Many video games draw players in with fast-paced, vibrant gameplay that provides instant gratification through hyperstimulation and perpetual rewards; however, Project Zomboid offers players a different form of engagement, replacing constant distraction with lingering tension, infinite respawns with life-threatening fear, and hectic voicechats with disquieting isolation. Project Zomboid, first released in 2013, is an open-world horror survival game set in a post-apocalyptic zombie pandemic. Viewing their avatar from above, players explore vast tracks of empty land and abandoned buildings, stealthily avoiding monstrous hordes and managing an overwhelming number of game windows, toolbars, and icons. Players must keep track of their health, search endless cabinets for the simplest of supplies, and pay attention to their surroundings, lest they meet their end while rearranging their backpack or ripping curtains into bandages.

My screen as I look death in the eyes. The minimap shows where “The Pub” is for new players.

 

I chose to study Project Zomboid because it offers an experience that is unlike many other games. While many virtual worlds are premised on creativity, humor, and socialization, Project Zomboid makes survival fraught, limits opportunities for levity, and often leaves players stranded, adrift from their companions in a bleak terrain. Thus, I entered the game with a guiding question: how do players make a hostile environment a comfortable place? As with any horror game, I assumed that there would be players who took the life-or-death stakes seriously, but I also assumed there would be players who went beyond pessimism and morbidity, focusing instead on building a community that transcended the game’s eerie, unforgiving atmosphere.

My point of entry was a “nostalgia server,” a server designed to give players a more authentic, “vanilla” experience, which means that modifications to the original game would be limited. While many servers employ mods, I felt that, as a beginner, it would be best to understand the base game before adding any other features. Even in its limited form, the server proved to have quite the learning curve. Averaging around 15-20 players for the duration of my observation, this server was populated by serious Project Zomboid players, many of whom lived in fear of losing their hard-earned settlements and supplies or who scoffed at questions from beginners like myself. While the server offered a Discord voicechat, no one joined it while I played, and so the Discord textchats offered asynchronous communication while the in-game textchats offered synchronous communication. It was in the Discord chats that I first began to uncover the sense of a community that had more to offer than the morose: after wandering aimlessly through an empty mall, I found myself near death, so I popped into the Discord and found that there were checkpoints and communities established for new players, such as a pub where people left cars filled with gas.

A town players had built.

Armed with a new sense of possibility, I paid close attention to the chat as my plans to find others were waylaid by a massive storm. I couldn’t continue my travels for fear of getting sick from the cold, so I spent the night in an abandoned restaurant. But across the server, players were doing the same. In the in-game chat, senior players made jokes about the weather and caught up with familiar players. Faced with dispersed isolation and danger, they found humor in the game’s gritty realism, and they played off of narratives that had been built in their time together. Looking back through their messages in the Discord, I found older talks in which the players shared Meyers-Briggs personality types as well as playful memes that brought their in-game experiences to bear on the current global pandemic: the irony of delighting in an apocalypse during a global health crisis was not lost on them.

As the skies cleared, I made my way towards the aforementioned settlements, where, without meeting a soul, I would find abundant supplies and directions to find other people. There were strange social contradictions: in a challenging survival game, players with little excess gave supplies to players who they may never meet. They played not for optimal individual survival, but for the creation of a space that is comfortable and familiar to both new and old players, knowing that brutality could only end in the server’s inevitable depopulation. I was only briefly able to interact with players, many of whom, despite friendliness, chose to keep to themselves. Why, in a game that is perhaps more easily and tactically played solo, did players choose to join a multiplayer server, especially if they seemed uninterested in some of the social aspects?

Other questions required more ethnographic work as well, such as how these in-game settlements came into being, sustained themselves, and built stories over time. Project Zomboid offers an alternative to the fast-pace of many goofy virtual worlds, instead requiring greater skill, patience, and isolation, the last of which is perhaps difficult to accept in a socially-oriented field of study. By inhabiting these settlements, visiting players who live far afield, and trying to gain mastery over the game’s complex survival system, an ethnographer could learn a great deal about the quietness, the loneliness, and comfort of a more subdued multiplayer experience. I leave you with the unsettling soundtrack to the game, one which sets the mood for a fraught experienced rendered more palpable by the kindness of online strangers.