Good Frustrations: The Paradoxical Pleasure of Fearing Death in DayZ

When a player is killed in DayZ, they lose their character with all its advancement, often equivalent to weeks of play; an enormously frustrating and demoralising experience. However, the majority of DayZ players view this as a positive and attractive feature of DayZ, and one of the keys to its appeal. In this paper we draw on 1,704 responses to a player motivations survey to unpack player experiences of permanent character death and demonstrate how this negative affective moment contributes to the positive affective experience of DayZ more broadly. Author Keywords Affect; death; character death; permadeath; DayZ. ACM Classification Keywords K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General - Games.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: OZCHI
• Authors: Fraser Allison, Marcus Carter, Martin R. Gibbs
• Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, OZCHI 2015