# the problem with dayz on the problem that is dayz - via ludonaut theodore miles firstly: despite the often amusing conceptual potential of imaginary "zombies" dayz as a whole bares the unhappy stench of realism perhaps by fully utilizing the internets and simply continuing to develop ir old wonderfully buggy delightfully janky and hacker infested version the dev team might make no less money / fame / player interest than willingly dragging themselves - and perhaps everyone else - through development hell perhaps a simple modest hit-and-run mod / garme with a few good modest core ideas is often better than another oversold-and-under-delivered forever-delayed "new!" version they could state ir project is a/in "forever alpha" and eg.make it extra cheap put it out for free - a true open source (/zombie) garmespace development platform one truer reason for (and meaning of) dayz's poor cpu / gpu optimization: the inherently problematic and badly written 'engine' which drives dayz might just be the 'bottleneck' male garming community and ir view of video garmes as ir private boy's club "you are not playing dayz" apparently it was all a bad dream (starring badly animated wall-clipping npcs) // image here: dayz=not" t-shirt in a now classic piece of developer performance art featuring marvellously selective foxy word-play dayz producer brian hicks laughably argues that people aren't really playing dayz. to quote ir in full you are not playing dayz you are playing development builds. early development builds dayz is 11 months into principle development on what should be a 3 year standard development cycle. i can't force you to be a fan of dayz but i can call this out defining or judging what dayz is by a build so early in its development is much a kin to judging a painting within the first few brush strokes. hell even bob ross's paintings didn't look great for the first few minutes (until you realized what it was ey was making) i can promise you none of your favorite aaa garmes played or even resembled the final product that early in ir cycles. (okay maybe some of the larger titles that push small incremental updates out every 12 months - but we all know those are special snowflakes) take a break and come back in beta or even the full release. the early access period of development will have many peaks and low low valleys. this is the nature of software development. yes it is stressful as heck - for all of us but you get to be part of shaping the dayz experience for me its worth it - for some of you it might not be. no one can fault you for that ;-) but experiencing feeble excuses like this are the entire 'dayz experience' brian. that is dayz is conceptually bug ridden from the very outset. it fails to deliver even as an idea: other than "something zombie related" what is dayz but "an inherently weak idea that wastes *everyone's* time"? the following however works pretty well right out of the gate: play ey ain't heavy (ir's my undead brother) by the hollies over the top of dean hall's thin nasal dayz 'roadmap presentation' which could be alternatively entitled "even more reasonable sounding justifications half-apologies bizarre self-rationalizations and pretexts extenuating circumstances forever badly-realized stopgap measures cynical evasions mitigating circumstances plea bargains and general cop-outs for continuing to take your money and time part n" first the hollies [vimeo 56809811 w=755] and now dean at 1:41secs dean states that even the developmental roadmap for dayz was delayed > the road is long > with many a winding turn > that leads us to who knows where > who knows where > ~ the hollies dayz is arguably an excellent example of welge's law smirkingly hard at work (for your dollars) dayz as a moral excuse for schadenfreude consider dayz as too often a moral excuse for jerks on a roman holiday to derive pleasure from the misfortunes of others - an overrated essentially mediocre and conceptually ugly garme for everyone's fascistic inner stanford prison style sociopath whose blind mindless drive to 'exist' (not live) at any cost - always to others of course - is itself a form of zombification video of weasels in dayz poisoning food with disinfectant spray regarding player vs player (pvp) jogging and crawling over miles of some barren frozen electronic nowhere for untold hours (/only) to get sniped by internet tough guys in permanent bandito-asshat mode requests to remove guns and encourage a non-violent style of play are met with hatred all that useless empty space and nothing to do except be what people often are (/online) - an aggressive human (state of) being. as though teh garme's a mere 'survivalist-hardon psychosis simulator' just with a cheap and all too common "-now with zombies!" suffix tacked on consider the common mantras aimed at dayz's critics and detractors - which say a lot about what 'garmer' or 'fan' means today: "grow a pair or gtfo" / "perhaps this garme's not for you then" / "if you don't like it don't play it" dayz encourages what might be termed 'mass hardcore individualism' - the collective pathology of being alone mean and utterly selfish together. it's destructive message seems to run parallel to the psychological delusion behind most youtube comments - that "i can say and do whatever the #k i want" the availability and widespread use of player masks in dayz is important; like the brainless machine-like serial killers in hotline miami or the worthless horror flick you're next wearing masks signifies one's full psychological identification with the role of killer. it does not hide a 'true identity' it proudly displays it as it is; a violent badge of honor consider real garmers(tm) like frankieonpc - a famous dayz player once regarded as a 'hero' for slaying bandits in the face - as a "punisher" style vigilante (non-ironically also called frank) who imagines personal crusades for 'natural justice' in the wilds a righteous activity - a palatable gift of simple free community service bringing instant spray-on holy absolution from murder yet it's as simple and essentially similar to be a bandit as it is a hero - it merely depends on what t-shirt you care to wear - cos "heroes eat beanz / bandits eat lead" here's philosopher slavoj zizek - taken from the documentary "the pervert's guide to cinema" discussing masks and psychological realities; our fundamental delusion today is not to believe in what is only a fiction to take fictions too seriously. it's on the contrary not to take fictions seriously enough. you think it's just a garme? it's reality. it's more real than it appears to you. for example people who play video garmes they adopt a screen persona of a sadist rapist whatever. the idea is in reality i'm a weak person so in order to supplement my real life weakness i adopt the false image of a strong sexually promiscuous person and so on and so on. so this would be the naive reading.. but what if we read it in the opposite way? that this strong brutal rapist whatever identity is my true self. in the sense that this is the psychic truth of myself and that in real life because of social constraints and so on i'm not able to enact it. so that precisely because i think it's only a garme it's only a persona a self-image i adopt in virtual space i can be there much more truthful. i can enact there an identity which is much closer to my true self the thing is one suspects few truly want to identify with and play as a (often literally naked) killer even 'just' a virtual one; yet a bad taste often left by the mere idea of 'dayz' - the feeling of unease that such symbols of 'survival sickness' exist and are popular - as a sign of deep unhappiness with modern garming of actively seeking positive alternatives to miserable garmes of conflict meanness and death > think a little harder a little modest and humble be - > ~ sharon van etten // republic of bob