When Adam Ruch was kidnapped at gunpoint while playing DayZ, his first thought was to quit the game. But he chose to stick with it, and then took to Twitter. "I am currently surrounded by about 5 guys with military weapons telling me that I'm their slave," he tweeted. "This is bizarre. They're making me pose for a photo." Before a sniper hiding in the bushes killed them, his captors – who were polite to him throughout – made him carry out dangerous scouting missions in return for scraps of food. Ruch, a games researcher at Qantm College in Sydney, Australia, says it was one of the most authentic social interactions that he had ever experienced in a video game.
DayZ is a game about surviving on an island full of zombies. First cobbled together in 2012 by a single developer in his spare time, it is a modification of an existing game, the military first-person shooter (FPS) ARMA 2. It has no missions, no scripted events, and is unusually strict in that dying means you have to restart the game from scratch. But the lack of a set narrative and the heightened investment that players have in their characters have produced some of the most emotionally charged experiences in gaming. And unlike most mainstream games – such as the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series – DayZ is so open-ended that players are forced to deal with the consequences of their choices.
This week Rockstar released the free online multiplayer extension to Grand Theft Auto 5, allowing up to 16 players to run amok at once, racing down highways, playing tennis and updating Lifeinvader, the social network of the fictional city where the action is set. The game is the height of big-budget world-building, a playground where the thrill is that actions have no consequences for their perpetrators.
Staying alive
DayZ is different. Its creator, Dean Hall, had the idea for it while doing survival training in Brunei with the New Zealand army. What DayZ lacks in environmental detail, it makes up for in the authenticity of its simulation of trying to stay alive. Players start out unarmed and, with almost no food or equipment, must scrounge what they can by exploring abandoned buildings or stealing from other players. You can easily break bones, go into shock or fall unconscious from loss of blood. To make the desperate situation worse, when your character dies you can only restart the game with nothing that you earned in the previous attempt. "You really don't want to die in DayZ," says Ruch.
Until now, death in games has simply been a metaphor for failure, says Marcus Carter at the University of Melbourne, Australia. "But we're beginning to see games that are using this metaphor in ways that explore moral choice and issues of culpability."
Carter and Martin Gibbs, also at the University of Melbourne, have been studying the social interactions between players in DayZ, looking at game logs, forum posts and videos posted online. "The consequences of dying add to the experience of players' interaction with each other," says Gibbs. "By playing this game we can explore those questions of survival, trust and betrayal in a society that has lost the rule of law."
In one video, for example, two players try to decide whether or not to shoot a third approaching in the distance. "Please turn around, please turn around," one of them says. But the third player keeps approaching, they shoot, and then they talk through their guilt. "I didn't want to shoot them." "Me either! But you know what happens when we don't shoot first."
Moral anguish
Most FPS games reward fast reactions, not moral deliberation. But Carter thinks that the consequence of killing another player in DayZ – restarting their game from scratch – can invoke genuine moral anguish. "This is really exciting to see," he says. "And a real testament to the growing maturity of video game design."
The high price of death in the game also means that players often would prefer to surrender their possessions or freedom rather than be killed. This can lead to spontaneous interactions when players meet in the game, such as muggings and kidnappings. But often players also wander through the game looking for wounded people to heal.
"The way in which death has been designed in most mainstream games, particularly the FPS genre, has devalued lives in games," says Carter. "What DayZ demonstrates is that if you put this value back, you can create some really deep and meaningful emotional experiences that are evidently attractive to players." Last weekend he was at the Interactive Entertainment conference in Melbourne, Australia, to present the results of the study he and Gibbs carried out.
Carter thinks the ideas behind DayZ could soon become more widespread. "We're going to start seeing a lot of other online games implementing similar systems," he says. For example, Hall is now working with a team of developers and bigger budget on a completely reworked version of the game, to be released next year. Mainstream games publisher Ubisoft says it wants to recreate the social interactions of DayZ in its forthcoming online FPS Tom Clancy's The Division.
Kill and be killed
"You should feel responsibility for what you're doing," says Leonard Ritter, an independent game developer based in Dresden, Germany. "But most games do not give you the option." Ritter wants to explore consequence in games even further. He is working on a title called Nowhere that aims to simulate complex social interactions between players and computer-controlled characters, showing players how their actions affect not only those characters but also future versions of themselves. The full game is not due for release until 2015, but early versions will be available next year.
Ritter got the idea when, while playing Grand Theft Auto 4, he was struck by how players played two types of game. Sometimes they would run around shooting people without thinking about the consequences; at other times, they would concentrate on achieving a strict objective. He wondered what would happen if your disruptive self suddenly showed up during a mission and shot you. "You would ruin your own game," says Ritter. "I thought that would be powerful."
