Permadeath

A new zombie apocalypse game, DayZ , departs from conventional gaming by introducing permadeath, which is a lot like real death in that it is permanent:

Evie Nagy reports , permadeath means “that players have only one life in the game and lose everything if they are killed—as well as a scarcity of survival resources, and a kill-or-be-killed relationship with other players, who often need your supplies to stay alive themselves. There are also zombies.”

Dean Hall created the game based on his experience of survival training in Brunei with the New Zealand army. He also found inspiration in films like The Road : “”Some of these films can be really powerful, and sometimes make you angry. Whereas I feel like videogames, a lot of the time have been always about being fun. A lot of people didn’t take them that seriously from other media because it’s all just fun—click the little thing, jump around and do this. Whereas I wanted to see a videogame explore areas like loss and fear and anger.”

Hall says he isn’t sure that other game makers will pick up permadeath: “I think that can be a lot to swallow, and it can be quite a risky proposition because people aren’t used to upsetting their customers. Which we do. I mean, the amount of times people have said to me, ‘I got so angry with the game I uninstalled it and I said to myself, I’m never playing this again.’ And then they say that an hour later they are re-downloading it because they really wanted to play.”

DayZ seems to be another stage in the blurring of the boundary between game and reality.