No surrender

[No surrender]

If you're going to have balanced combat, diplomacy isn't viable. Apocalypse develops from the point of the incident where it is most chaotic, social ties don't influence probability of survival immediately. Most of the population is going to die anyways and it is mostly chance as to whether any citizen survives. The beginning is the "New World," or colonization. Like in the colonization of the very initial colonization of the Americas, individuals had very similar overall chances of success as those of families and organization. Notably in history this period is the longest. During the apocalypse, this period is the shortest. People don't need to learn how to survive off the land, they need to worry about the logistics of equipment. While the basic requirements of the body in antiquity will remain constant, the skills required to satisfy them are dramatically reduced.

 

Given the threat of zombies, robbers, and murderers (not mutually exclusive), defense is the most important resource. Without weaponry people can't survive. They can't raid towns for food, they can't protect themselves from marauding bandits, etc. Since weaponry is vastly available and impossible to independently fabricate (compared to the past), the world is immediately divided into the armed and the weaponless in a matter of days after the initial panic. Once this hierarchy is established, the colonization stage fades into the "frontier stage," where three groups exist. Two, the family and the criminal exist from the "old world." Among these preexisting groups the rate of the survival of each party member is dramatically reduced compared to the new group, the individual. These people can have been from anywhere in the old society. This is the world of DayZ, this is the character the game must serve to.

[No surrender]

Providing an option to be neutralized completely removes any sense of immersion from a game that is supposed to provide an authentically sensational experience. Here's why:

Once you open the can of worms that is non-lethal diplomacy under [intense] pressure, you have to take into account the social nature of human instinct: submission of one's physical form is a very intimate act: one meaningless in a video game where the sole attachment the player is supposed to have is to their body.

 

In a game with check points and a story, the player becomes attached the character's character; Imprisonment in such games provides something that can drive the plot and engage the mind. In an open world survival game, the obvious solution to every engagement is to indicate surrender. after all, if the game's combat is at all balanced (which it should be), there is just as much of a chance that one combatant is killed as the other. However if one avatar surrenders immediately, they have enormously increased chance of survival: the other player is faced with the following possible actions and consequences that demonstrate how any competitive player would take advantage of this system:

1) Not trusting: Open fire from a distance: they aren't anywhere near point blank range and find it difficult to kill the yielding player before they return fire now that hostility has been established. The same as if surrender weren't an option.

2) Not trusting: Leave: nothing happens. Would be the same if the the mechanism weren't in place.

3) Trusting: Approach: the non-yielding player approaches the kneeling player, there is a third player (and possibly a few more) already allied with the supposed submitting player. As the non-submitting player draws near they are picked off easily.

 

These scenarios are not problematic in themselves. The following scenarios are problematic and are from the perspective of the naive gamer looking for a hardcore experience:

1) Confusion: As our optimistic hero approaches a surrendered person, he is faced with confusion: if he is smart he will realize that this very well could be a trap. He compares the situation to real life. He has been playing the game for a couple days and has a fairly powerful gun. If reality were in the state of "zombie apocalypse" the only reason anyone would make such a gesture of open surrender is that they are indeed acting in desperation or that they wish to seek a mutually beneficial companionship. While ambush is still a possibility and the man submitting could be only doing so under the force of gunpoint, there would be no reason for our hero's fancied version himself to consider this because he most likely has never crossed paths with such despicable criminals himself, because had he, he would most likely be dead.

 

Coming back to the reality of virtual reality, he decides to trust them. He remains confused because he is aware that he would have approached the other player even if they hadn't been able to surrender given a lack of option, if they did not open fire.

2) Glee: A victim. He doesn't have a gun but he might have other precious loot.

4) Hopelessness in the product of DayZ: The point of the game is to die: if you can't die there is no thrill. Another more subtler gratification of the game is to kill. If you allow yourself to be handcuffed by strangers robbers during the apocalypse...well, you wouldn't have lasted this long.

 

PS

In the "frontier" stage of the apocalypse socialization is the death of the individual.