The town is just out there in the near distance, a cluster of houses
amid acres of flat scrubland. I can't see any movement, there's no sound
except birdsong, but the buildings are a two minute run away. If I
break cover and another player is nearby, I know they will shoot me.
They will shoot me and loot my body. That is the reality of DayZ.
Still only available as an early alpha build on Steam, but already
immensely popular, Dean Hall's bleak, utterly unsentimental zombie
survival game is unbearably tense and atmospheric. Players are pitched
together into a stark landscape, and must survive for as long as
possible, ransacking buildings for guns and food and avoiding the
undead. But just as in all the best zombie fiction, it's not the rotting
monsters you often have to worry about, it's the other survivors. Each
server houses up to 40 players, all desperately scavenging for the same
meagre supplies. And if you kill another participant, you can take their
stuff. There is a clear benefit to adopting a "shoot first" policy.
We see the same thing now in GTA Online, the vast multiplayer
spin-off from Grand Theft Auto V. Players hit Los Santos, engaging in
criminal missions and tasks, but when they're off duty they just cruise
the streets in stolen cars, looking for trouble. And trouble often means
being anti-social – chasing down and shooting other players, or camping
out near key hotspots like custom garages and ammo stores blasting
anyone who walks in. Just for kicks. Rockstar sometimes punishes such
players, introducing a "bad sport" scheme to highlight them to others.
It's gaming's equivalent of an ASBO – and we all know how effective
those have been. Spawn to kill
There are obvious reasons why this happens. Gamers have been
conditioned by a generation of successful online shooters like Call of
Duty and Quake to view other participants as targets. In Call of Duty,
there is no other motivation beyond killing, that's what you're there
for. And from the very beginning of video games we have the intrinsic
thrill of the shoot-kill feedback loop; it is the most clear, instant
and satisfying interactive sequence this medium has ever produced.
Shooting doesn't require realistic visuals or complex game systems – in
the great arcade shooters of the late-seventies, you had left, right and
fire – those were your interactions with the game world. Even the word
'fire button' has aggressive connotations. That's what it always was –
an aggressive act committed on the game world. Games are enormously complex now – and yet we're still being channeled down this zero-sum interaction channel: shoot or die.
If you consider this at a systemic level, shooting always makes sense
in a moment of indecision. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma, the famous
behavioural experiment that shows altruism, trust and co-operation are
often unworkable factors when you don't know what the other participant
is thinking. In DayZ, you always have more to gain from shooting a
stranger: not only are you safe, you also have a resource to plunder.
Theoretically, a new player could be a good asset to your squad, but how
do you know? In the split second you often have to decide these things,
the diplomacy of the bullet makes more sense.
In the past, game designers have often sought to counter the problem
by brute-forcing co-operative behaviour. "World of Warcraft kind of
solved this issue by making missions where you had to form a group in order to complete them," says game developer Byron Atkinson-Jones, whose shooter, Blast Em
is heading to Steam soon . "In this situation, the obstacles – as in
things to kill – were just too much for one person to attempt alone. The
reward for helping a fellow player then was completing the mission and
leveling up."
It looks like this will be the system employed in Bungie's
forthcoming massively multiplayer space opera Destiny. Although there
will be assigned player v player combat zones, if two sets of
participants bump into each other during campaign missions, they'll only
be able to work together to complete the task. Battlefield developer
DICE has added whole layers of co-operative intricacy into its team
modes, introducing squads and commanders to initiate group tactics. But
once again, we're only really talking about co-operation on a
mechanistic level.
There can of course, be genuine humanity in that. "Team games like
Dota 2 and Battlefield semi-force you to cooperate with strangers by
putting you on the same team," says game designer Michael Brough. "It is
kind of a blunt instrument, but it's still up to the players whether to
actually cooperate. Quite often in Dota, if someone dies early on it
gives the opposing team an advantage, then people start blaming each
other and arguing, teamwork falls apart and you start falling even
further behind...
"sometimes the team breaks down completely, someone gives up and
disconnects from the game or refuses to play, but other times the team
gets over their disagreement and starts pulling together and can even go
on to win. When this happens it's quite beautiful." Social circles
Meanwhile, in most online games, especially MMORPGs, all the really
meaty social interaction is effectively outsourced to the players
themselves through the guild system. Friends have to get together in
meat space, agree to form a team, use microphones and often third-party
chat software to communicate, and then enter the game world as a unit.
In this way, all the emotional drama is effectively happening between
the members of the social group – the game just happens to be where it's
taking place. In many ways, online role-playing games are venues of
collaborative play not instigators. Certainly, players will meet in the
world and form friendships, but the impetus and the heft of the social
interaction happens on the periphery of the game experience.
Is there a way for game designers to encourage and reward more
advanced social relationships between strangers? Is there a way to
balance out the allure of deadly violence? "Generally if you want to
encourage some kind of activity in a game, it's not a terrible idea to
just try explicitly rewarding it in the most obvious way possible," says
Brough. "Like, maybe that won't work and you'll need something more
subtle, but it's the first thing to try. So if you want to encourage
some kind of cooperative activity, make numbers go up when people do it.
When you trade items they get bigger, when you craft items they get a
bonus for the number of people involved. Basically, positive-sum
interactions rather than zero- or negative-sum."
Atkinson-Jones agrees: "It's strange to think about having to reward
being friendly but it's certainly possible. You could provide an
achievement for being around a fellow player for a certain period of
time without killing them. That could actually lead to hilarious
situations where you get a group of players all hugging together, trying
to get that achievement – although once one of them has gotten it, they
would probably start opening fire - almost a 'who blinks first'
situation from a Tarantino film."
The key then would be in incentivising positive group behaviours
rather than allowing violence to be at the tip of every interaction
tree. A group could receive a health or XP boost by taking on newcomers.
Perhaps designers could introduce certain resources that can only be
shared rather than looted from dead bodies. More violently, there could
be a sort of self-destruct item, which destroys a player's inventory
when they're killed by another human participant. Selfish genes
Of course, this is a very mechanical way of thinking about things –
but perhaps that's necessary. We need to be realistic: altruism is rare
in nature – animals that appear to be behaving selflessly toward each
other are merely indulging in mutually beneficial, highly reciprocal
relationships. Lions form prides, not because they totally love each
other, but because unless your prey is old and weak, you need more than
one hunter to bring down a wildebeest. Ant hives aren't social
institutions, they are machines. Even in the most intelligent species
such as apes and dolphins, totally altruistic acts are exceptional;
protecting the group usually makes sense from a survival perspective. As
for humans, we see from the logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma that
although self-interest has its costs, it often carries far lower risks.
But it's sort of sad to think of games – and gamers – in this way.
DayZ is a thrilling evocation of zombie fiction, but what it can't
capture in the same way as linear media like The Walking Dead or Day of
the Dead, is the interplay between survival groups – those tense moments
when one set of desperate people meets another. In the TV series The
Walking Dead, much of the emotional depth comes not from the shoot-outs,
but from those first meetings and negotiations – the myriad opposing
forces working on every encounter. In this world, it is not always best
to shoot first – and that provides the cathartic thrill. And really, if
Walking Dead was simply about shooting, it would be be pretty
unwatchable. It's the relationships that form between, say, Maggie and
Glenn or Michonne and Andrea, that keep us engaged. Amid the slaughter
and the fear, the narrative requires human interaction and emotional
drama. It's how we invest.
And it's not just the game systems that prevent this in titles like
DayZ and GTA Online, it's the paucity of interaction depth. Visual
limitations mean we can't read the body language and eye movements of
our fellow players, and these are the vital unconscious clues to intent
that we pick up constantly in real life. Few games expand their gesture
sets beyond taunts, and even fewer provide amiable collaborative
ventures. In GTA Online, there's not a whole lot you can do with another
player once you've decided not to shoot them. You can't communicate,
you can't do anything except launch a mission together and work side by
side. You can't take them on a date, you can't make promises and plans,
you can't develop. DayZ allows microphone chat, which at least adds
verbal communication, but this can be horribly jarring. Hearing a
12-year-old drawl at you through earphones while their muscular
twenty-something avatar idles on screen doesn't do much for your
suspension of disbelief. The heart of the matter
So really, can we encourage emotional interplay
between strangers in online games? Because that's obviously the key;
that is what provides the complexity of human relationships in the real
world. One way is to remove violence altogether. Thatgamecompany did
this beautifully with Journey, distilling interaction down to the
ability to follow and lead, and to make one simple sound. No names were
visible and there was no vocal communication. Yet even with such limited
materials, players were able to build profound relationships, even if
they were fleeting and ethereal. We don't need much to get along.
But DayZ isn't Journey – there's no such thing as a mystical zombie
art-game (though, dammit, I sort of wish there was now). Killing is a
vital part of the experience – as it is with GTA Online. So we're back
to this one apparent requirement: the commodification of friendship. The
introduction of systems that make the prospect of collaboration a
beneficial one. The next time I'm outside a small town in DayZ, I want
to know I can wander in there, meet another player and have a bargaining
chip or two. Already, players are using a raised arm gesture as one of
friendship, or they're yelling "peaceful" down the microphone – but
these simple digital acts are open to abuse and without visual
complexity, it's all meaningless. Which is a shame because from
listening to more experienced players, some of the most profound and
enjoyable experiences have come out of hooking up with strangers and
exploring together.
This isn't going to be popular, but I wonder if some form of
bio-input is the ultimate answer. Valve Software has experimented with
biometric feedback in the past, looking into peripherals that read your
heart rate and alter the game accordingly. We know that Kinect can trace
fluctuations in skin colour to monitor your heart rate too. Perhaps one
day that data will be available to other players. You're approaching a
group of survivors with your arms raised, but the camera sees you
sweating; a message comes up on the other player's screen: "heart rate
rising". What they do with that information is up to them. But they have
it.
And that's the underlying truth, I fear. Emotion is about
information; friendship and love are governed by data – you need to
collect enough to trust someone. I think the first game that really
truly figures this out will be the biggest game in the world.
