![]() “There are a lot of possibilities that come with suspending the normal rules of civil society - even in play,” said Dr. ![]() When you’re actually playing inside of a digital apocalypse, exerting as much control as the developers give you, you become a part of a story where anything can happen. Of course, when you’re reading or watching these kind of stories, it’s a passive experience - you’re following the arc of a predetermined tale. And usually, people turn to entertainment to manage it, to put the fears of the time at a safe distance.” “And many people are fearing we are living in times when the complete downfall of society, whether from social unrest, disease, war, terrorism, rogue nations … these are not fantasy scenarios,” he added. While he doesn’t play games, he noticed that much of his findings overlap with gamers as well. Barna Donovan, an associate professor of communication and media studies at Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey.ĭonovan studies the relationships between films and their audiences. “Usually, every type of mass entertainment - throughout history, when you’re looking at it very closely, of why something has become so popular, you see it reflecting the concerns of the time,” said Dr. To examine why this is such fertile ground for developers, we have to look outside video games and see how it has taken over pop culture itself. Our appetite for apocalyptic stories clearly goes beyond video games: You can find countless books, films, and TV shows that depict humanity’s struggles at the end of the world. Image Credit: Bohemia Interactive Yearning for the apocalypse Together, we looked at four key areas: why the end of the world is a common setting, what role zombies and other creatures play, the power of player-driven stories, and the future of the genre. Like DayZ, all these games are or will be going on sale in an unfinished state, giving players a chance to not only play them early but to help shape the games themselves.īut how did they get so popular in the first place, convincing millions of people to spend $20 to $30 on what can look like broken games? To get some answers, I spoke with a few of the developers in this space as well as with people from academia who could talk about the effects of post-apocalyptic entertainment on game design and other forms of media. Last month, it announced H1Z1, a survival game that also has players fighting against zombies. The genre has also attracted the attention of Sony Online Entertainment, the studio responsible for the massively multiplayer online games Planetside 2 and Everquest. As of this writing, Bohemia has sold an astonishing 2 million copies.ĭayZ’s impressive success story inspired more independent developers to create their own version of an online apocalypse, such as Rust (which hit 1 million sales in February 2014) and Nether. Though DayZ originally began life as a mod for military shooter Arma II, it grew so popular that the dev team decided to turn it into a standalone product.Įven though this version of DayZ isn’t finished yet, it has been at or near the top of Steam’s best-seller list since debuting in December 2013. When they’re not busy running from the undead, players have to make these crucial decisions every time they meet someone. ![]() The face of this new and punishing genre is DayZ, Bohemia Interactive’s open-world zombie survival simulator for PC. But thanks to the explosive rise of multiplayer survival games, more and more people are exploring these moral quandaries for themselves. It’s hard to imagine how we’d react to something like this in real life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |