Boy oh boy. Chernarus, the fictional soviet republic that hosts DayZ, is a hard place to live and a very easy place to die. DayZ is an important link in the chain that took us from the early craft-'em-up days of the massively multiplayer Minecraft through Player Unknown Battlegrounds and into the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends. You're dropped into the massive world of Chernarus, a place overrun by the infected (read: zombies) and basically left to survive. There's very little handholding, and really the whole point of the game is that thanks to various factors it's a hotbed of emergent gameplay. First off, there are the zombies. On their own, they're not that difficult to deal with so long as you've got a melee weapon to hand. It doesn't take all that many of them for you to become overrun, however. Even with a firearm there's a pretty good chance you'll quickly become zombie food thanks to extremely scarce ammo. If you want to survive, then, you'll need to get creative by scavenging for anything you can get your hands on and making use of the deep crafting system to build useful resources. This can take you deep into resource management territory. You could, for example, choose to survive by hunting out tins of food from the days before the apocalypse, or you could opt to plant a garden to feed yourself with. Which brings us to one of the other factors that makes DayZ so unpredictable... As an always-online game, at any given moment there are up to 60 other players running around Chernarus's world with you. If they see you, will they help or will they murder you and take the fruits of the garden for themselves? There's no formal structure to how you play, and with all those other players each with their own agenda, the potential for surprising moments is huge. As with any great zombie fiction, it's the other humans that are the real danger...