Has anyone been watching Day Z on stream? [View all]

I just ran into this recently, but it's been around for a while. It's a mod ultimately based upon Arma II, eventually to be released as a standalone game, perhaps next year. Server keys for the latest mods are apparently extremely difficult to acquire, so I don't think the average joe can really play it yet.

But it's already attracting an impressive audience on twitch.tv, often landing it on the front page.

Day Z is an open-world zombie apocalypse RPG, with some very interesting twists.

First, it's what we old-timers called hardcore--one life only for your character. The younger folks are calling this type of setup YOLO, for "you only live once."

Second, there is no reliable way to ally with anyone in the game. There is no way to prevent another player from turning on you and killing you at any time and stealing your hard-earned loot. Yet, with cooperation, players can repair vehicles and helicopters and use team tactics to hunt other people and steal their shit--which is where the real action is.

Third, the game is a sim, so your character has to eat, drink, fight off zombie infection, bandage wounds and replace lost blood. The game does not pause while looting or rummaging around in your backpack for painkillers. Audio chatter between you and your friends within the game can be audible to other players. Failing to maintain health, tend to wounds, hydrate and eat, or manage pain results in different and realistic effects, like blurred vision or shaking while trying to aim. Zombies are common and relentless in pursuit, if a little buggy and dumb right now (yes, dumb for a zombie dumb). But nobody cares about the zombies--players merely use their location and movement to identify the location of other players.

The fellow who conceived the mod and met with such unexpected success based much of the game's totally unforgiving difficulty on his own experiences as a soldier who was injured deep in the jungle while training. So the game starts off hard, and then gets harder as the player begins to succumb to injuries, infection, starvation, pain and thirst. Boredom plays a role, too. Just as real combat veterans describe life in wartime, there can be long periods of boredom unexpectedly interrupted by short, vicious combat.

The social aspects of the game have quickly grown... unsettling. Tenuous and paranoid relationships are forged between real-world players, and broken. Streamers are often tracked down and assassinated, then their viewers help track down the assassins when the character respawns as a new character. Vehicles from helicopters to bicycles are laid out as bait for the unwary, and the places where people gravitate in search of loot and game, like an air force base, are death traps. Nobody really trusts anyone, but they still need each other to survive.

As one example, last night I watched a group of four guys, thinking they had killed off everyone else nearby on the server, decide to rile up a huge herd of zombies at the air base facilities in order to kill them and hopefully scare up some gear and medical supplies from their bodies (they were all injured from previous encounters I did not see). Unknown to them or the viewers, two other players had moved in on opposite sides of the airport. Those guys weren't working together, but both were waiting for the zombies to chase the group I was watching to the top of a building, and then snipe them as they took an outside ladder back down.

One of the four died to the zombies. The other three, running low on ammo, began their escape down the ladder. One of the snipers shot at the group, and revealed his position to the other sniper on the far end of the field, who killed the first sniper and confused the hell out of everyone. The group went after the position of the dead sniper while the other escaped, and the zombies tore up a second group member badly enough that it was impossible to save him. So that player bravely spent his last moments trying to attract the attention of the zombies while the other two guys beat a retreat. And then they went hunting for the other sniper, which is when I went to bed. That of course is a reconstruction of what I think happened, and like real combat witnesses, it's certainly wrong in some of the details.

Day Z is the darkest, most ruthless game I have ever seen, and I'm having a ball watching it. But I have already promised myself that I'll never play it--I think it is inevitable that the press is going to zero in on Day Z as a game that provokes real-world violence, and for once they might be right, because people who have invested hours of time in accruing all the materials they need to survive are going to be pissed when someone finally gets 'em.