DayZ: The First MMO to Allow Truly Evil Roleplay

DayZ, the cult multiplayer zombie sandbox survival MMO, is open-ended enough to enable roleplaying journalists, doctors and game show hosts, and as it turns out, it's also the first mass market MMO to allow roleplaying true evil. No, not like the infamous World of Warcraft funeral massacre, which was bad because a real person's death was involved, but genuine, creatively sadistic, in-game evil. That's the conclusion I'm making after reading this seriously impressive (if quickly depressing) DayZ Reddit thread, "What is the WORST thing (morally) that you have done in DayZ?". The confessions are sometimes amusing, sometimes remarkably disturbing. Here's a relatively mild one:

A very friendly man stumbled across our pumpkin farm, when he tried to leave we broke his legs, handcuffed him, then beat him to death with blunt objects and ate him. All while singing "We wish you a merry Christmas." It was a good day.

Oh yeah, human-on-human cannibalism is now allowed in DayZ, leading to lots and lots of Hannibalistic fun. But the ability to betray, deceive, and coerce other players strikes me as the element that turns in-game backstabbing into something more satanic. I hope the National Science Foundation research project on DayZ takes an in-depth look at how the game enables dramatic sadism and cruelty -- and what that does to the players' psyches and subsequent social interactions.

Here's another -- possibly too gruesome to read while eating:

I once killed a man in cold blood in Solnichiny without using my mic. I cut him open and took his meat and wore some of his clothes and some other clothes. Then I proceeded to cook the meat and waited for another guy to come by the town. The same guy came back 30 minutes later. I had different clothes so he didn't recognize me and I used my mic this time and gave him some meat. He ate and realized he had eaten human meat and began to shout at me. Then I told him that I HAD KILLED HIM EARLIER AND THAT WAS HIS OWN MEAT. He got so angry that he took out a knife and stabbed himself in the throat!!!

So, you know... a nice friendly night of interactive fun?

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Comments

[Iggy]

Well, the world is certainly a better place for DayZ. Pass. Might as well watch some ISIS beheading videos.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

First? Hardly. The same sorts of shenanigans took place in Ultima Online twenty years ago. While the creators hoped that players would come to police themselves, that never materialized in any meaningful way. It was too damn boring to take a reactive posture to evil and too damn easy to delete and replace an expendable character for griefing.

Eventually UO realized that open-world PvP was untenable and cloned the entire landmass to create a dimension with no open-world PvP. On the first day, it crashed and burned repeatedly -- the developers had not counted on the fact that about 95% of the player base desperately wanted OUT of the hellhole. And of course, UO's experience is the reason why Everquest (and later, World of Warcraft) disallowed non-consensual murder.

It may work for DayZ, a niche game in a niche genre. But every MMO to this point that's tried a world that's entirely or mostly open to PvP has either folded or moved to a more balanced zone/flag system.

Designers keep trying. My personal hypothesis used to be that deep down game designers are a bunch of little pinpricks not quite clever enough to thrive on 4chan. But the evidence keeps contradicting me, so I can only conclude that they're naive optimists who keep thinking some players will sacrifice their precious playtime to be the virtual police.

Good luck with that.

[Rin]

There is a good reason why PvP areas in games and mainly PvP based game communities are usually described with the word 'toxic' ...

[Shockwave Yareach]

Personally I don't see the fun in betraying and being betrayed. Eve online runs that way, which is why I stay away from it.

Surely there's enough pain and heartbreak in RL that we don't need to emulate it in virtual space too.