suck my ♥♥♥♥

I have 172 hours logged in DayZ. I bought it in January, after my partner suggested it as a game we play together. The first time we played was a weekend and we played for 13 hours straight. I’ve been hooked ever since.

I mostly multiplayer games these days. I have a little over 200 hours in Left for Dead 2 and almost 100 in Team Fortress 2. DayZ is unlike those in a lot of ways, but one in particular – every time since I started playing, I log on and I wonder: is this the time? It hasn’t happened yet. That was close, but they didn’t actually say it. I’ve put in over 50 hours, maybe I’m lucky. I’ve put in over 100 hours, maybe I’m being paranoid. I’ve put in over 150 hours, I am one of “those girls” who see it everywhere, things are actually okay.

Today my streak ended and someone told me in game VOIP that they wanted to rape me.

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DayZ is a survival horror game. It’s a standalone game based on a mod of Arma 2 by the same name, by Dean Hall. The mod enjoyed massive success and since the alpha version of the standalone was released on Steam Early Access in December, it has sold more than 1 million copies, consistently topping the Steam charts. The player recorded videos are funny and the community actively posts on Reddit and the DayZ forums, posting locations of loot spawns, pictures of the scenery, and locations of bandits, so other, more well-geared players can hunt down those who ruthlessly hunt new spawns.

DayZ is fascinating to me (I’m a relatively new gamer and never played the mod). You start as a new spawn, with just your clothes and a flashlight. You immediately start to feel hungry and thirsty. More than likely you spawn somewhere on the vast coast, either in a town or somewhere strung between. There is no map. If you’ve never played, you probably have absolutely no idea where you are. And there are zombies. You start running to find food and when you do, it’s probably in a can that you can’t open without a screwdriver or a knife. You need water, and if you find a lake, you can drink, but then you realize it’s probably contaminated and then you’re dead. And so you respawn back to where you were, or, more often than not, somewhere kilos and kilos away. There are no vehicles. You can only run at a moderately decent pace.

So you start again with nothing and maybe this time someone shoots you for no real reason at all – they have a gun and they’re bored and you’re just a Bambi, a new spawn, helpless as a baby deer. You fall off a ladder (my falling off ladder stories are hilarious and numerous – it’s a story every player probably has and they’re something you just shake your head and laugh at) and break your legs and a zombie catches you. You spawn too far away from anything so you climb to the top of a silo and jump off it, after ceremoniously taking off your clothes and casting them aside. You run into a dangerous city with your fists up and try to punch out guys with guns so you get guns and then you have guns until someone else kills you with their gun and then they get your gun and you start all over again.