What DayZ is advertized as, and what it actually is are two different things. On its Steam store page for the game it is described as “open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game.” A mouthful, yes, but it fails to touch on the core engagement of DayZ. DayZ is, at its heart, a game about simulating human interactions in stressful situations. The game is advertised as being centered around killing zombies, but the zombies in the game are really more of an environmental hazard and indicator as opposed to being the central threat. Players fill the roll of apex predator.
Each player starts the game on a beach with approximately 25 square kilometers of fictional Eastern European countryside in front of them. There are small towns, castles, forests and three larger cities, along with a multitude of other locations scattered throughout the map. Initially, the objective of the game is to survive and it is this survival the forms the base motivation throughout play. There are several different character statistics that each player needs to remember, ranging from the obvious in food, water and health, to more unusual needs, like disease and temperature, the later being affected by how wet a player is, be it from rain or swimming.
Resources to help manage these statistics are found throughout the world in the various buildings, sheds, houses and, in one case, giant beached ship that populate the world. The loot found in each location is mostly randomized, with some locations and specific buildings being more likely to spawn different types of items. A house, for example, will usually have more food than a military barracks, which often houses weapons or military style clothing. The items found around the map all contribute, more or less, to the goal of survival. Food and water help with starvation and hydration. Clothes aid in camouflage, water and element resistance and storage of items. Weapons help, but never guarantee, defense against zombies and other players.
No matter how much gear and how skilled or lucky the player is, they will eventually, given enough play time, die. Death in DayZ can come from any number of directions, be it from failing or being unable to manage the various in game statistics or from just plain being shot. When death does come, unlike most other games on the market, there is no save to revert to or earlier character to fall back to. Death is death and you end up back to square one, sitting on the beach in your t-shirt and jeans. Some items can be preserved, either through stashing them throughout the world or through teammates recovering them off your body, but other than that death is quite a permanent affair and one that holds far greater consequences in game as compared to almost all other games available today.
DayZ is an unusual game in that it subverts many of the components that, according to Juul, are usually found or flat out required by games in general. Out of the six components that Juul references, three are bent or manipulated beyond the scope of most other games and a fourth is arguably altered as well. The gameplay concept that plays with these first three rules comes down to DayZ’s lack of a “win state” There is no way to win a game of DayZ.
The first of Juul’s rules to be impacted is the idea of fixed rules. Juul states that a game’s rules need to be “sufficiently well defined that you do not have to argue about them every time you play.” Most games follow this structure, both in single player and multiplayer titles. The win and loss conditions, as well as the rules of single player games are well laid out. You progress through the levels and win when you finish or loose, either in the moment where you reset and continue, or when you stop playing. Multiplayer player titles have similar outcomes, with the notable difference being that, within the discrete structure of the individual matches, there is usually a side that wins and a side that looses.
The exception to this would be challenge modes such as the zombies mode in some of the Call of Duty games. These modes give you progressively harder challenges, be it enemies or levels, that continue in perpetuity until a loss condition, usually death, is met. There is no direct way to win these types of games. The objective here, however, is unambiguous. Players are attempting to get a high score or to see how many levels they can get through. The ultimate win is not in the game, but in how well the player can do in relation to their friends and all the other players at large.
DayZ hold more in common with these challenge modes, save for a few key differences, the first being your objective. Challenge modes are all about that high score. The gameplay that happens in the interim is in service of the goal of a higher score. DayZ has no effective mechanism with which to show off time played in any meaningful way. The actual time in game on each character is, while the most obvious measurement, misleading. Because of the extensive diversity in activities in game, playing for four in game days as a hermit in the woods is very different in difficulty from someone raiding the towns and other areas where players congregate. A day in one style has inherently different challenges from a day spend in another place. Most games with challenge modes attempt to normalize the experience by narrowing the diversity of experiences and challenges to make in game metric, often the number of rounds survives or something similar, more meaningful.
There is one other difference between normal challenge mode games and DayZ and that is the challenge gradient. Most challenge or survival games, be it the Call of Duty mode mentioned earlier or other survival games such as Don’t Starve, often have an increasing difficulty as a function of time. Each round in CoD Zombies is harder than the last and Don’t Starve has seasons that increase the challenge overall, as well as harder enemies that spawn the longer you have been alive. DayZ lacks that time based challenge increase, instead opting for a geographically based system.
Certain areas of DayZ are more or less challenging, but this change in difficulty is not an inherent property of the game. Instead it is an emergent quality of the way loot and initial player spawns are distributed. Players are, by and far, the most deadly thing in the game and, because loot is unevenly distributed, players looking to get the best gear tend to congregate in the areas where that loot spawns. Adding to this pull for players, there is a push factor in that the new players are spawned on the coast which runs along the east and south sides of the map, mostly opposite from the high loot areas. This creates a gradient of players and player gear from the south-east to the north-west and reinforces the geographically oriented difficulty curve, as opposed to a round or time based system.
This all ties back into Juul’s idea of games requiring fixed rules. DayZ, because of the more emergent nature of the game, requires player interactions to drive change within the world. If every player sat in one place nothing in the world would change up until the players all died. The interactions between players are not defined and have no fixed rules; killing someone or helping someone are both equally acceptable actions and it is up to the players to set the rules surrounding their peer’s in game actions.
This human element also throws a wrench into Juul’s ideas of variable and quantifiable outcomes and the valorization of outcomes. DayZ has variable outcomes, that much is undeniable, but it lacks an effective way to quantify those outcomes. The previous examples used have a metric during and at the end of gameplay. There is a shorthand is non existent in DayZ. There is no good method to determine the “winner” or the best player of DayZ on a large scale. Even on a small scale, victory can be relative. A firefight or other engagement where the players are actually trying to kill each other can have many different outcomes, far beyond the normal win/loss/tie outcome so common in most other competitive games.
When engaging, players can, beyond the three basic outcomes, also disengage from combat, ending in both players living. Players can also mortally wound the other player, leaving them to die later from either other players or the environment. Players can also negotiate a truce and decide to trade instead of fighting. These examples don’t touch on the player motivation. Both players could win if one player is trying to kill other players but the other one is simply in the game to act out a part. Imbedded is a video of a player taking on the role of a slasher movie antagonist. If the “normal” player had simply shot the slasher player, both players would have completed their goals. If players operate under different motivations, the ability to quantify the outcomes cleanly becomes difficult, as well as the fact that the game, due to it not explicitly valorizing any outcome beyond survival, leaves the interpretation of victory up to the players. Almost all other games have, in any multiplayer situation, the players working together or against each other. DayZ offers a third perspective, where players act asymmetrically.
DayZ offers a counterpoint to Juul’s definition of a game. What are usually hard guidelines for the design of a game are subverted or disregarded in DayZ. The idea of player created goals and objectives, combined with a lack of direction from the game, leads to asymmetrical goals which subverts the ability to assign definitive values to the results of the game. It is this ambiguity that brings DayZ into conflict with Juul’s definitions, as well as giving DayZ a distinct form of gameplay and makes it a prime candidate for discussion in regards to gameplay, rules and player engagement.