If online video games are the wild west, DayZ is the virtual saloon where the craziest gunslingers go to out-crazy one another. Less of a game and more of a dystopian social experiment with zombies, DayZ challenges players in a way that few games do. Your goals are less about saving the world and more about surviving and your enemies are less of the undead variety and more of the living, breathing dangerous type. DayZ tasks you not with surviving the zombie apocalypse, but surviving the people who survived it and while it's not for everyone; especially those looking for any sort of narrative driven experience, DayZ represents a new and novel way to look at a stale genre.

"...more often than not a pretty desolate experience..."

I'll be honest, when I first started looking into DayZ, I didn't get it. I would watch streams on sites like Twitch and wonder what I was watching. I always wondered where all the zombies were, in fact, where were all the other players? It just looked like a game where people kept running endlessly. Then I played it and I found out that I was right, well pretty much anyway. DayZ is the gaming equivalent of Cormack McCarthy's The Road; there aren't a lot of people populating it's world and that's where much of the drama comes from. You're going to spend most of your time traveling from town to town in search of resources and items to help you survive, and it's more often than not a pretty desolate experience; in fact during my first time playing the game, I spent the first thirty minutes scrounging without seeing another soul.

DayZ plays on the isolation feeling quite well and thanks to it's remarkable sound design you're going to question every sound you hear. Is that crashing sound behind you a mouse scurrying through the abandoned building or another survivor looking to take everything you have? This, in essence is what makes DayZ such an interesting experiment in gaming; it's a zombie game where you're more worried about the living people also playing the game than the undead, and the community makes each play through an interesting and engaging experience to say the least.

I don't really even know how to begin to tell you about all of my experiences with the DayZ community. There was the time I found a fellow survivor who teamed up with me to watch each other's backs from the many other dangers that filled the world, only to have him shoot and kill me when I found the item he was looking for. Side note, that's one of the lessons you learn very early on in DayZ - trust no one. Then there was the weird guy I found wandering by the side of the road and just following me once I passed him in the middle of the night, and if that wasn't creepy enough...he kept singing. With day Z the allure is never what is going to happen, but what might happen.

"...a theatre where you create your own stories..."

That being said though, DayZ is clearly not for everyone. The fact that there are no objectives and no structure whatsoever means that anyone looking for any sort of narrative experience will leave DayZ feeling like they're missing something. This is a theatre where you create your own stories and some may not get that. Truth be told, I wouldn't disagree with you if you told me that DayZ was boring since it's pretty much the same content again and again if you don't seek out other players (or they don't seek you out). DayZ is technically still in Early Release and there are plans to add more content but don't expect it to be enough to draw in those more interested in single player games.

Just be warned though, DayZ is not a very well made game. Maybe that's not the most fair thing to say about a game built off of a mod for another game but technical issues plague the DayZ experience. You'll often be scrounging through a building only to have a zombie clip partly through the wall and take you out. The controls are also frustratingly bad and often lead to you leaping into danger when you're trying to just survive. DayZ also doesn't always play by the very rules it itself establishes, with certain things wounding you once and then killing you completely the next time.

DayZ is so different from most everything on the market that it almost begs to be played by anyone with even a passing interest though it's lack of any structure of path is sure to turn off some more traditional gamers. It's best to think of DayZ as a sort of social experiment; what would you do and who would you trust in a zombie apocalypse? The results may surprise you. DayZ is not for everyone, but it's an interesting, novel idea, and that's something that the games industry could use a lot more of.