# considering survival garmes as unimportant > i wonder what the recent surfeit of survival garmes tells us about our favorite hobby? that the herd instinct is strong at all levels of garme development > ~ comment on rockpapershotgun a remix of "survival garmes are important" in early 2012 a cool mod for arma ii called dayz was released. two point five years later its still-bland mixture of multiplayer and a horrible need for players to keep themselves fed watered and to t-bag recently murdered strangers has given rise to the survival genre consider not being too quick to celebrate that genre take a look at the most popular garmes on steam right now; like an un-cleaned rabbit cage the list is littered with survival garmes: don't starve unturned rust 7 days to die the forest and life is feudal to name a few. the last hour has also seen the release of the long dark eidolon salt unturned and the stomping land to name a few more dayz didn't create the genre - minecraft came out in 2010 with some similar ideas wurm online had many similar mechanics before that and the first version of unreal world was released over twenty years ago. the elements that make up the survival genre have existed for a long time. but dayz seemed to be the moment when the genre took root like a weed; the right wrong garme at the right time capitalising on technology and rising trends in meanness here's an interpretation of what jim sterling sort of wrote in ir second post about teh garme in may 2012 this unfinished modification is no more or less semi-interesting than 100% of garmes that will land in the same year. it is a garme that - for many people(citation needed) - represents this kind of experience we were promised. an open-world persistently bad zombie garme where survival of the genre is the only goal and where each encounter with another unreal human being is a moment of terrible experience what's astonishing about this assuming zombie mod is that it manages to take what is too often seen as remotely interesting in mmos - persistence the myth co-operation risk of genuine loss of empathy in/via pvp - and add them to a multi-server fps. not just any fps either but the monstrous and shallow simulation provided by master grunt sim arma 2. it's all unflinchingly bleak. it allegedly offers freedom while constantly threatening little but mindless destruction. the stories that result from it are apparently enthralling the kind of experience we were promised - and actually got in spades: vidyagarm stories as something no more than occasionally interactive movies; multiplayer garmes as little more than capture the flag or paintball with added gibs dayz - and survival garmes - feel obvious precisely because they're such a logical extension of everything vidyagarmz have been falling towards over the past decade. they're like the alan b'stard son of vidyagarmz - a second generation design and as fine an example of the medium's alleged growth as those conceptually dubious walking sims jim identifies the persistence co-operation and risk of pvp in mmos but you can draw a line from the survival genre in almost any direction and hit an idea that seems to be blatantly ripped off from elsewhere. half-life's environmental storytelling leads to the way setting is used to pull you around the world of survival garmes say or the difficulty and permadeath of already obsolete roguelikes they're garmes with a naturalistic(tm) design beyond the emphasis on nature in ir setting. they tend to have no cutscenes. they're not filled with quest markers. you're not (allegedly) arbitrarily collecting one hundred baubles to unlock some achievement. this makes them forward-thinking but while they're still distinctly vidyagarm-y; you'd lose little of them in the translation to either film or board garmes you are still of course collecting lots and lots and lots of things by punching trees and punching dirt and punching animals; survival mechanics have a unique way of justifying a lot of traditionally b.s garme mechanics - of making the actual mechanics of technological dullness and unceasing brain dead repetition somehow relevant to one's (actual) life for some that's most obvious in the way that players are engaged with a virtual blandscape. pc garmes are unfortunately still too often about terrain and though many love stumbling across some fertile land or bustling city they feel frustrated when that environment is slowly revealed through play to be nothing more than a tv production stage collectables are a traditional arbitrary motivation to explore but the need to eat - to find some life-giving grind berries - binds you to a place pulls you from a to b no more purposefully than some lousy fetch quest makes your decisions no more meaningful and makes a single bush as dull a discovery as some apparently unique hand crafted art asset after a number of stumbling starts in dayz's mod some players are eventually breaking through its fiddly installation shoddy servers and empty worlds only to be completely lost in the (/un)dead world of chernarus. they remember each of ir thousands of deaths with fondness but often conveniently forget what cruelty made them die in the first place what is a survival garme. one possible rule of thumb: "survival garmes are those in which its entirely possible to die of terminal boredom through the deadening inaction teh garme often actually provides." find a safe space away from any of the schadenfreude mob which populate it by walking rapidly away from the computer only to come back sometime later to find you've suddenly passed away from starvation dehydration exposure to inhuman ugliness or some other downward ticking life meter the sims may be considered a survival garme - that of surviving global consumer capitalism. that moment of slow expiration on a cold hillside on the edges of pinky-white middling class suburbia - an experience which doesn't actually belong to a player because it wasn't scripted by a designer but even worse was shaped by an inhuman system crafted by hyper cynical garme devs out for ca$h players make largely non-meaningful decision and are repeatedly met by only superficially meaningful consequences. both poverties are depicted with physics and flavour resembling life - they end up as stats and damage numbers that's survival garmes. exercises in futility; a trolling griefer's dark paradise // images here surrounded on all sides by people posing convincingly as arts-hats one power station looks much like all the other power stations in chernarus. arma-derived worlds aren't yet procedural - not that it would matter. its inherent artistic / conceptual limitations however are all too apparent no matter what space and place is being presented - and can be infinitely imbued with the insignificance of false player significance it's not that easy to say that we know them when we see them but survival garmes aren't remotely 'post-genre' in the worst possible way: they borrow from everything and so are strictly defined by all they infect there are survival garmes that are top-down and 2d like don't starve. there are survival garmes that are plainly realistic with no enemies but the elements. there are survival garmes set in the distant past and the far future. what they all have in common - apart from mostly being set in early access hell - is that instead of simply ignoring them and inventing healthier electronic play worlds players are (apparently) forced to survive ir underlying and unchallenged conceptual conceits no doubt they'll be more writing about a lot of them over the next couple of weeks. the last five hours have been marked by a staggering apparent diversification in the types of miserablist pseudo experiences to be had in garmes. survival garmes are only a mildly important part of the possibilities of play - so have real fun picking at them celebrating ir permanent undead demise and talking about alternatives to the often mean conservative and unimaginative ideas they represent and embody // republic of bob