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Do survival games reveal human nature? Let's get into it.
2013 saw the release of a lot of trendy survival games, including Don't Starve, Rust, DayZ,
and NO, not Tomb Raider. Sorry guys, but Tomb Raider is not a survival game. Yeah, you have
to kick boxes and kill pigs to somehow make some sort of super powered fire shotgun.
But it's also only trivial, and you won't die if you don't do it.
Can we please stop calling it a survival game, guys? You know who you are.
Most video games have survival elements, like not dying, but they're not survival games.
In the words of Kevin Forbes, creator of the critically acclaimed Don't Starve, "In survival
games you are not at the top of the food chain anymore, in fact, just staying alive is hard."
It's not 10 year old campers trying to kill you. It's trying to make a camp, and then
starving to death.
In Miasmata, gameplay is momentum-based. Like in real life, you have to slow to a stop when
running and if you don't look where you're going you could fall down and hurt yourself.
Get a little booboo.
Survival games makes you vulnerable, in a way that Lara Croft isn't. Seriously, she
kills like 3000 dudes in that game without batting an eye.
Not a survival game!
Video games really push the line in terms of what we think is acceptable and moral.
In Grand Theft Auto V there is a torture scene in which you actually have to torture somebody.
It's super gruesome and there's no way to skip it.
And a lot of people got really mad about it, in a way that they didn't for torture scenes
in Star Wars,
Princess Bride,
or pretty much the entirety of 24.
This is because you actually have to torture the person.
In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, there's a scene in which you have to massacre a bunch
of civilians at an airport.
It's grim.
These games can really test our humanity, but they don't really reveal human nature
in the way that collaborative survival games do.
Games like GTA V and Modern Warfare 2 didn't give you a choice as to what to do. But some
games do.
Spec Ops: The Line is famous for its bleak outlook on war and is based around a series
of worse and worse decisions you have to make to survive.
But as powerful as this is, you're still making the decisions behind closed doors.
In the Fable series, your actions are measured on a morality scale. The more innocents you
kill or are mean to, the more feared you become and the bigger your horns get.
Seriously, in this game if you're bad, you'll be seriously ***.
Sorry that was a bad joke.
But when it comes down to it, evil or not evil, you're just interacting with computers.
Games like DayZ and Rust reveal human nature in a way that other games can't because it
pits people against people in a world that's already punishing, where the consequence is
not only dying but losing everything you have.
It's called Perma Death.
In Fable you can kill your computer-generated wife, but in DayZ you can actually kill your
real-life wife.
That's messed up.
I watched a play through of DayZ where a gang of experienced players happened upon a couple
of players with nothing but yellow jackets and fire axes.
Instead of murdering them or robbing them at gunpoint, which is pretty common, they
told them to drop the axes in the middle of the road, walk backwards to separate ends
of the road, turn around, run for the axes and fight to the death.
That's messed up!
In any of these games you can be whoever you want.
You could be the guy that says he's friendly and tags along with you, only to beat you
over the back of the head with a pipe wrench the minute you find something he wants.
You can even be a serial killer, because your actions impact a real community of people.
In these survival games, you aren't forced to torture somebody, you decide to do it.
You don't have to massacre a bunch of civilians at an airport, you decide to massacre a group
of naked dudes with rocks in their hands, running for an air drop.
But it's not all dark. These survival games also reveal the greatness
of human nature.
When all those naked dudes were running through a field with nothing but rocks in their hands,
a more experienced player came out and started mowing them down.
He couldn't get them all before they banded together and chased him through a forest with
rocks.
This all happened. Rust is amazing!
You should play it.
They all ended up dying, but they were able to band together to survive in a way that
people just don't in games like Call of Duty.
Groups of people are also drawn together to create amazing things.
In Rust you can find a 300+ story tower that was painstakingly built by a large group of
people.
I came across a clip from DayZ were a guy was being robbed at gunpoint. The guy being
robbed was newer to the game, so the robber ended up taking his can opener, but giving
him a bunch of helpful items in return.
This isn't even mentioning the immense beauty that can be found in Minecraft collaborations.
Seriously, those guys are frikkin amazing.
Do survival games reveal our inner demons?
Yeah, but they also bring out some angels.
What do you guys think? Do collaborative survival games reveal human nature in a way that other
games simply can't?
Let me know in the comments and I'll talk about my favourite comments in the next Friday's
comment video.
If you haven't already, be sure to click right on my face to survive....subscribe.
And if you want to see me play any of the games I just talked about, head on over to
GamezaDaily and check out that channel.
And as always, thanks for watching.