Whether you’re grouped around a screen to do battle inMario Kartor rolling with your guild in an MMO that demands an internet connection, the social side of gaming has grown massively in recent years.Consoleshave even been designed with this in mind. In this age of being perpetually online, gamers are no longer seen as loners in basements - or if they are, they at least have a mic and headset down there with them.
Multiplayer games have become so ingrained in our lives that it’s easy to take them for granted, or understate their impact, as we get inundated with live-service titles vying for our attention. This is particularly true if you derive most of your social engagement from games, as I do.
Chatting over the Internet while playing has long been a thing, with players using third-party services like Roger Wilco or TeamSpeak more than two decades ago. Nowadays, many games — including survival games — have native comms built-in, and modern consoles support Discord integration.
I met one of my best friends, John, in a video game almost a decade and a half ago. I was teaching in rural Poland, and he was working the night shift on the front desk of an even more isolated hotel in Norway. We were in the sameWorld of Warcraftguild, and we’d spend hours chatting nonsense while raiding Deathwing each week.
We’ve since moved from game to game, spanning multiple genres. He introduced me toLeague of Legends(for better or for worse), and we’d play Town of Salem with his Norwegian friends. Then cameArma 3— an achievement, given I avoid shooters as if I were deathly allergic. However, since last year, the game of choice has been Bohemia Interactive’sDayZ, the zombie survival game that was borne out of Arma 2 mods alongside another of our experiments,PUBG.
It turned out to be the perfect social game, better than any of the others I’ve tried. The sheer amount of downtime you get when you’re playing a survival game gave us plenty of time to connect. In other genres, you’re usually focused on the gameplay — taking down bosses or trying to win PvP skirmishes, for example — with a bit of idle chit-chat in between. But with DayZ and other games of its ilk, you spend an awful lot of time not doing very much at all.
Survival games often have massive maps, and thecore loopis the same. You search for food, clothing, and weapons, all while spending tons of time traversing an enormous map. It creates the perfect environment for a proper conversation, and with that, getting to know people. The scenery is nice, too.
Another factor conducive to a better social experience is that while high-stakes PvP is the ‘endgame’ of a title like DayZ, you don’t have to take part if you don’t want to. Most of the time we hang around a low-tier settlement and mess around, saying hello to ‘Bootleg Sanic’ or John using tech trickery to blast‘Balaclava’ by Shy FX, MC Spyda, and D Double Efrom the in-game PA system. It’s become our own personal in-joke.
Between our shenanigans in ‘Party Town’ (Kamyshovo) and acting as a taxi service for fresh spawns, we’ve met countless random players through the in-game comms. Some are fleeting, like a ten-minute drive, but others stick around, for entire sessions or even longer. What started as two friends playing together has grown into a Steam chat group of seven, spanning the UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and more.
So, it’s no surprise that my most-played game in 2023 was DayZ. I ran up almost 500 hours, the equivalent of about 20 days, and more time than I spent on my PS5 in total. I look forward to finishing work each day when I know we’re jumping on John’s TeamSpeak server to chew the fat and do nothing particularly exciting. It’s nice feeling a sense of belonging.
It’s something I probably take for granted at times. Having bounced around Europe this past decade and a half, I now find myself back ‘home.’ I’m in a familiar town, but I feel like a rank outsider. The people I once knew have long since moved on, and when you’re in your 40s, forging new in-person friendships isn’t easy.
Meeting this group through the medium of DayZ has been a blessing. We’ve got to know one another’s stories, we talk about our struggles and feelings, and offer encouragement when we know others need it most. There have also been far too many laughs to count. They’re not just lads I play games with, they’re friends who have gone a long way to helping me combat the loneliness of being back here. No genre has shown me that more than the survival game.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -available on PC in early access February 20.
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
