I’ve been trying to get back into Zombies, Run! lately. I don’t actually run from the zombies, persay, but against zombies a brisk walking pace is your best defense – and in the case of Zombies, Run! (or its new name with less confusing punctuation ZRX) the entire point is just to get moving.

If you’ve never heard of ZRX, it’s a pretty unique kind of fitness app/game. Where the usual formula for the dozen odd other ‘gamified fitness’ experiences I’ve tried – other than the Niantic titles – has been ‘walk to earn points towards actually playing a game’, ZRX blends gameplay into the experience of running or walking through the real world. It also does this without requiring you to walk around with your phone held up to your face.

The main gameplay and story of Zombies, Run! comes in the form of audio clips. You start the game by choosing an episode and listening to an introduction. In that clip, someone in a radio tower tells you about your upcoming mission as a runner for a settlement in a zombie-apocalypse scenario. You hear sirens, the gates on your settlement rise, and it’s time to start your run.

Over the course of the mission you get other broadcasts from the fictional radio tower, telling you about the places you’re supposedly visiting and less staticky messages from other people you meet along the way. If you’re an interval runner, you might even get alerts that swarms of the undead are on your heels and you need to speed up to outrun them. In the meantime, you get to listen to a post-apocalyptic radio station that contently plays your favourite songs (through a playlist or streaming app of your choice on your phone). Your progress is tracked by a timer, step counter, or GPS, and you’re cued into that progress at regular intervals through audio messages.

In this way, ZRX presents you with what I’d call an audio game. There’s a base-building component involved between missions, but the majority of the gameplay comes through your headphones and your physical movements in the real world.

It’s a unique experience as compared to most games that rely heavily on visuals and written text, and one well worth trying out if you’re the type (or want to be the type) to go running or walking on a regular basis. There aren’t many things that can make a person run like the shambling dead – whether out of fear or for entertainment. That said, since their rebrand to ZRX, the app has expanded to include a lot of stories in less horror-oriented worlds with Marvel-themed stories and more original works.

Checking out those new audio-game experiences might be enough to get me walking for my exercise – at least when I can pry myself away from BeatSaber now and again.

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I’m pretty sure “content” ought to be considered a slur.

To be clear, I’m talking about the word when it’s used in the context of “content creator” – a term which now seems to apply to anyone who creates anything to be shared anywhere on the internet. That includes writers, artists, vloggers, musicians, streamers, academics, and shit-posters; all under one label.

Am I irked by these different subjects being treated equally in linguistic terms? No. They’re all different fields with different audiences and different fans. Lots of overlap, I’m sure, but the main point I’m trying to make here is that each topic, each medium, and each creator is an individual, and those individuals are making things that are unique and interesting in their own ways, in their own rights.

I’m irked that we call it all content.

Content, in ye-olde pre-internet English, is thusly defined:

Noun
content

1. Something contained —usually used in plural
2. The topics or matter treated in a written works

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/content

The more recent usage, I’m pretty sure, comes from the ‘content’ of a video, or the ‘content’ of a specific post, but whenever I hear the word that isn’t the way it comes across. It comes across as being the content of the social sites. When someone is called a “content creator” what I hear in the word is person who makes the content of <insert social media site here.>

To the modern consciousness, you are not an artist. You aren’t a writer. You aren’t a filmmaker, or a journalist – you make content. You make filler to stick into YouTube and Twitter and AO3 and Instagram. You make stuff so unimportant they can’t bother to check what it is you’re making as they scroll by. It’s not a word that celebrates your work the same way as any of those older terms, it devalues and anonymizes creators until they’re unimportant cogs in the social-media machine.

I don’t like it. I’ve decided for myself that I won’t use it.

If you want to define a creative by their work, mention the work. Don’t disparage it by calling it shovel-ware content.

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