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.