DayZ

I am dead.

I am lying in an apartment block somewhere in Russia.

I was heading for the roof to have a look around. half way up the ladder I fell.

A glitch. A wrong push of the button. And two broken legs.

I crawled down for flights of stairs. I got all the  way to the door.

Two men approached, they were not there to help.they had guns.and they had bullets.

I am dead..                         

In my most successful and longest-running game of DayZ this is how it all came to close.

The game is still in its early beta so a great deal of things is going to change, hopefully.

The game does not feel complete yet. The game has not been very consistent the times I have played it. And it still suffers from untimely server crashes.

It is constantly getting improved and the things I find problematic might change in the final game.

It has all the seeds to be a great game.

The times I played it though I felt a bit like the undead I was trying to avoid. I couldn‘t quite figure out what or why I didn‘t enjoy the game I have been told was so great.

In this analysis I will try to explain why.

Analysis

 

I am going to use Calleja’ model of involvement in the analysis.

in it there is six types of involvement.

here follows a quick summary of the six types.

1:

Kinesthetic involvement

„freedom of action allowed and the difficulty of the learning curve of the controls involved as a major influence on the players involvement in the game environment“

2:

Spatial involvement

 „The spatial involvement concerns players engagement with the spatial qualities of the virtual environment in terms of spatial control navigation and exploration.“

It is also the process of internalizing the game space and giving players a sense of inhabiting the game world, basically a sense of place.

3:

Shared/social involvement

„The engagement derived from players awareness and interaction with other agents ... these agents can be human or computer controlled“

4:

Narrative involvement

„The engagement with story elements that have been written into again as well as those that emerge from player interaction with the game.“

5:

Affective involvement

„Encompasses various forms of emotional engagement that. Emotional engagement can range from the calming sensation of coming across an aesthetically pleasing space ... to the adrenaline rush of an competitive first-person shooter.“

6:

Ludic involvement

„players engagement with the choices made in the game and the repercussions of those choices.

the choices can be directed at the goal given by the game but also the goal decided by the player or a community of players.

it also encompasses choices made on the spur of the moment without relation to any overarching goal.“

Are you in the zombie apocalypse?

I‘m not sure I am. I‘m going to figure out why.

This is a prioritized list of the involvement types in DayZ.

It is subjective and based on my personal experience of the game.

My experience is limited to four sessions consisting of 3 to 4 hours of gameplay.

And as the game is still in beta my listing could change dramatically in the final game.

I will go through them one by one and explain why I have prioritized them as I have. Then I will see why and if the game failed to involve me.

Spatial involvement.

affective involvement

shared/social involvement

ludic involvement

narrative involvement

kinesthetic involvement

the first is

Spatial involvement:

The navigation and exploration is interesting in the game.

There is no mini map. If you find a map you can look at it, it does not tell you where you are so navigation is handled in a way like real life.

Navigation is hard you can easily be turned around so you have to look at the landmarks and signs. All the signs in Russian which complicates things even more.

A lot of the game have you exploring the countryside. the exploration is necessary for survival.

Your avatar needs to drink and eat. and scavenge useful materials and of course weapons. to defend himself from the undead and the other players.

The game engine makes the world look realistic or enough like the real world and that makes the navigation and exploration engaging. You can spot at building or maybe a crane in the distance and make your way to it. The buildings and the small towns are laid out in a familiar and recognizable pattern. We know how to navigate these things in real life and it makes the game space feel real.

It helps you internalize the game space and involve you in the game.

Some things does break your suspension of disbelief and makes the game feel very much like a game and one in beta at that.

You can walk into the house go through rooms, rummage through the kitchen, bookshelves, and take books and clothes and hopefully food.

Walk down the street into the next house and the interior is an exact copy of the other house.

When you have done this three of four times the houses doesn‘t seem like real places more like similar mystery boxes that can be filled with useful stuff on nothing at all.

A lot of doors in this part of Russia is locked for no apparent reason. Sometimes none of the entrances in the house work. Or maybe only one way in is viable.

In one of my game sessions I followed a road through the woods and apparently literally walked off the map. After running through empty and barren hills for 10 minutes. I walked back, all the way back to the forest and the game space.

You don‘t feel constrained, or at least I did, in your exploration of the game space. I did not realize I had walked off the map which can be seen as a boon and not a disadvantage to the spatial involvement.

I would have noticed if I had walked into and invisible barrier. but would have found it just as confusing. The game space seems real so it is only in the instances where it is not, that I realize how spatial involved I am.

Affective involvement:

It is by the same token the affective involvement is high up on my list.

The game‘s sense of place spills over into affect involvement. the sun on the hills, the insects and birds along with the sleepy seaside towns, the air field, factories and military bases.

It all adds emotional engagement. We know most of these things from real life and to see them abandoned with undead littered around brings the game alive.

There is also moments of adrenaline, when meeting a zombie without carrying a weapon. Or the moment when you meet another players avatar and you don‘t know whether they will be friend, or Foe.

that neatly brings us to

Shared/social involvement:

The interaction with other agents in the game is a huge of what the game is about.

In the zombie fiction the social aspect and group dynamics are important. people together fighting against the end of the world and each other.

In the game of DayZ it becomes part of the game.

The other players will want your stuff, or sometimes they will want to help you to increase their own and your chances of survival. I never met anyone who tried to help me.

Every meeting with another player was interesting, and a bit scary. I only met a group of people once, and they shot me immediately.

But all the other encounters and it would be running away with killing the other player which is not the most interesting outcomes.

The social aspect is a big part of the game as it is and will be an very important part of the final game.

It will be very engaging to survive in the game world with your friends. If you manage to find them.

The only other agents in the world are the undead. And every interaction with them are the same. You either fight them and die or survive or you can just run away.

But always know that the undead can pop up at any time. As long as you don‘t have a weapon that is scary and engaging but as soon as you get a moderately good weapon the thought of meeting a undead is nonproblematic, even trivial.

next is the

Ludic involvement:

Planning is also a big part of the game. The immediate problem that faces the player is getting food, water and a weapon.

Food can be found but it has not really to do with the choices you make. It comes down to blind luck.

The same can be said about water and weapons.

You can also survive for a long time without food and water.

The game does not give you any goals, really. And I never felt I had to make any really meaningful choices.

I just mostly wandered around. And that is not that interesting.

Next I put the:

Narrative involvement

There is no scripted narrative in the game.

It is possible to experience interesting moments in the game. And that can constitute a story, as is clear in my intro.

The spatial and affective involvement could also be experienced as a emergent narrative.

But most of the time when I have played the game, not enough interesting things have happened.

Nothing that could constitute a narrative, or an engaging one.

Lastly we have the:

Kinesthetic involvement

The kinesthetic involvement is not something I would highlight as positive. The game lets you do a wide range of things. But knowing exactly what button to press can be hard and frustrating to figure out. And mastering these controls is not something that would give not a huge amount of involvement or pleasure.

The controls are still clunky and being good at controlling your avatar will not give you a huge advantage against zombies or the other players.

Looking at the game in this way has helped me understand why I did not find the game very engaging.

I feel the gameplay is clunky and not really that engaging. Wandering around the Russian countryside while being hungry and thirsty, is about as much fun as it sounds.

The undead and the other inhabitants of the world should serve to make the experience more interesting. But the zombies is not something you need to plan for and are not that big of a threat.

And other players few and far between and I have always been able to run from them. Except when I broke both legs.

The game mechanics are still a bit difficult to figure out, it is not always clear what you can do and how. That will hopefully be fixed when the game actually comes out.

An End

What I found interesting and engaging was the game world itself. The world is realized very well it feels and looks real, trying to figure out where you are and where you can go and more important where you should go is the most engaging part of the game.

Looking at real map of the place I was walking around with my virtual counterpart was the part that gave me most pleasure.

Just trying to figure out where I was planning where to go.

And the desperate hope of reaching a far-flung part of the world to get that one piece of supply was what kept me going through the desolate and quite frankly boring Russian countryside.

Survive

Don’t Starve is a game about survival. It came out in 2013 and was made by Klei Entertainment. The goal is to not starve, of course. Well it’s harder than it sounds.

I’m huddled by a fire. In the dead of night. I ate some raw monster meat. That was bad for my stomach and my mental health. I might be going mad. I’m being hunted by some kind of demonic shadow hound.

It’s circling me. It’s is not shadow anymore, It is real. I ready my homemade spear. The Hound pounces.

I die.

That’s how I died in my longest running game of Don’t Starve. I survived for about two weeks.

The Game-structure, Game-world and Gameplay works together and underlines the theme and creates a real experience of survival.

This in a beautiful, odd and creepy world.

Don’t Starve is a really good game…

Don’t Starve

In the beginning of the game you can only play as Wilson the Gentleman Scientist. You unlock other characters the longer you survive.

When you start a game you wake up in a field with a man standing over you saying: “you better find something to eat before night comes”. That is the only information you get. Now it’s all a matter of surviving.

In the top right corner you have a clock counting down to evening and the night. It also tells you how many days you have survived thus far. There is also a counter showing your health, hunger and sanity.

In the bottom of the screen there is an inventory and a map. The map only shows what you have explored so far. In the beginning it’s a depressing sight filled almost exclusively with black.

There is a toolbar in the left side of the screen with different menus: tools, light, survival, science, fight and dress.

And that is all the information the game-world gives you. That’s a problem if you want to live… And that is one part that makes the game great.

Survival

Survival takes skill, knowledge and luck.

The gameplay doesn’t require much skill. The skills are represented by what you can craft. But you have to figure out what to craft and why.

The game doesn’t give you any knowledge about anything. You don’t know what things are good for what, you only know what can be used to craft things.

Luck is represented by the random generated world.

The game gives you minimum information about the game-structure. At first you don’t know that will happen and why.

It is not that the gameplay is particular hard. It consist of running around collecting things and interacting with objects.

When the cursor hovers over an object some text appears. It tells you what you can do. Like “pick grass” or “examine”.

When you have collected enough of a resource it can be used to craft new items.

In the different menus you can see what can be crafted from what.

In tools you can build an axe from sticks and stones. This in turn can be used to chop down trees. The wood can then be used to build a fire.

The gameplay is thus a race to gather resources. To obtain new resources. To be used to gather new resources.

A race because you always have to build a fire when night comes.

If you don’t have a fire at night something bad will happen you don’t know what.

The game-world is divided into Day and Night. At night the character is forced to make a fire and stay close to the light. Or he will die. You don’t know that untill it happens.

So you never know the rules of the game you are playing.

Which is the problem with survival in the real world. You never know what can happen and what consequences your choices will have for your chances of survival.

But you learn the more you play. And when you die you are dead and have to start over.

The game is puzzle. An interesting Puzzle albeit the same puzzle every time.

You know nothing

That is not true you know some things. You know you have to eat something or you will starve. It’s in the title. And you know you have to have a fire at night. Your avatar will tell you if you don’t have a fire and night is coming.  Other than that you have no knowledge. The game-world tells you nothing about how to play the game. It’s hard to know what you should do. Harder still to know what is best to do. You only know what you can do.

That’s is the one thing the game does to help you. You always know what you can do.

When something in one menus can be crafted that particular menu turns green.

The game-world always tells you as little as possible about the game-structure. So there is nothing to inform your gameplay.

That is what makes the game so hard which fits perfectly with the theme and title.

The gameplay in the end becomes trying to figure out the game-structure and that is what you use to form strategies. Every time you die and you are going to die a lot you learn something new and can probably survive a bit longer next time.

When you have died a couple of times you will form your own strategies for effective survival.

You will know what to do. Find particular resources and craft certain items in order of importance. According to your strategy.

When you have done whatever you set out to do. You have a new problem. What to do next.

The world

The world is a cute cartoony looking world.

All the animals, the plants and the avatar have the same cartoony look. But something is a bit off.

You come upon weird altars with pigs’ heads on spikes. And you can find things like evil flowers and wormholes.

Your avatar and all other creatures in the game is drawn in the same cartoony style. But it looks more like it was drawn by a disturbed kid than Walt Disney.

The game world shows you and tells you that it’s a dangerous place and surviving will be hard. And you believe the avatar when he tells you that you should build a fire.

But again you don’t know what the different things does. You don’t know the rules of the world or the game-structure.

You figure this out by playing the game. The pig-altars brings you back from death. So basically gives you an extra life. Which comes as an unexpected but welcomed surprise the first time that happens.

The look and style underlines the inherent danger of the world.

You never know what tree is really a monster waiting kill you.

It all fits together

The gameplay quickly becomes figuring out strategies for survival. You try to figure out the game-structure to “beat” the game.

The style and look of the game underlines the dangers and the sense that you don’t quite know what’s going on.

The puzzle that is the game becomes the fight for survival. It’s always the struggle to get the upper hand and “beat” the game that makes the game so interesting.

The sense of superiority and accomplishment when the timer ticks across to a new day is a fantastic feeling.

PS:

Now the game have a excellent expansion called Reign of Giants. Buy it!

tilbage med ændringer

jeg vil begynde at skrive herinde igen.
Men det meste vil nok være på engelsk fremover. det er sådan mit studie foregår.
Alle mine tanker omkring spil, mit studie, er dog ikke lige relevante på et universitet.
så That's no moon, vil være mere eller mindre ufiltrerede tanker om spil, spildesign, rollespil, film, tvserier, tegneserier og general popokultur

så here goes...