How a Zombie Game is Bringing Me Closer to My Son

I’m not much of a talker when it comes to parenting. There’s a commercial that Verizon ran recently depicting a father and son out shopping for phones that’s a pretty good example of how my 17-year-old son and I relate to one another. I don’t deny it and will acknowledge this as a weakness. We do things together and have great time, but since my son tends to go to his mother for most advice and direction and it appears to be working pretty well so far, I never really feel the need to add much in addition.

Some of my fondest memories of time with my own father involved video games. Now, my dad is no gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but for some reason he would play a certain old Atari 2600 game by the name of “Dark Cavern” with me. I even won a ribbon in the elementary school science fair for a project entitled “How Alcohol Impacts Video Game Performance” in which my dad was the sole test subject. I decided that I wanted to have the same sort of experiences with son and began to play games with him pretty early. Some of the most fun we’ve had together has been finishing Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Halo on co-op mode. In the last few years, as often happens in most areas of life as a child grows up, our time gaming together has been more and more rare. He’s taken over what used to be MY Xbox 360 as his own and I have gone back to my first gaming love: PCs.

I was starting to miss our gaming time together and when my son’s 17th birthday rolled around a couple months ago, I asked my wife if I could buy both of us copies of Diablo III, to which she agreed. My son had not played either of the previous Diablo games, but I was a huge fan of the first one and had played some of the second, so I was excited to introduce him to what I had hoped to be a shining example of the genre. We had a good time and completed an entire run through of the game cooperatively, but I found that I hadn’t gotten what I had hoped to from the game, for two main reasons. First of all, the game is lackluster - it tries to do what was awesome 10 years ago in exactly the same way, when the industry has matured and moved beyond the very simple gameplay mechanics of the original. Secondly, my son and I didn’t really play it TOGETHER. You see, his PC is in his room and mine is down in my man-cave, on completely different floors within my home. Diablo does not require that the players cooperate very much beyond, “Hey, follow me,” or “Hey, use this spell on that monster,” all of which can be accomplished via text chat. We had essentially played the game at the same time in two different locations. I might as well have been playing with a stranger over the Internet.

Lately, I had heard interesting things about a game called “DayZ.” For those unfamiliar with the game, it is actually a free mod for the retail game “Arma II: Combined Operations,” which is a combat simulation game (think Call of Duty combined with a complicated flight sim.) The DayZ mod is termed a “survival simulation,” because it allows the player to experience a multi-player world in a way that most games don’t dare - where the player’s actions have real (well, ‘real’ in a game way) consequences. The biggest consequence is the character’s death. Not 'death’ like most games, where you press “Reload” and try again. When a character dies in DayZ, they’re done. The player must start all over again from scratch. Oh yeah, the world’s full of zombies. And not the “Living Dead” style of slow, lumbering zombies. When these guys get hungry, they run like the “28 Days Later” variety. And there’s lots of the suckers around, too.

Then there are the 40-60 other players in the same world who might be there to help or to kill you and ransack your body.

So, I was on the fence about DayZ for a while. On one hand, I really wanted to play it, but on the other, I didn’t want to play it by myself. The base Arma game went on sale during the recent Steam sale, so I began asking all my gamer friends and acquaintances if they wanted to play and got no takers. Finally, about two hours prior to end of the sale, I decide, “Screw it” and ask my son if he has any interest in playing. He agrees and we both buy a copy of the game. The following day, I came home from work and get both games running, fire up Skype so we can communicate via voice chat while we play, and settle down for some gaming.

Right away, it becomes obvious that this is not the typical multi-player scenario. A player is dropped into this gigantic world with a handful of basic supplies, such as a flashlight, a bandage to fix minor wounds, some aspirin and a small little back-pack. And no weapon. To make matters worse, everyone spawns in different spots so that even if you and a friend start the game on the same server at the same time, there’s a really good chance that you’ll end up MILES from one another. No exaggeration - the world is huge and it is entirely possible to play the game for hours, or even days and never see another virtual human soul.

This is what my son and I encountered during our first few plays of the game. We had the Skype “radio” to talk to one another and we had a DayZ map app on our smartphones, but never once during our first night in the DayZ world were we able to meet up. But you know what? It didn’t matter. We were talking and chatting the entire time about all the things we were finding and doing in the game. We probably talked more during that 5 hour period than we had in the previous six months. As the evening progressed, I met up with a group of 3 other people and explored with them for a while, but eventually wound up getting killed when I missed a swing that I had intended to land on a zombie that was attacking another player and hit that player instead. He promptly responded with a hatchet shot to my skull. Even though we went to bed having played the entire evening separately, we both knew that we would be back the following evening.

My son and I sat down for our second evening in the DayZ world determined that things would go better. We were more comfortable in the game and had a better grasp of the mechanics. This is where DayZ really shines: it forces the player to play in a completely different way than most games. You’re constantly on your guard, always planning out moves and NEVER rushing into situations without considering the outcome. We began getting our bearings and planning our meet up. I had spawned in a tiny village up the eastern coast. My son had spawned on the southwest corner of the world. Even running full speed toward one another, it was going to take at least 30 minutes to converge. We planned to meet in one of the larger metropolitan areas in the world, Electrozavodsk, or “Electro.” Not a big deal for me, since there wasn’t a lot between me and the city but land. For my son, this was a much bigger issue, because he would have to either go around another large city, “Cherno,” or go right through it. Always dangerous, because the larger metro areas contain more supplies, and as a result, more zombies and more humans. Within a few minutes of entering the game, we had both found weapons. This is always fortunate, because without something to keep the zombies from eating your brains, you’re almost totally helpless. I found a hatchet and my son, a rifle. After a bit of time to find some basic supplies, we both set off on our journey to Electro. My trip was fairly uneventful: only a single close call with a zombie that I quickly dispatched with my trusty hatchet and a run-in with another human just outside of Electro. So far, I’ve been approaching the human encounters in a generally trusting way and this one was no different. I almost stepped on him as he tried to crawl past me. I tried to say “Hello,” but he simply stared at me with emotionless eyes and kept his head down and ran off into the wilderness. Weird, I thought.

Meanwhile, my son has reached Cherno. “Just be careful in there, son,” I tell him as he tells me of his intentions to go straight through town. He choice would quickly lead him directly into a hot zone. He got shot by what he assumed to be crossbow.

“Crap,” he says over the radio. "I’m dead.“ Within a few seconds I see his name appear at the bottom of the screen, informing the world of his demise.

This is also not the best news for me, because it means that now I am truly alone out here. And I’m about to stumble into the most dangerous area in the game. While my son is restarting his game and we wait to see where he respawns, I start taking a look around and I notice a human running toward a large construction site. As I watch him run into the building, I just barely see a zombie running full bore toward me out of the corner of my eye. As I swing around I notice he’s not alone. A single zombie is no big deal for the trusty hatchet, maybe two. But a half dozen? I try my luck and do the thing you’re never supposed to do if being chased by a zombie. I ran.

I head straight for the construction site and start climbing the stairs to the roof. As I reach the top, I look around, expecting to see a zombie following close behind. It’s just an empty doorway. The group must have gotten confused by all the turns I had made as I ascended to the roof. I can hear them screaming below but soon their cries go silent and I dare to take a breath. Remembering the other fellow I had seen enter the building, I’m cautious as I search the site for supplies. I was able to scavenge a couple sodas and not much else, but there’s no sign of anyone else here.

By now, my son has respawned and I get the best news I’ve heard in two days: he’s near the lighthouse to the west of the city. I climb the large crane to scope out the surroundings nearby and set out for the other side of town. I keep to the ocean side of the city and don’t encounter any real resistance as I step onto the shore outside of town.

"Noooooooooo!” I hear my son cry.

“What?” Over the radio, I hear the frantic breathing of someone in distress. "What?!“

"I’m dead again.”

At this point, all you can do is shake your head. This game is brutal.

I do some exploring of some abandoned farmhouses while awaiting the news of his third respawn of the night. I notice that the indicator that marks my thirst level is low. Gotta find something to drink - I drank my single cola a while ago before I ran across a city and fought a half dozen zombies. I’ve reached Cherno just as my son informs me that he is now in a little town called Komarovo, according to the roadsign he can see. "Awesome, we should be able to meet on this side of the airfield. Just run down the coast.“ And he does after finding a hatchet and some supplies for the road.

After my son’s experience in Cherno, I decide there’s no way I’m going in there tonight. I skirt the city to the north and then duck south to pick up the coast line on the other side.

"Wooohooo!” my son squeals, in the first display of positive emotion in the past 90 minutes. He’s stumbled across a freshly dead traveler, that happened to have a very nice automatic rifle on him when he was brutally killed.

I stumble into an abandoned grocery to avoid a mob of zombies and find some cans of food and a couple drinks. I down one and am feeling pretty good. After slipping past the zombies, I head toward the beach and start running west. My son is presumably headed toward me in the opposite direction. After what seems like an eternity of sprinting, I see a tiny figure come around from behind a rock outcropping.

I see someone,“ I whisper across the radio.

"Me too,” he says. We don’t even wait to verify what we already know to be true. For the first time in almost two days, we’ve managed to link up with one another.

During the previous evening’s play, when I was travelling with the two others I met on the road, I was taken to the airfield that my son had just recently run past and had been able to stock up on supplies at the field medical station that is just south of the airstrip.

“Follow me,” I say and head off in that direction. In a few moments time, we reach the medical station. We both stop short as we approach and I see my son hit the deck. I follow suit. We can both feel in the air that something’s not right here. Crawling forward slowly, I look toward the tents with the big red and white crosses painted on them and see something I never expected in this world: a fully operational vehicle. As I watch, two figures jump into the white and sky blue van and I hear the motor roar to life. I watch in frozen wonder as the van screams forward. Right. At. Me.

No, no. Not like this. It can’t end like this. All I could do is watch helplessly as the van careened toward me, barely avoiding running me down like a snake in the tall grass. Couldn’t have been more than 10 feet away from me.

“Whoa,” is all my son could say.

“I want one,” I respond.

There’s a point in nearly every story where the hero makes their mistake. Here’s where we made ours. We decided to go check out the tents and the towers looking for supplies, never considering that the two people that had just driven away from here had already cleaned this place completely out. In the process, we were attacked several times by zombies. Nothing life threatening, but enough to lower my health to a point that that I was in a severely weakened state. I ate my two cans of food and it helped a little, but as we left the tents and headed north to the airfield, my vision was already blurry to the point that if my son got too far ahead of me, I lost sight of him completely. I needed lots of food or a blood transfusion. Mistake number two: we went north after searching the airfield.

It was beginning to get dark. The combination of dusk and my weakened eyesight made navigation difficult. As long as my son walked just a few paces in front of me, I was okay. If he happened to deviate from his path or, god forbid, go prone, I was blind. I had the idea to walk in front, since I could still see the road ahead okay, while my son watched my back and kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. This worked okay for a while. We were walking deeper into the wilderness and running out of chances to find any supplies or help, though. We crossed under some power lines and stopped. My son looked up the mountain and said, “There’s some buildings up there.” Then I got hit. I swung around to my right and just started wildly swinging my hatchet at the blurry zombie-shaped thing. He finally went down. As I took a step toward his body, I went down too. My leg was broken.

“What happened?” my son asked with genuine concern.

“We’re in trouble.” I tried to stand a couple times and each time immediately passed out and fell to the ground. I could crawl, but we were miles from civilization and couldn’t fight off any dangers we might encounter. I crawled to the edge of the forest and propped myself up under a tree.

“You’re going to have to leave me,” I said. "Go up to those buildings and check 'em out.“ I expected there to be some resistance to this idea, but his answer surprised me.

"Okay.” That was it. He turned around and sprinted to the buildings.

While we chatted via radio as he explored for anything useful, I took a deep breath and started emptying out my pack onto the ground. My eyesight was so poor at this point that all I could see was a fuzzy mess a few inches in front of me. It was dark and I was starting to worry that my son would not be able to find his way back to me. But soon he returned with the fateful news: “Just a bunch of ammo for guns we don’t have.” My health was extremely low and I was fading in and out of consciousness.

“I’m dying,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Take my stuff. Be sure to take my pack - it’s one of the big ones.” In between fainting spells, I could just make out his silhouette picking up my items off the ground.

My health was critical now. I was unable to stay conscious for more than a couple seconds.

“All right, buddy. I’m done now.”

“Yeah,” he muttered.

I logged off the server and exited the game. Just as I closed down, I hear on the radio, “So, we’ll play again tomorrow? Right, Dad?”