Dystopian Daze
The real horror of DayZ? It’s you.
I am an Asian man in a pair of grey cargo pants sat under an electricity pylon, staring out over a small town while I bleed to death. Soon I will lapse into unconsciousness and die. When I do, it will conclude my first attempt at living in Chernarus. Total survival time: two hours.
To call DayZ a game would be a dis-service. At a glance, yes, it bears the hallmarks of a hundred other survival horror shooters: being as you are a lone player trapped in a desolate island populated mostly by zombies and discarded weapons. Arriving hungry and thirsty on the shoreline, holding nothing but a small torch, you must wander through abandoned towns and homesteads, gathering food, water, supplies, and if you’re very fortunate, a functioning weapon.
DayZ’s crucial difference lies in its utterly unforgiving gameplay. Food is scarce and what is discovered is often rotten. Water sources can be contaminated. Medical supplies must be sought out. Want a map of the level? Better hope you find one on the floor somewhere. Infections occur. Bones break from falls. Shock and cold will deplete you. Cans of food are useless until you find the means to open them. None of which will matter unless you can find a backpack or jacket with pockets to hold these items.
What really sets DayZ apart though is the lack of a save function. Your progress is paused each time you log out of the servers, and you return exactly where you left off. But once you are killed in Chernarus, you go back to square one: on the shore, near naked, cold and hungry. No prizes for your efforts. No rewards, no achievements unlocked, no karma, no XP, no flair. No roster of top players, no measure of time spent in game. Everything can be lost in an instant, and in Chernarus it quite often is.
This inherent risk lends itself to a painstakingly slow and careful form of ‘play’. On my first playthrough of DayZ, I crept through the darkness (yes, it gets dark in Chernarus, and if there’s no moon, you won’t see any further than the few feet of light your pocket torch throws) gradually gathering cans of food and soda. Long periods were spent wandering through neglected fields, simply looking for houses to ransack. My existence consisted of 98% tedium and 2% sheer terror, courtesy of buggy zombies that phased through walls to attack me. After too many encounters with these zombies, I ran out of bandages, and climbed a hill to enjoy the view while the life ran out of me.
On reflection, these were the halcyon days.
Were it not for human players, my time in Chernarus would exist in some kind of zen-like immersion. The aesthetics of the island, the post-industrialist Soviet decay that owes much to STALKER (itself a homage to the Tarkovsky film of the same name) is the perfect salve to the hyperkinetic activity of something like Bioshock. Grass and concrete are the modern psycho-geographic null points, ubiquitous and non-descript, and Chernarus has them in plenty. The entire world exists like some kind of depopulated half-memory of my daily world.
But I am not alone in Chernarus. Every server teems with other human players. They, like you, begin hungry and desperate. Despite having an open mic system in built to facilitate communication, and a plethora of mute gestures your character can perform, interactions are more likely to be scored by gunfire than conversation. Because despite the arduously slow gameplay — or perhaps because of it — most players opt to progress as a bandit preying on other players than to forage for themselves. I’ve yet to experience a single interaction with an armed human player in DayZ that did not result in an attempt on my life.
Aggression in DayZ is mercilessly brief. A single strike from an axe will incapacitate you. A single gunshot will kill you. Death comes easy. By contrast, your kills will go unpunished. There is no record of your sins. There isn’t even a way to know who killed who. Unlike other game systems which monitor your actions, God is not watching over Chernarus.
On this stage set by DayZ’s creators — one which features a total lack of any kind of social system for policing behaviour — players debase to utter ruthlessness in no time at all. As one quip goes: in DayZ, you either die a hitchhiker, or live long enough to become a serial killer preying on hitchhikers. So far, I have yet to kill another human player. I’d like to keep that record, if only because it drives a better experience. Surviving Chernarus is relatively easy — disappear into the woods, raid remote farmhouses for food, live a quiet solitary life. The true thrill is betting several hours of hard-scrounged supplies on an encounter with another player.
As such, DayZ operates as a kind of grand, mass deployment of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Working together, two players can triumph faster than they can alone. But at any moment, one may decide that it is easier to kill the other and rob him. And once the other player realises this, the only sensible option is to make the first strike.
In Chernarus, with no karmic system, players are freed to act mercilessly in their own self-interest. What little co-operation exists — gangs of marauders and bandits steamrolling through to the choicest locations — seems to arise from outside the game system, as groups of friends agree to convene on a particular server at a particular time. Organising an ad-hoc alliance within the game without serious peace-keeping firepower at your disposal is a nigh-on impossible challenge.
I think this makes DayZ perhaps the most dystopian game I’ve yet played. That is a term that gets bandied about a lot, attached (incorrectly) to every game set in a post-apocalyptic world. And while the creators of Bioshock and Deus Ex crafted dystopian landscapes in which to set their narratives, the story arcs were nonetheless heroic ones: you struggle, you gain power, you triumph. In both, the denoument of the storyline was a subversion of the hero tale, but the underlying mechanics of gameplay to that point were inherently fair. Good play was rewarded. Objectives were clear. Possessions were multiplied. Rules had to be obeyed.
DayZ, by contrast, offers nothing except a landscape and a host of human players. There is no inherent reason why everyone on the island could not collaborate, live peacefully, share resources which are, after all, infinite. There are no points awarded for killing others, it’s certainly not the objective of the game. The dystopia of DayZ is not inherent in the game: it is an emergent property of the players. Make no mistake, anyone who thinks our eventual zombie apocalypse will be fun: in a world where there are no consequences for our actions, we humans will happily kill each other for a can of beans.
