Echoing the Christmas truces that took place along the 1914 Western Front during World War I, some DayZ players on Reddit want to spend the day with their baseball bats shouldered and their guns tucked away. Since the game often acts as a sort of laboratory for human behavior, any proposed ceasefire in the DayZ Mod or Standalone alpha will take place as a simple—but maybe revealing—experiment.
With its release Monday, the DayZ alpha has seen a massive influx of players and it's a time of year when people might have an hour or two to sit down with a hot beverage and explore DayZ's gorgeous, nightmarish landscape. Since so many of the survival sim's most terrifying moments usually involve encounters with other human beings rather than the game's zombie antagonists, a Christmas truce seems like the perfect way to see what the mood is like among DayZ's alpha community.
Are you like the person in the motorcycle helmet who challenged me to a pointless fistfight on a lonely hilltop the other day, or are you more apt to give a hungry survivor a cold soda and a can of beans after a long trek through the woods? I guess we'll find out. And that's sort of the strange and interesting point of DayZ for me anyway—the not knowing. What would you do?
