An average day in the life of a DayZ survivor is grim and depressing. Trudging from house to house in an isolated Eastern European locale, searching for a meager can of spaghetti to eat cold and a steak knife to slash at the aggressive infected with. Running (but not for too long) to get out of the rain so all your lovely worn clothing doesn’t turn into a ratty wet dishcloth. Managing all that only to realize you’re suddenly in the middle of a forest with no idea where to go next, and you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, and wet. All you can do is trudge on a bit further in the hope of finding something, anything, to help.
At last, you find a place with some goodies to eat and drink; you discover a bandage after punching an infected to death (because you broke your knife trying to gather wood), and you find a lovely fireplace to get yourself warm at and dry those sodden clothes.
Then some bloke pops in, having seen the smoke from your fire, and decides that conversation is overrated. So he pops you in the head with his rusty rifle before you can utter, ”Please, don’t…”. At least you can take solace in the fact he’s making good use of your corpse by crafting rope from your guts. That version of you will live on as part of a handcrafted backpack carrying what little gear they robbed from you.
Yes, DayZ’s world is grim and seemingly pointless if you’re looking for some grand objective. The only steadfast mission here is simple: survive.
In DayZ’s three colossal official maps (Chernaus, Livonia, and the incredibly icy Sakhal), the backstory is the same. You awaken on the outskirts of a place taken by a mysterious virus that turned people into hostile monsters. You have extremely limited supplies, threadbare clothes, and a pressing need to rectify that.
If that wasn’t enough of a spanner in the works, DayZ is an MMO game, so you’re sharing the map with up to 59 other folks, all at different parts of their survival journey. Survival is the name of the game, but DayZ’s systems and player interaction often turn it into a role-playing game. The scenario I described at the start of the article is just one of many ways any encounter with others can go in DayZ.
I’ve played numerous MMO-based games across various genres, and the common thread is hostility and competition. Now, despite what media regarding post-apocalyptic worlds have been telling us for the last 20 years or so ad nauseam, DayZ has featured some of the most wholesome random encounters with strangers on the internet I’ve ever come across. Don’t worry; people can be heartless, toxic, murderous, flesh-eating bastards, too, so it’s no grimy utopia. But the shared understanding of how bleak and uncaring DayZ can be bonds people, even if it is just for a fleeting few minutes. A positive encounter can be as simple as a shared fire on a wet and windy night or a few supplies handed over as you pass each other in a town.
Just One of Those DayZ
The most exciting emergent moments, though, are when a random encounter turns into a multi-hour team-up where you decide to build a base, take out highly-powered threats together, and make daring runs to the most dangerous places on the map.
Maybe you form a new friendship at that moment, or perhaps you never see that person again after they get snuffed out by another survivor sniping them from the woods. Deliciously, things might not end as straightforwardly as that. Maybe they betray you as supplies dwindle, or you’re the perpetrator instead.
Video games, movies, and television have all tackled the ‘zombie’ apocalypse scenario with a familiar theme of ‘the real monster is man’ (not that we need that scenario to let us know that these days), and sure, DayZ is a part of that, but it so hones in on the idea of survival at all costs that it inverts the usual dynamic of a PvPvE game and produces almost defiant acts of kindness and brotherhood. As with reality, you get the resource-rich and poor alike attacking others out of greed, ignorance, and spite, but they are an understood and accepted part of this world. You plan for that.
Learning to trust people in a hostile world can be hard. However, the rewards are rarely as rich as they can be in DayZ.
