Stories and Worlds

DayZ is a transmedia storyworld. Its diegesis is expressed in multiple ways in a variety of media, including games, a website and a novel, as extracted above. Its originating form was that of a ‘mod’, a term used to describe the modification or expansion of an existing commercial videogame (Egenfeldt Nielsen, Heide Smith and Pajares Tosca 2008:159). In the case of DayZ, developer Dean Hall took the military simulator game ARMA II and its expansion pack ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead and transformed them into a multiplayer open world survival horror game (bbc.co.uk/news 2012). The scenario is that a fictional post-Soviet state called Chernarus has been attacked by a virus which has previously eradicated most of the world’s population. As a player you’re told you can either act alone or team up with fellow survivors to negotiate the hazardous wasteland. Your opponents include zombies and other players (dayzmod.com). Dean Hall and the creators of the ARMA II game, Bohemia Interactive, are currently developing a standalone version of DayZ.