DayZ is an award winning free 2012 multiplayer open world survival horror mod designed by Dean Hall for the 2009 tactical shooter video game ARMA 2 and its 2010 expansion pack, ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead. The mod places the player in the fictional post-Soviet state of Chernarus, where an unknown virus has turned most of the population into undead, violent zombies. As a survivor with limited supplies, the player must scavenge the world for supplies such as food, water, weapons and medicine, while killing or avoiding both zombies and other players and sometimes non-player characters - in an effort to survive the zombie apocalypse.
DayZ has been widely praised in gaming media for its innovative design elements, with Kotaku and Eurogamer describing it as possibly the best zombie game ever made, PC Gamer calling it one of the most important things to happen to PC gaming in 2012 as well as one of the five scariest games of all time, and PC PowerPlay giving it its Game of the Year award as well as ranking it as the overall fifth best PC game of all time. The mod reached one million players in its first four months on 6 August 2012, with hundreds of thousands purchasing ARMA 2 just to play it.
The mod version of DayZ remains in continued development by its community. The standalone game version is currently in development by Dean Hall and ARMA 2 creators Bohemia Interactive.





DayZ attempts to portray a realistic scenario within the gameplay, with the environment having different effects on the player. A character may receive bone fractures from damage to their legs, go into shock from unexpected ambushes, receive infections from zombies or diseased players, or even faint due to low blood pressure. Thirst and hunger must be kept under control by finding sustenance in either cities or the wilderness, with body temperature playing a key part in the character's survival.[1] The game focuses on surviving and the human elements of a zombie apocalypse by forcing the player to acknowledge basic human needs like thirst, hunger and shelter. These mechanics require the player to focus on immediate goals before they can consider long-term strategies.[2]

DayZ is praised for its level of emergent gameplay. BuzzFeed author Russell Brandom suggested that the mod has spawned the first photojournalist in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, creating articles that are not only about a game world but journalism told from within it.[3] Brandom claimed that DayZ is a unique example of the MMORPG genre in giving players the freedom to harm/murder each other, whilst adding no restrictions on how or why they may do it, quoting a player who described it as "the story of people".[3] The mod has been compared by Kotaku to The Walking Dead and its focus on interactions between the characters when faced with desperate situations. The players in DayZ are forced to deal with dilemmas in similar ways as portrayed in both the comics and TV series for The Walking Dead.[4]
It has been proposed that DayZ provides some insight into people's motivations and behaviors when reacting to real crisis events, mirroring controlled experiments of a similar nature. However, some critics of this theory argue that participants do not react as they would in a real world situation in which their life is truly threatened.[5] Despite the game being biased towards self-interested, hostile competition, many players enter the game with their own perceptions and priorities. These varied approaches and experiences within the game suggest that even in a system that should theoretically promote rational behaviour, people act in unexpected ways. It has been proposed that this dispels the idea that chaos is an objective and defining feature of the system, rather it is what players make of it.