DayZ
Introduction
DayZ is a multiplayer zombie survival game developed and published by Bohemia Interactive. The original version started as a mod for Arma 2 in 2013, a war simulator game for PC, and then became a standalone game for the PC in 2018. Subsequent releases for PlayStation and Xbox One consoles followed in 2019. DayZ’s main genre is horror survival with subgenres covering adventure, shooter, sandbox, and MMORPG (Steam Store). In DayZ, you spawn into a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies and players with only a few items of clothing; no map, food, water, or weapons. Explore the map to find items to survive, defend yourself against zombies, and choose to cooperate, avoid, or kill other players. Some players will be friendly and communicative, others will kill on sight without hesitation. If you are able to initially survive by finding food, water, clothing, and defending against the environment and zombies, then your judgement and cooperation with others will be the determinant of your life.
Autoethnographic Component
I originally found the game through live streamers on Twitch, which had drawn a lot of early attention and popularity to the game with the initial mod release. Given the extreme hardcore survival elements, the game stood out compared to other games that were tailored towards fast engagement. Being spawned into a world with limited information and supplies created an intense experience. Each playthrough would be unique depending on the items you found and the interactions you had with other players. DayZ is meaningful to me because it cultivates patience, disciplined planning, and social interactions shaped by scarcity. Each moment you are faced with a decision: do you risk the open road for speed or detour through the treeline to stay unseen; do you speak first on proximity chat or let silence do the negotiating? Small moments like sharing rags at a water well, splitting a can of food, parting ways without names, glimpses of trust that can be undone minutes later by an indifferent conversation or a bad route choice. Over time, DayZ rewards calm decision-making and careful signaling, turning survival into a practice of thinking clearly.
Setting
DayZ places players in a fictional, post-Soviet state map called Chernarus. Chernarus is a sprawling open world filled with dense forestry, open farmland, abandoned towns, and military outposts. Empty houses with broken windows and overgrown fields with abandoned farm machinery reinforce a sense of isolation in a giant open world. Unlike linear survival-horror games, DayZ does not guide players through a set of curated experiences. The environment and other players act as an ongoing threat by withholding resources and always making the player feel vulnerable.
DayZ’s world denies players stability and control. This is similar to Perron’s “Survival Terror”, where the player is never fully in control, resources are scarce, and threats fluctuate depending on the situation (Perron 10). A simple decision to enter a barn in search of supplies may spiral into a fatal mistake if zombies or hostile players are inside waiting. The openness of the map fosters constant anxiety where there is no safe hub or area of refuge.
Narrative
DayZ offers no scripted questline or critical path to follow. Instead, its narrative emerges from moment-to-moment decisions and consequences of risk management within a hostile landscape. The survival plot is simple and repetitive: spawn, scavenge, and sustain. However, the story and narrative is built around fragile and spontaneous moments of opportunity, desire, and trust. Rouse argues that horror thrives in interactive media because choice and consequence can directly manipulate dread and anticipation (Rouse 15–25). DayZ embodies this by making every inventory slot and encounter with other players a spontaneous choice. In contrast to a classic save-point tension (e.g. Resident Evil), DayZ replaces this tension with full persistence while being in the world and losing everything on death. Ewan Kirkland’s discussion of remediation around survival-horror save mechanics helps demonstrate why surviving DayZ feels so dangerous. When you cannot bank progress at will, other than to just stop playing, the game converts routine tasks such as drinking water, crossing a field, and seeing another player into high-risk narrative pieces (Kirkland 115–126).
Survival
At the heart of DayZ is a survival system that requires players to manage hunger, thirst, temperature, and illness. Players must scavenge for food, hunt wildlife, collect clean water, find weapons, and maintain warmth against the rain and cold. Failure to do so leads to starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, or infection. As the player, you are reminded of these pressures through the HUD and status effects (e.g. “hungry,” “cold,” “sick,” “bleeding”), which nudge you to respond before small problems spiral.
The limited control over bodily states reflects Perron’s framing of survival horror (Perron 10). Fear intensifies through ongoing vulnerability rather than through moments of surprise. The horror emerges less from immediate jump scares and more from the creeping realization that survival is always under threat from both the environment and other players. The survival mechanics create tight risk-reward loops. Sprinting burns calories and water faster, but reduces exposure time. Lingering to cook meat or boil water restores reserves, but exposes your smoke and light to other players. Clothing gets wet and loses insulation, so you’re forced to dry off at a fire, which broadcasts your position. Medical care includes bandages or disinfected rags to stop bleeding, charcoal tablets counter food poisoning, and tetracycline treats cholera from dirty wells; each item occupies limited inventory space you’d rather dedicate to food or ammo.
Loot
Loot is the foundation of DayZ’s gameplay, guiding how players move, interact, and survive. The scarcity of canned food, can openers, water purification tablets, warm clothing, and basic weapons forces players to pay close attention to their surroundings and resources. Thurgill discusses that rural topophobia can cause fear with vast, underpopulated landscapes, so the gameplay of moving between barns, hedgerows, and small towns to find loot causes players to interpret every situation they’re in with an opportunity cost (Thurgill). Players see fence breaks, open doors, and missing loot as potential signs of danger. The player must constantly negotiate between being exposed or not. Managing weight, noise, and visibility becomes a way of survival rather than just an optimization problem. Communities often solve scarcity socially through barters and trades, which is similar to Tremblay’s observations that horror communities generate resilience through mutual aid (Tremblay 13–18). The constant decision-making is why a can opener can be more significant than an assault rifle: one keeps you fed and offers a way to help others while the other can get you killed on sight.
Zombies & Players
In DayZ, the undead are not player controlled. They are relatively easy to manage one-on-one, but in packs can quickly become a problem. The zombies are not treated as the main antagonists, but as one of the many threats embedded into the environment. This is similar to how Webley and Zackariasson emphasize that zombies in games embody a “playful undead,” where in DayZ the zombies act as another obstacle to the player’s goal of finding resources to survive (Webley and Zackariasson). The game’s primary antagonists are other players. Ethical decision-making, whether to ambush or be friendly, is a choice a player has to make at each moment. Gilbert’s work on patterns of ethical thinking in online play aligns with DayZ’s moral grey zones (Gilbert 151–152). Social frictions are a part of horror where trust and betrayal are survival mechanics. In DayZ, proximity VOIP and emotes hand can either humanize strangers or set up a kill.
Mods
Modding has been central to DayZ since its origin as an Arma 2 mod and remains supported in the standalone version with Steam Workshop integration (Steam Workshop; Bohemia Community Wiki). Horror-themed servers commonly tweak the survival model: harsher weather and disease, Halloween events, custom creatures, and trader economies that alter social dynamics (role-play servers with rules of engagement and safe-zones). These variations support Perron’s point that survival-terror is a spectrum produced by design constraints (Perron 10). Server owners can fine-tune difficulty and resources with mods to create different survival experiences. Some focused on realism and scarcity, others on constant threat and chaos.
Gameplay Video
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhTCBfvDpCY (YouTube).
Citations
Perron, Bernard. “Survival Terror.” Silent Hill, University of Michigan Press, 2012, p. 10.
Webley, Stephen J., and Peter Zackariasson. The Playful Undead and Video Games : Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay. 1st ed., Routledge, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179490.
Gilbert, Sam. “Ethics at Play: Patterns of Ethical Thinking Among Young Online Gamers.” Ethics and Game Design : Teaching Values through Play, IGI Global, 2010, pp. 151–166, https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-845-6.ch010.
Kirkland, Ewan. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, 2009, pp. 115–126, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325483.
Rouse III, Richard. “Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games.” Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Edited by Bernard Perron, McFarland & Co., 2009, pp. 15–25.
Thurgill, James. “A Fear of the Folk: On Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes.” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, 2022. https://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/a-fear-of-the-folk-on-topophobia-and-the-horror-of-rural-landscapes/.
Tremblay, Kaitlin. “Resistance and Survival Through Community and Horror.” Game Devs & Others. Edited by Tanya DePass, 1st ed., Taylor & Francis Group, 2018, pp. 13–18, https://doi.org/10.1201/b22458-3.
DayZ on Steam. Steam Store, Valve, https://store.steampowered.com/app/221100/DayZ/.
“DayZ—Steam Workshop.” Steam Workshop, Valve, https://steamcommunity.com/app/221100/workshop/.
“DayZ: Modding Basics.” Bohemia Community Wiki, https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/DayZ:Modding_Basics.
Images & Video
“DayZ Logo.” DayZ, Bohemia Interactive, https://dayz.com/.
“DayZ — Emote Gestures (Screenshot).” Steam Community, 2023, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3079077517.
“DayZ legit the most beautiful game.” Reddit, r/dayz, 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/bcun02/dayz_legit_the_most_beautiful_game/.
“DayZ (Media Gallery, Chernogorsk).” Bohemia Interactive, 2019, https://www.bohemia.net/games/dayz.
“DayZ HUD — Status Indicators (Image).” Reddit, 2022, https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fy44jpmsix9s81.jpg.
“Loot.” DayZ Fandom Wiki, https://dayz.fandom.com/wiki/Loot.
“Infected.” DayZ Fandom Wiki, https://dayz.fandom.com/wiki/Infected.
“6 Hours of Cozy DayZ Gameplay – No Commentary, Relax, Sleep, Study.” YouTube. Uploaded by Lullaby Quest, Mar 31 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhTCBfvDpCY.
AI Disclosure
No generative AI tools were used in the creation of this wiki.