Dean Hall's (AKA Rocket) popular Arma II mod, DayZ, made it's way into it's own standalone game about a month ago and has already sold over a million copies in it's Alpha stage. That's got to say something about the unique gameplay design, or the current demand for this type of sandbox.
Having extensively played the Arma II mod of DayZ, I could not wait to get my feet wet in the standalone. So I picked it up on launch day and have been playing it on and off since it's release. It's time-consuming, unforgiving and has a really high learning curve, but beyond that, it's wonderfully broken and fun.
However, being an Alpha, there is a lot of stuff not yet implemented in the game at this current stage, so if you're the type of person that enjoys going on an Easter-egg hunt for increasingly better loot, you're going to have a bad time. There is only a limited selection of items in the game and a lot of them have no actual usefulness at the moment.
Besides the lack of loot, there is also a scarcity of zombies in this game. Being a post-apocalyptic, zombie survival game, you would expect the zombies themselves to be abundant, but they are seldom found in huge, threatening packs and even so, they pose no actual threat as they are now. You can literally walk circles around them and they will not be able to hit you. Might as well change the zombie model to carrots, because they pose the same level of threat to you.
So, since the loot is limited and the zombies are broken, what is there really to be achieved at the end-game?
Well, the truth of it is that if you have the loot you want, you can either log off until new content has been added, or seek out player interactions. There's no incentive to keep exploring and there's no real timesink to be had when reaching end-game, like building bases or planting crops. However, that's not to say that the end-game is dead, since there is always banditry.
Banditry is a bit of a broad term, considering that everyone in the game classifies you as bandit, should you do something against them. For example, I don't consider people that kill players on sight bandits - they are murderers/psychopaths. In my books, a bandit is a person that approaches you, interacts with you and ultimately holds you up and takes your stuff or kills you. Some times, they make you drink disinfectant or eat rotten fruit and some times, they take your clothes and make you run from town to town naked, wearing only a pink hat - That's banditry.
This is what the end-game comes down to. You can either be nice to everyone, eat your beans like a fucking neanderthal with a screwdriver and die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a bandit. The game bottlenecks you into player interactions as your end-game reward, and without it, all you would do is end up searching buildings, looking for food and water while waiting for content patches to drop so you can rinse and repeat.
How can ruining another player's game experience be any fun?
Ruining? No, no, no. You got real bandits all wrong. We don't want to ruin your fun, we want to enhance it. We want to give you an experience that you'll be laughing about for days. Killing someone on sight can be considered shitting on someone's enjoyment, but holding them up and making them sing "I'm a little teapot" while shooting around his feet? That's an experience you're not going to forget. We don't even want to kill you. All we want is for you to entertain us, since there is no actual end-game but this.
All of this got me thinking, though. How does the way we play DayZ and interact with people in-game reflect on us as society? Since there is nobody to regulate rules or laws, it brings out our inner demons and enforces the idea that we are all inherently evil, just waiting for the opportunity. You can't trust anybody in DayZ any more and anybody is potentially an enemy. It's the Wild West, minus all the cool looking hats and Mexicans.
Maybe it's because the zombies are not really a threat and we don't actually need to work together to survive them? When we are the biggest predator in the game, it's very difficult for social cohesion to happen without a common threat or enemy figure. Perhaps when the zombies get fixed we will see some new type of social dynamics, where people will group up to help each other, instead of grouping up to kill each other.
Until then, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to hold you up, make you sing, feed you things that no person should be fed and ultimately make you my tap-dancing monkey, since it's the greatest form of enjoyment that I can currently derive from this game.
