Fridge Logic; There is no Bandit - Thoughts on the 'Anti-Game'

[Swi1ch 39]

So, I had a Fridge Logic moment;

There's a lot of discussion on the subject of Bandits in DayZ; both the humanity mechanic, and the action of firing upon or otherwise being hostile to other players. After hearing Rocket refer to DayZ as the 'Anti-Game', I realised that we have all fallen into the same conditioned box of thinking.

Side note; Rockpapershotgun did a 3 part review on a game called Pathologic, which is definitely an 'Anti-game'. You should read it if you care about games at all.

What do I mean by this? I mean that games have conditioned us to think in certain ways (And I don't mean this in a 'put on your tinfoil hat before the ten year old who saw GTA kills everyone way). An example of this:

You're playing an RPG. Skyrim, Fallout, whatever. You're wandering around, and you see the entrance to a cave. Unless you've never played a game before, you immediately know a few things;

1. The cave has bad guys in it, that will likely grow larger in number or power the further down into the cave you go.

2. The cave may begin or be included in a quest that relates to the main or a sub-plot.

3. The cave probably has shiny things in it that you can pick up to sell or use.

That's how a typical game would handle a cave. In DayZ, or an 'Anti-Game', that cave you stumbled upon might;

1. Take you ten minutes to travel through, only to come to a dead end.

2. Have a few enemies a quarter of the way in, and a single can of beans right at the end.

3. Just kill you as soon as you walk through the door, because you're not meant to go in there in there, at all.

These sort of responses are difficult for players (including myself) to get used to, because they are not in line with what we 'know' about games.

How does this relate to DayZ? Well, because the vast majority of us have fallen into a bucket that we can think only within. Conditioned views of 'what the game is'. Some standard bucket thoughts go something like the following;

1. This is a game where I team up with players to kill/survive vs zombies.

2. This is game where I kill players, with the added challenge of avoiding zombies.

3. This is a game where the goal is to find the best items available in the game.

None of these are right. However, none of these are wrong, either. DayZ doesn't fit within our normal boundaries of what a game 'is'. The closest I can come to for what I think what DayZ 'is', is a game where you try and survive. That's it. Adding anything to the end of that is just a method.

So how does this apply to Bandits? Well, once I started thinking about the game like this, I realised it was somewhat out of place to have this arbitrary point where a player become a 'bad guy'. It's sort of like a punishment (or reward, depending on your point of view), and thus you perform an action and face the consequences of it in a really 'gamey' way. People with bucket thinking want this consequence to be amplified (Longer respawn times for players who kill other players, negative side effects on their character, stuff like that), because they have decided that this is the 'wrong' way to play. Opponents to that line of thinking typically cite 'realism' as the reason for allowing Banditry.

Fact is, the reason Banditry is allowed in this game, is because it is in the game. It is neither right nor wrong, it just happens in this particular game world and mechanics. To punish or reward the choice to kill players make no sense, because that is pushing players towards a particular route. There is no route in DayZ. A good example of this is moral choice systems in games, where it is clearly better to pick one or the other, or to only go with one to maximise the benefit. The benefit of any action in DayZ is entirely dependent upon the situation, and this is where it's role-playing strengths are most apparent. A pure 'innocent' player is at some point going to have to make the decision whether or not to temporarily go 'bad', and kill a player for food so he can survive. A pure 'bad' player is at some point going to have to make the choice whether to co-operate with people so he can survive.

In the end, it is moral ambiguity that is what makes DayZ super interesting. Your mechanical choices at any point only affect that point in time; you sneak into a town and grab some loot. Once you're out of the town, that choice is now near irrelevant. Your role-playing choices however will carry over from before; you shot some guys and have decided to go 'straight'. This will have a constant effect on what you do but this is never enforced by the game.

We are all bandits, and none of us are bandits. We're not supposed to be one or the other. We don't even have to pick. It just is, and that's all there is to it.

Post needs editing badly, but in my world, editing is not needed.

[DaPessimist 1]

What's the benefit of not being a bandit?

Answer? There is none.

Welcome to CoD with Zombies.

[8bitplaya 0]

What's the benefit of not being a bandit?

Answer? There is none.

Welcome to CoD with Zombies.

Did you even read the post?

There is no bandit.

The entire game is what you make it.

[LondonHyena 7]

Good post OP

+1 rep

[Kransthow 1]

big up

[pack.wolf 0]

Have some rep. Excellent post.

[septuscap 42]

There is no route in DayZ.

If you've taken a game theory course, there is something called a dominated strategy.

Take player A and B who encounter each other. Each may be friendly or hostile, and may shoot or not shoot the other. If B is hostile, A must shoot or die. In the basic scenario, since this is a split second decision, A must shoot first.

Take an example where A *knows* that B is friendly. (He has witnessed his good nature or whatever). B still does not know whether A is friendly; so A must shoot B or else be shot by B (due to B in this case being in the basic scenario).

Being friendly is a dominated strategy in this case. You either are shot by the hostile, or shot by the friendly who thinks you are a hostile.

You've basically reduced the game to pre-made groups or running around in newbie gear saying "friendly?" and dying repeatedly until you possibly meet another friendly (the ridiculously small, masochistic percentage of the playerbase to whom meeting a stranger in this world and cooperating is worth the hours/days/weeks of death required to do so).

I don't know that I like the term anti-game; I think the gaming industry is just maturing to give us actual emotional experiences, not just kiddy games. And just because Day Z is an "anti-game" does not mean game design can be thrown out the window. You still need to give friendlies the tools to foster trust with other players.

Holstering weapons to eliminate the split second decision making required at the moment. (The obvious weakness here is the same that we currently have, where some one says "yea I'm friendly too" then shoots the good samaritan in the back a second later).

A recognition system of SOME kind. I'm of the mind that names could pop up on mouse-over but only at close distances (I *hate* servers that randomly pop-up your name at 100m behind a tree). There just has to be some way of recognizing some one, the player models/skins are not different enough, nor the gfx advanced enough, for players to recognize their friends even at spitting distance let alone across a field.

A reputation system that lets players you've come to trust share their experiences with strangers. If player B distrusts C, let him tell his friends; this is completely realistic yet completely implausible, and I'm sick of "realists" trumpeting realism only when it suits them while players end up with an incomplete reality that gimps the entire experience. (this could be implemented via color of the player's name on mouse-over at close distance with shared/subscribed blacklists or whatever).

Implementing realworld-inspired projects that require teamwork on a large scale (ie. introduce a larger threat/horde/etc, allow players to build something with more value than the instant gratification of 'pwning a noob,' a reason to HOLD an area rather than just get in/out with supplies, etc)

Large-scale competition between two in-game "projects" to allow larger teams to form (ie. enemy of my enemy is my friend mechanics, this power plant powers both my town and yours so let's not kill each other, etc).

I can see these possibilities with the map we've been given, and the playstyles I've mentioned are simply not possible at the moment, not just b/c the power plants aren't operational -- the social playstyle is a dominated strategy.

[SupWithThat 2]

Great post OP, repped.

Welcome to CoD with Zombies.

I just don't even.

[Powermolch 3]

Excellent Post.

[WhizzkiddUK 0]

I encounter plenty of friendly players. Only ever been shot once I think, maybe twice.

Is this an American thing? The EU servers are mostly friendly. The only times I have been shot at is on US servers (which I play at night to avoid the dark. I live in the UK).

Why does everyone propagate the myth that this game is just a cod style death match now? It isn't. Rocket himself said the stats show most people are friendly.

[worbat 13]

Makes perfect sense, and I love every minuite of it.

[septuscap 42]

Rocket himself said the stats show most people are friendly.

There's a million ways to interpret a stat :D

Did he post specific stats? I'd be really curious to see them because from my experience players are almost always killing one another. I've come across two friendlies in my time playing so far. Almost every player I've seen has come at me shooting; and many a time in global chat I've seen two strangers cooperate only to have one kill the other soon after.

I'm sure many players play in GROUPS (ie. kills vs. bandage/transfusion/etc stats may be favorable), but they are not friendly to STRANGERS.

[Kolchak (DayZ) 5]

This is rich. "You only think there are bandits because of conditioning." No, a Bandit is a Bandit because that's what we've all chosen to label them, based on their attributes. Is a chair a chair by some divine purpose? No. We call a chair a chair because that's what we've abstracted that configuration of wood/metal/plastic into. It's a normal human behavior, and it's one of the few things that truly separates us from the animals. Without abstraction we cannot have higher cognitive function and complexity of action goes right out the window. If people had never abstracted energy conversion and application devices into engines you wouldn't have cars or cranes, or anything else that one of the main components is 'engine.' You could apply your entire post to almost anything else in your life, objects, living things, especially concepts, you could decide beds aren't actually beds, you could decide your computer isn't actually a computer, but it wouldn't matter.

In the sense of abstraction, as long as someone uses a name to summarize something along with it's properties, that's what it is. The meaning of that abstraction can change from person to person, but there's always some core properties that link them all. So far the only thing that links all Bandits here is that bandits kill other players for some reason. Some people don't count the ones that do it in self defense, some don't count the ones that only kill bandits. But when it all comes down to application of that abstraction it will always end like this:

Guy1: "Is that guy a bandit?"

Guy2: "Saw him kill someone earlier."

*bang, bang, bang*

Guy1: "Go check his pack and we'll get out of here."

As long as bandit = player killer, even if it's just in someone's mind, there will be bandits in this game.

TLDR: There's a picture of a bandit under the word 'kill' on the front page. Thus, there are bandits.

[Swi1ch 39]

TLDR: There's a picture of a bandit under the word 'kill' on the front page. Thus' date=' there are bandits.

[/quote']

I wrote a post in response to this, but then I realised you missed the point entirely, and would probably do so again.

If you've taken a game theory course' date=' there is something called a dominated strategy.

[/quote']

This is the sort of post I was hoping as a response. Some of these points can be attributed to "The game is in alpha". For example, giving incentive for collaborating players to hold an area together. The game just isn't at that point yet (I've written some suggestion posts on how to get it there, so I do agree with you)

Regarding recognition systems; I agree, but I believe the spirit of the game would require any system like this to be role-playing, rather than mechanical. Allowing, for (a terrible, trite) example, two players to set up a cease-fire between them to negate friendly fire would be a horrible solution; I have no better ideas on how to accomplish this specifically. Blacklists would be abused all to hell.

Game theory; This is what really interests me about DayZ, and that is that it deliberately lacks balance in the traditional form. Being friendly is a dominated strategy in Dayz because that's what it's supposed to be, at the current point in time. The point, as I see it, is to throw that game design out the window and create something completely different, and that's what's so wonderful about it, along with why the servers are tanking so hard and there's so much rage (Not point at you, don't worry) about the game in general.

There's LOTS of things to come yet in DayZ. But what won't be one of them is what we have come to regard as normal balance; if something is the best strategy, it will be the best strategy.

Edit.

I wrote a post here http://dayzmod.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3420 about a dynamic world, which I believe would provide these incentives to work co-operatively, but without forcing anybody to do anything.

Edit 2.

If you're interested in game theory as it pertains to video games, as I assume you are, PLEASE go and read Rockpapershotgun's article on Pathlogic. It is super interesting and I think you'll find so too.

[Kolchak (DayZ) 5]

TLDR: There's a picture of a bandit under the word 'kill' on the front page. Thus' date=' there are bandits.

[/quote']

I wrote a post in response to this, but then I realised you missed the point entirely, and would probably do so again.

If you're not willing to even engage in conversation with people, why did you post this on a forum? I got your point, you just missed mine. But I think there's an even bigger problem. I can understand why you think this is some kind of revolutionary design strategy, the whole "We put people in a world with stuff, give them ways to use that stuff, but we don't keep their score or give them guidance." thing. But it's not, it's actually some of the oldest game design. In the past games were so limited by the technology of the time, the funding that wasn't available, and the sheer lack of experience, the easiest way to design a game was to make the only limits on the player what they could do in the world with the things or abilities they have. If you tried to do something that wasn't intended, it just wouldn't work, but you could try everything. The way you knew you were doing something right is, it would work. There were no wrong choices, if it worked, it was the right thing to do. DayZ has the same design, only it's made on a base that allows for pointless or detrimental endeavors. The games of the past would have done the same if they had the technology we do now.

The part where you really go wrong is when you say Survivors assume that being a Bandit is the wrong way to play, and that's why we label them that. I'm fairly certain no survivor said "Oh he's got a bandit skin, he's doing it wrong." before they shot them. You can assume we have these grand ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, but in reality, it's much simpler. We have no need for these deep thoughts. We have chosen to associate the word Bandit with someone who kills other players. Because of that, they represent a part of the game that goes against our long term goals, our own survival. We don't go roll in our fireplaces, throw grenades and then lay on them, or try to hug zombies, in the same way, we try to escape, kill, or avoid bandits. That label is the abstraction that makes it easier for us to categorize them and as people we do what makes things easier for us.

You're saying being labeled a bandit is arbitrary, I'm agreeing, but also saying that it being arbitrary doesn't change anything. When it comes to people judging other people it will be the way it always has, (even though I know this is a bit before your time): "You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions." As long as there are people who kill other people, there will be Bandits.

[deadbolt (DayZ) 10]

the social playstyle is a dominated strategy.

no, playing alone and trusting people is a dominated strategy, i have seen large groups form on multiple servers, mostly has to happen on ts or vent but its completely possible

[Wired 1]

There is a key point being missed by all who are in favor of leaving no game mechanic to deal with bandits: Murdering other players is the ONLY playstyle where even if you fail, you are back in the game after loading and ready to do it again. A spray of Makarov bullets will take you down, no matter how much you covet your pile of shiny gear.

Also, I actively mock anyone who thinks it is more realistic to have no one able to tell if you are a killer. The only reason why you are killing people on a server to grief their experiences is because there are no ramifications to you. If there were more severe ramifications, you wouldn't play at all.

[deadbolt (DayZ) 10]

If there were more severe ramifications' date=' you wouldn't play at all.

[/quote']

true, because i would find the game way to boring without pvp

[Wired 1]

Than by all means, CoD is that way.

Now, before someone jumps on me for being a carebear keep in mind that I actually have no problems with PKs in general. The first time I was killed I said "Whateva!" And the second time someone tried to get me I got the jump on them.

I also feel that the bandit skin doesn't work too well as a deterrent against those who are just going to suicide over and over again on players who are actually trying to survive.

It IS unfair to some to leave the option out. I don't believe EVERYONE who PKs does so because they want to just kill people over and over again without any ramifications. But there are plenty of those who do, and seem to want this game to to become their personal playground where they can hop on with the ease of any dm game out there and waste people...except most of the people they run into aren't willing to fire first.

But really, what IS the difficulty in playing this game as a pure bandit? You kill someone, you have everything you need to survive that other people have to carefully prepare for. You die, you start over with the stuff you need to just keep killing other players.

To clarify my point:

A survivor needs to know where water sources are, make sure they can find food, maybe grab a knife to hunt animals, supplies to repair a vehicle, ammo to even get most of these as they have to go into zombie infested towns...

What does a bandit need? What he spawns with. On his way to hunt the richer targets that think the non-coast areas are safe, he can even pick up an extra gun along the way. Sometimes you can play by being a survivor at first and then switching to a bandit, but you achieve your goals faster by abusing a trust system survivors often need.

[cimex 0]

I wrote a post in response to this' date=' but then I realised you missed the point entirely, and would probably do so again.

[/quote']

Okay, you have fresh eyes here. So, let's see your reply.

[deadbolt (DayZ) 10]

so how exactly would there be any pvp in this game at all if the consequences to killing are so severe that the people that kill for fun wouldnt even do it?

[colosseum 2]

Brilliance.

---

so how exactly would there be any pvp in this game at all if the consequences to killing are so severe that the people that kill for fun wouldnt even do it?

I imagine it would get rid of the random griefing snipers and other nonsense and replace it with actual bandit raiding in teams and whatnot.

In other words, how it would really be in real life if this situation were to occur. People don't turn into psychopaths who wait under a tree and snipe people. They get into groups, teams, gangs or what have you and fuck shit up with a purpose, not just because they feel like trolling others.

[deadbolt (DayZ) 10]

Brilliance.

---

so how exactly would there be any pvp in this game at all if the consequences to killing are so severe that the people that kill for fun wouldnt even do it?

I imagine it would get rid of the random griefing snipers and other nonsense and replace it with actual bandit raiding in teams and whatnot.

In other words' date=' how it would really be in real life if this situation were to occur. People don't turn into psychopaths who wait under a tree and snipe people. They get into groups, teams, gangs or what have you and fuck shit up with a purpose, not just because they feel like trolling others.

[/quote']

i dont see how it would work though, if the consequences are so severe that the people that really love to kill dont, then why would the people that only want the gear do it?

[septuscap 42]

no' date=' playing alone and trusting people is a dominated strategy, i have seen large groups form on multiple servers, mostly has to happen on ts or vent but its completely possible

[/quote']

Of course, and most people do exactly this. Make their pre-made group that they trust and then kill any other randoms they encounter. What I am referring to is not the lack of grouping but the interactions with "the other." (google if you have not heard this term) My grouping with 5 of my friends makes it a TEAM deathmatch (of course of a different nature due to its larger map and additional pve objectives), but a deathmatch nonetheless.

It'd be extremely interesting to have players actually hold structures to some purpose (factory makes ammo, hospital makes antibiotics, power plant powers many of these structures, etc) and allow for more than one possible interaction with another group. Imagine actually sending an envoy over to the group over at the factory to try and trade for your medical supplies, or paying tribute to the group at the power plant for keeping the power on. Or just killing them all and holding it for yourself.

None of this makes any sense with the current implementations. Buildings are made to scavenge and leave, not hold down & defend. There is no reason to cooperate with a stranger, or even wait and figure out what his goals/intents are before shooting him. Trade isn't worth the risk when you can simply re-enter some secluded town over and over and stock up on supplies. In fact, would it be possible to make # of players on the server a factor when spawning loot? Maybe we should save that for another thread :/

[callahan9119 7]

I think the problem is that altruism is not rewarded and banditry...or being a fucking psychopath is rewarded based on your faceless anonymity and the complete lack of consequences for your actions. I thought the bandit skins were a good half step towards solving this, although poorly implemented. The biggest problem is the difficulty in communicating, so an unnecessary and unrealistic muted fear pervades every human interaction. You cannot communicate realistically, and the game's design punishes you for that. You can't tell the cut of a man's jib in this or at least have a guess, like you would in real life.

Yes it is a "zombie apocalypse", but the limitations currently eliminate the humanness of the interaction between players who are not connected via an independent voip, wo you already know are friendly. I think the current system or "vision" is fine, but not with the limited ability to communicate with other players. I would think in a real situation, people would be meeting up forming groups or "clans" to use videogame speak and working together...but the limitations are not conducive to having this type of mechanic as they require you to form them outside the game, and clans bring their own inherent set of problems. It's a hard problem, thank god it's alpha.

And analogies about Skyrim or other single player games don't really mean much.