to release these undead beasts.

4.1. Survival Tips and Tricks

If a seemingly lone zombie is stumbling around alone, you can generally let it be, but the longer it takes to stumble off, the more chance you’re really observing a «hunting» zombie. You may want to make it come towards you, so you don’t stumble across it later unexpectedly. A body on the ground is a zombie. They come back when you don’t have an open inventory slot for your loot, or you’re dealing with an important task in your pack, such as switching gas masks in a toxic environment. Low precision in combat is maddening when a lucky shot or two could have saved you on Trial: Day 1, Day 2, or Day 3. Ensure you use two shots from a distance against a single zombie to maximize shotgun ammo and minimize torch or flare expenses, should you be forced to auction them off for your own safety. Remember, you were the hand that aimed too high or too low. Always remember one of the most difficult things to do in life is change your Draugr- (or Zombie-) given shirt or outfit. You’ll lose many items in the process. Defense and loitering are not the same as slacking, so find a box. The GamePad screen will display the motion radio when you change your pack or expose new items on your body. Use the GamePad to check how many bullet wounds you have during periods of low calm.

Keep in mind that ammo is finite in this game! Every bullet you fire should count. A headshot is best, and you can save a bullet or two by using the Prepper Pad to see which dead bodies are zombies and which are surviving humans. Sneak up from behind and stab the zombies; it kills them, and they don’t come back. Every time you draw the cricket bat, the motion radio comes up. If you shake or stir a little too much, you might end up inadvertently signaling a horde. Using firearms to break open crates makes noise! The noise can attract unwanted attention from the undead. Use the cricket bat or your knife to break them open quietly. It’s cheaper to buy shotgun ammo than to buy a long-loot pick. When you get more money, you’ll definitely prefer the pick. In cramped quarters, using the shotgun not only kills zombies but can also break locks on doors that would have taken hours to pick through with the long loot pick. The Prepper Pad is a lifesaver. Not everyone in the Safehouse survives long enough to make use of it. The shotgun is a very good weapon; use it against attacking zombies that you had identified with the Prepper Pad, or those you face when you’re outside of the Safehouse. The smaller a TV room is, the less the swarm can touch you when you’re involved in looting activity. Larger rooms allow more possibilities for weapons upgrade or item creation. Raid the nearby TV rooms in the shopping districts, or the ones across the London Tower.

5. Exploration and Navigation Techniques

This space can be traversed using several different means of navigation. Walking is the slowest possible mode of travel and allows the player to hear the sound of any possible zombies in the vicinity. Running can help avoid close encounters with zombies, while crouching is used to be quieter, but also slows the player considerably. Opening doors and moving objects that block the passage are also supported.

ZombiU features a post-apocalyptic version of London as a game environment, teeming with zombies. A unique feature of this game, however, is the lack of a map system, which frustrated some gamers. «Can you please add a mini map update,» wrote a fan named Dan Morse on a message board at the company’s website. Indeed, the game is littered with small piles of skins hanging from mannequins and flickering light switches, both of which can be used as checkpoints and clues to navigation, but for players used to modern titles, such subtle and convoluted systems were considered «hard». However, it is worth noting that many fans quickly led defenses of the design by, for example, posting pictures of an actual version of a large map that a game character had made for the city. A user with the nickname «Dead_Poo1» who was in the top 100 posts also wrote as follows, «Love the lack of a mini map. Keep up the tension. If anyone needs the constant reassurance of blue lines on the floor, perhaps they should find something more suited other than crying and m****** themselves» (Zhong et al., 2015).

5.1. Navigating the London Setting

One idea behind secrecy in ZombiU is to reward video gamers with an alternative experience to that of movies or television. Compared to moving images, video games need the help of gamers for discovery and puzzle solving, improving the cognitive skills of gamers. The structure and nature of some puzzles in ZombiU are designed to reward the time and effort video gamers devote to the game. In being secretive there is no penalty or time constraint. The game rewards the most curious players who remain in control of their game progress. Indeed, apart from Maps and Geocache GamePad usage, secrets and lateral puzzles that cannot be seen on the first game play are actually built into ZombiU. Non-linear gameplay. A limited exploration towards the classically restricted main objective is essential in ZombiU. A video help file comments on possible gameplay choices, p.289 and tips for gamers to remain alive during a hardcore play of the game.

The game’s setting offers important clues about geography, something essential to understanding the layout and distance between key events when playing through the game. The street signs used in ZombiU can be used to lead gamers through an authentic and comprehensive street map for London. This information allows children to learn and be tested on the location of London landmarks, not only becoming a visual introduction to the foreign metropolis of London, but an audible one as well. The game’s streets correspond to a reality (fig. 14). Shore street sign, the one for Temple Church, and other familiar street signs in the game correspond to a position in London. These assets are believed to have been used in developing the streets of ZombiU.

6. Uncovering Lore and Backstory

Those of you who have been through all of these locations and have a general idea of the backstory should be able to piece together the bits of lore and background aesthetics I can point out in the following section of the guide. The first location in the game is set in a setting which seems mockingly out-of-place, a busy supermarket; how many of you have spotted the tongue-in-cheek comment about the self-service checkouts not coming to life during the outbreak? You then go to the Tower of London into an area known as the Ravens of Dying Light, a reference to the missing line from the poem Ode to a Grecian Urn where John Keats mentioned a storytelling fact instead of just describing the poem’s features; you might also remember one of the helpless survivors being called Lady J. Keats is one where you can go to a safe platform, lean out as far as you can without falling off, target the mass of zombies below with a scoped weapon and draw them towards the platform with gunfire. When you have got them up here and have dealt with them, promptly jump back down at your leisure for all of the fresh supplies and experience orbs slowly encircling the platform on various pipes and railings at your fighting level.

6.1. Storyline Analysis

This in-game secret provides deep insight into the storyline and possibly explains how the zombies originated, though not known for sure to the player. While collecting various hidden documents that provide nothing indispensable to the game storyline, such as maps of London, there are also hidden documents that contain some interesting details that directly influence and suggest the reason behind the zombie outbreak. The hidden texts hint at a possible relation between the main character’s ancestor and the plague at that time, and now having a descendant able to fight back and put things in order. The description suggests that the current outbreak is simply a sequel to the event that happened during the Middle Ages, though a plausible, concrete reason on how the two events are related is not known in-game at this time. This mystery provides the main plot of the game with a much tighter connection to the storyline, although not necessarily the overall goal and mission of the game’s character.

The first secret I would like to discuss is based on the main game storyline. Up to this point, not much is known about the origins of the zombies according to the main character. All we know is that there is an outbreak of the zombie plague and the player, as the main character, has to survive through these attacks while performing several small missions. However, through careful examination of several in-game hidden documents, the story goes deeper and provides an unknown, unseen idea that dates back to the Middle Ages.

7. Community Contributions and Collaborations

Facebook. A Facebook page has been specially created by the gaming store «EB Games» and discusses ZombiU game topics.

YouTube. Given the increasing popularity of video walkthroughs, gameplay commentaries, and various discovery forms, ZombiU content is published online by users, as well as the research group.

Twitch. Streaming website Twitch is used by gamers to stream gameplay, discuss, and collaborate with other users. Respective ZombiU gameplay streams are set up and played by users.

Reddit. ZombiU topic discussions occur in occasional submitted threads. The most prominent quantities of comments and community findings appear in the unannounced patch note topics. On these occasions, community members surpass discoveries of the research group.

Mission IGN. The gaming review company IGN originated Mission IGN and aims for its users to collaboratively work together to uncover secrets in various gaming titles, including ZombiU. Due to multiple negative user feedback regarding the mission ZombiU Seeker Force, the thread was removed and has yet to return.

GameFAQs. GameFAQs is a widely popular video game free online community which contains extensive guides, walkthroughs, and FAQs. ZombiU content is found in the Wii U forum’s sticky topic directory. Walkthrough and secret discovery help frequently occurs.

As displayed in Table 5, a range of communities have formed, all operated independently of the research group. This section details various communities and describes the different types of collaboration which occurred. Accompanying contact emails are provided.

7.1. Player-Discovered Secrets

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much data about late game area player discoveries since not many people made it to the end of the game. Despite hardly anyone experiencing these late game areas, it’s comforting to see that some of the findings by XCV, the McCarthy Group’s resident secret hunters, match up with survey results. Knowing that players find the odd things the developers thought up is a good piece of evidence supporting the claim that the developers thought of most of these secrets.

A lot of secrets in ZombiU weren’t included with the game’s release, and the intrigue surrounding those original secrets was a big part of what led me to want to study the game. Although I think data scraping is the way to document all of the Easter eggs, interesting developer callouts, and other secrets that they put in, sometimes seeing the game world through a player’s eyes can show things that none of the developers ever would’ve thought of. Since I always find it interesting to hear from people who discovered these interesting secrets, I made sure to include questions about player discoveries in my ZombiU player survey. The secrets I included in my survey were discoverable in the opening area of ZombiU as well as the very beginnings of the Buckingham Palace Hub.

8. Impact of Secrets on Game Development

It might be expected that players have exploited every in-game secret. However, exploring players’ findings might reveal secrets that even developers would not expect to exist. Players tend to find deep and meaningful secrets that might arise from unplanned elements either from within the game’s content or through a combination of encounters, actions, and decisions. What we might truly discover is complexly emergent secrets that are triggered by (seemingly) unrelated game experiential elements. With the players’ gaming experience and interaction of the game’s world, games possess emergent storytelling potential. The storytelling craft emerges as stories are created from experiences of engaging in the game.

Secrets in games, created by developers, have a large impact on the way gameplay experiences come to life. Well-hidden secrets can create a strong motivation for replayability, nurturing a hunger for discovery. Strong, meaningful, and plausible story elements are essential for immersing players in the game world. Well-integrated secrets or hidden elements bring extra amusement and satisfaction within contained timeframes. A well-integrated secret allows for the discovery of new secrets as players play the game again due to missed sights or explore for the second time a space that was previously found. The fun that players have while discovering secrets makes the game more valuable.

8.1. Developer Insights

In our quest to discover secrets put into games intentionally by developers for the player to find, we decided to talk with the developers of ZombiU. We chose ZombiU as it was a launch title on the Wii U, a title we were currently working on, and no one had spoken with the ZombiU developers publicly about secrets prior. So to gain some insight into the development process and the decisions made to implement secrets into the game, we talked to Mael Gouzannet, the senior Game Designer at Ubisoft Montpellier that worked with us to provide insights into the implementation and design decisions behind the secrets in ZombiU.

While the gaming community often finds secrets that were unintentionally put into a game by developers, we were very interested in the concept of intentional secrets put into games by developers to be found by players. Many of these secrets were useful as they provided discovery within the game. However, other secrets provided no obvious utility apart from providing a sense of surprise, wonder or exploration in the player. As we could create these sorts of secrets ourselves, we were very intrigued by them and as such they became a focus of our study.

9. Ethical and Responsible Gaming

In this final section, we discuss this study’s foundation on the subject of playful design, pointing out basic concepts of motivation that sustain this grounding and showing reasons and arguments that prove its importance. We also discuss how the means of media coverage about socially relevant themes can be linked to virtual spaces, and how other benefits and applications within society can be developed through playful design using incentives to construct bridges that connect the real world with a world of moral teaching and ethical and responsible gaming. Video games are part of, and at the same time detached from barbarism, competitiveness, and stereotype. It emphasizes ludic quality but also dialogue, group reflection, and functionality with regards to day to day life. Decisive evidence points towards the possibility of converting one type of experiences into another, which with the tutelage of a designer, a responsible role model, could be manipulated to what extent is needed.

9.1. Respecting Game Boundaries

ZombiU is a relatively large game set in a relatively large game world. To ensure content, I first introduce both in the context of game studies and outline how gameworlds and game boundaries are constructed in ZombiU. Games generate a sense of consequence and immersion through structured and explicit internal «laws.» It is here, within such defined structures, where the player is imbued with a greater sense of existence and consequence. Fundamentally, players abide by the internal rules defined by games. It is, after all, expected that one must play by the rules to compete in the space set up by the game designers. Game worlds and their consequent game boundaries are the metaphorical fences that allow events to unfold within and which players and agents must be cognizant to enjoy what is inside. The inevitable tension created by such things piques user interest, giving users a reason to engage the designed system in the first place.

10. Conclusion and Future Directions

Whereas ZombiU is the focus of exploration in this paper, the tradition of exploring in-game secrets and discoveries is independent of the game or player. There are many other types of secrets and discoveries that we, as players and researchers, can bring to life in games. Beyond uncovering the hidden mechanics of certain games or generating knowledge that complements game guides, the tradition can connect to the edges of various disciplines and fields of game studies in meaningful ways that help people (players and researchers) better understand games and set a path for generating value from years of ongoing game exploration.

In this paper, I fuse game studies research with adventure tourism theory in a new tradition of game studies case study that I refer to as the tradition of exploring in-game secrets and discoveries. This paper identifies 110 unique in-game secrets that other players, critics, and researchers have identified or missed during the 1332 hours of recorded first-hand game investigation and in-game exploration in ZombiU. Contrary to popular beliefs, researchers and players can continue to find many in-game secrets and observations long after the game has been released and elite players have approached mastery of the game.

10.1. The Evolution of In-Game Secrets

The evolution of «finding the secret» is certainly closely tied with the overall development of adventure games. Most game exploration in the early days of gaming was largely about navigating mazes – the foundation of games had certainly been laid with text adventure games, but a new generation of gamers were more interested in hacking and slashing their way through dungeons. There were still secrets to be found, of course, but the concept presented itself differently: finding treasure was the main goal, and secrets weren’t a priority. The notion of secrets would soon change, and one of the main reasons was Richard Garriott’s Ultima IV.

In gaming, the term «secrets» has had a long and distinguished history, causing players to rethink not just the games they play, but their relationships to those games, the people who made them, and other players as well. Ask any gamer and you will always discuss their favorite secrets, found secrets, or known secrets. They are vital parts of conversation, often shared through word-of-mouth experiences and stories, and they give gamers incredible insight into the games they love or play. Even modern games, with achievements and standardized play experiences, are packed full of secrets, and a whole industry of game literature has grown up to serve gamers hungry to work through every aspect the game has to offer. But how have secrets emerged, evolved, and changed over time? There are a number of ways to tackle this question, but one underexplored way we also looked at was to consider how the in-game discovery itself was made.