Diversion

Yeah enough thinky stuff.
Game review time!

This thing called DayZ came to my attention.
It's utterly geek friendly. By that I mean a bit of tech knowledge may help even before you launch it.
So what the hell is it?
It's a fairly brutal multi-player game. You're a "survivor" with incredibly basic equipment (depends on the server you log on to, but the standard issue is basic). You're in a world full of zombies. You need food, drink, warmth, and you need to survive, so you need bandages and weapons.

Why am I bothering to write about it? Well it's a "mod" a modification of a game called Arma 2. Arma 2 is a strange game in itself, aiming to be a very realistic modern military simulator. It manages on a lot points. A single bullet will kill you, pretty much instantly. Your storage space is based on your pockets, tool-belt and backpack. It's very limited. You can catch infections, or more rapidly just bleed to death if you can't bandage yourself up fast enough. Pain makes your vision blur and shake. Broken bones stop you moving. Blood loss slowly blurs the entire world in to grey as the pain pounds away. You can forget "I've got 40,000 hit points and a codpiece of non-damage" here.

There's your feel of the game. Now back to the tech bit. It's geek heaven. You can't even run it with just Arma 2 installed. You need a whole mission pack of extras to bolt on to Arma 2 first. Even then, you're best off downloading a further add on called "DayZ Commander" to browse the 6,000+ listed servers and find one right for you, and then download even more maps and variations to play. Once you're in the game the tech assault doesn't end. This isn't your standard GUI. It's not going to hold your hand and tell you what this does to that. It feels like the entire keyboard is configured to do something weird with any key at all, and what you do with your mouse to get things to happen is perplexing to begin with. Think steep learning curve. It makes sense once you get the hang of it, but initially it's a case of "I have no idea how to do anything".

It's worth adding in here that the graphics are up there in the "really very good" category. If anything it relies on blur filters and light contrasts a fair bit, but actually that doesn't harm it at all, and blends with the visual damage from bleeding and throbbing pain. At times it's almost artistic, but it's always very easy to feel you are there. The quality of daylight changes, night time is nicely gothic, the rain really does get you down, and you can see the sun glare slowly fade as you emerge from cover in to bright sunlight again. Lets just say that it's immersive enough. You can moan that you can't get in to more buildings, but that's about it. They still look nice from outside.

So what some genius did was plonk that sort of simulation, in to zombie apocalypse land. The result is fairly intense! To give you an idea, apparently the average life span of a "survivor" is slightly over one hour.

But ... around about your 5th or 6th life time in DayZ, you start to get a bit of a grip on how to survive, (the lessons are fairly brutal), and here's why it has a bit of a cult status. It's not actually the zombies that are the most dangerous things in DayZ. It's the other players. Here the game pings in to a new kind of multi-player environment. There is no dungeon to team up on. You can either fight together or against each other. The rewards for taking down a well equipped player are tempting. You can spend hours or even days scavenging for the same results. On the other hand, your survival rate as a duo at least are hugely enhanced. Blood transfusions can only be made by another player, and that can be a life line. Mentally though, you're still thinking it's another mouth to feed and they better pull some weight. There's not even any moral compass added by the game designers here. This is it. You're a survivor in a world full of zombies, there are other people around sometimes, how do you deal with it?

The whole basic need vs greed morality debate suddenly hits you right between the eyes. How nice are you actually? Given you have to survive in a world full of zombies. How much do you trust other people? Suddenly that "Where are you? Let's meet up." in conversation isn't as simple as it looked.

To add to that mental pressure, this is a game with one life. You start a game, you can log out and back in on the same character with the same equipment right back where you logged out ... until you die. Then you have to start again from zero. That doesn't sound so bad if you're only surviving an hour or so anyway. It becomes a major mental factor when you've managed to survive for a week.

I'm not sure I've managed to get it across in this little review, but this is one hell of a brutal strange little sub-genre of game in all kinds of ways. It seems to bring out the best and worst in people.

So there's your basic review. Insanely hard to get in to. But actually .. something quite special if you ever do. A total departure from immortal, hand holding, user friendly, "which guild are you in?" online games.

But wait up .. something else I noticed. I know many players just treat DayZ like any other game. But I noticed something that reminded me of William Gibson going on. I really do need to be in the right frame of mind to log in to DayZ. It grows when you are in the game. You pause, gather yourself and then plan ahead the next scavenge, open the doors and cautiously look around. Time to move on again... It's the game that finally has me "jacked" in to it. From log on to log out, I'm in DayZ, and that little realisation, is why I bothered to write this blog post.

Adversary Tactics

Heads up.
This one is for the un-zombiefication I intended here.

99% vs the 1%
"They are socio-paths", "Evil cynical gits" and so on and so on ...

Hang on...

Wait up!

I think. You are thinking about this wrong. Just like the 99%'rs, they totally believe what they are doing is the right thing to do. Mind bending huh? But pretty much likely to be true in the vast majority of cases. Even serial killers tend to believe they were doing the right thing.

So if you want to PsyOp this one, you need to retrain the thinking. Once you've got that "They really think they are doing the best thing" under your hat, it begins to be easier to see where logic and questions can be applied and asked to undermine it rather than all out pointless confrontation.

But...

There's a problem.

People holding right wing, homophobic, racist and generally intolerant views (in fact the common factor is resistance to change from a norm), have been proven to have lower IQ's.

You're not just figuring out which pillars of unfounded logic to chip away at here, you're dealing with someone who has a relatively reduced mental capacity compared to yourself.

Put that first misconception and that second compounded problem together? And you've got a why left bashes it's brains out against the right again and again and again for decades ...

Fun huh?

Later Edit:
Clarity time. It's just a hunch, but I think many of the people on the right who annoy the left so much are not doing the best they can to sabotage the country. I think a fair few of them just honestly believe (in my view wrongly), that if you protect the money and allow profiteering that jobs will be created and everyone will be happy. They still buy in to trickle down economics and a faith that those at the top act in the interests of the majority. Almost touchingly naive and idealistic perhaps?

Even Later Edit:
I've watched a fair few of these arguments scroll past. Athiest v Christian, Democrat v Republican and a fair few other flavours. The end it seems. Is not the argument. In virtually all cases you have one side with an entrenched world view who is willing to bend rules lets say to preserve that world view. On the other side you have someone with a new idea or approach that conflicts with that view.

Seems stupidly simple, but a battle us weird humans seem to fight every second of every day, focusing on the issues that bring the difference to the light, and ignoring the basic root problem. Fear of change / the unknown vs. new approaches or interpretations that might work better (or worse!).

I don't really have an answer to it. Just a sneaky feeling that this is how humans do it since language enabled it. The side that shouts longest and loudest, wins. That's Democracy isn't it? Oh hell no. Not touching that with a barge pole. It might be the roots for the concept of Democracy. Where we are now is a whole different ball game.

The World According To Me

Nice title huh?

Ok bits of the world...

Assange
It's impossible to be 100% certain, but I'm going with 95% sure the whole rape allegation thing is a set up with the CIA behind it. The lone accuser has known ties with CIA affiliated groups. The CIA is known to frame people with whatever bogus crime they can chuck at them to bring them down. The FBI has even been known to be involved in entrapment in such cases that Federal America doesn't like.

It stinks to high heaven and it plays on the worst side of human emotion. Rape is a horrific thing. By painting Assange as a rapist, they have turned every defender of him in to a "Rape Apologist". Humans tend to think in black and white. That's what it plays on. "The reliable main news media says Assange is wanted for serious rape charges, so he must be a rapist". These people forget who won awards for Journalism and revealed tens of thousands of documents and the Collateral Murder video. If you've not seen that video. Go look on youtube for "Collateral Murder". Go watch a trigger happy helicopter crew waste over a dozen people including those who came to rescue who had been shot already. As far as I know, attempting to get someone who has been shot to hospital is not a crime punishable by death from above. According to Federal America? Yeah it is. Nothing to see here. Move along.

If you're still unconvinced, do your own reading *at source* not via main stream media or some biased blog you found that has already judged Assange guilty of rape.

In my world? Yup. Assange may have some odd bedtime habits. I don't think he's a rapist. I think Federal America just wants him down for revealing the contempt Federal America has for foreign countries and foreign citizens via WikiLeaks.

The Euro
Roll up and witness the spectacle of the 2000's. Witness the unbelievable truth that when it comes down to it, it's not Goverments that control the world. It's the money that control's governments. You will not believe how the goal posts can be moved, time can be bought or how many millions of citizens can be screwed in to the ground to protect the interests of ... money. It's a meme thing. It's not (in my view) some vast Illuminati conspiracy. It's a meme. I know of some fairly clever people in the fiscal world who are still baying for the money presses to turn, for anything at all to happen to keep the market bullish to a degree and screw the people. They are not in some huge group (ok maybe the masons, but I doubt the women are so much).

It's just the mantra since around the 1980's (depends where you draw the line) has been continual growth, ever expanding liquidity based on ever expanding trickery. The ride can't stop. We made billions out of this! It just can't stop! Blame the population on less than average wage. Screw them. I want my thousands to keep piling up like they have done for decades ... The rich get richer. That's how it works right?

That's what you're up against. The machine can't fail for these people. They will happily short a falling market to make a profit. But when defaults and wipe out bankruptcy on a large scale becomes an issue? Oh hell no. They can't go there. Might actually loose a bundle of cash on that one.

Stupidity
We live in a world of sheep.
It's annoying as hell how these people breed and spread yet more sheep. We live in a world where potential statesmen can talk of "Legitimate Rape" and how women can magically reject sperm if it's not. We live in a world where people still believe the every word of the bible is true (that they choose to focus on). We live in a world of climate change deniers. On this already screwed up world we then have yet more billions who focus on the actions of minor celebrities and brand label products to validate themselves and determine who they can and can't associate with. It's the same world harbouring the new wave of Nazi. A whole wave of people who hate immigrants, gays and any other bogus religion except their own bogus religion.

But hey ... don't worry ... we can make jokes on Twitter and get pissed off with all that and just ignore it ...

Uh... Yes that's tempting. But it just lets the whole things slide towards slowly getting more and more stupid as each year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second passes.

It's insanely hard work fighting stupidity when you're outnumbered by thousands to one. But ... What's the alternative?

...

The world according to me is pretty bleak isn't it? On some levels I can get by on the fact I've just got this lifespan to go, then I'm out of it. Having children complicates it. Feels to me like there's little I can do beyond chipping away as best I can to give them a very tiny bonus for when I'm gone. I try to tell them not to be sheep. I don't know if it will stick. The sheep seem to be winning. If the sheep win. My children loose.