I take a deep breath, wonder why I'm doing this, and then spawn in as a freshie on a server with 21 people on it. Once I've visited those two cities, which will take at least a few hours, I can call it quits and start playing normally again. I'll also make myself visit two big cities, one in the north and one in the south, forcing me to cover a good bit of ground and enter areas in which zombies and players are likely. The servers I play on need to be at least half-full so there are other players around. I came up with a couple ground rules to make sure I don't just squat safely in the woods eating berries for the day and then declare myself a winner. Mostly, though, if I die in today's session, I'll be losing a game I truly enjoy, forever, and that feels pretty heavy. So, there are financial stakes, as well as whatever you call stakes that make you look like a complete moron. What's more, as a games writer, if someone were to contact me (as Graham did) about writing a paid piece on DayZ, not only will I be losing out on that pay, I'll have to explain that I can't play it because I promised the Internet I wouldn't, which makes me sound like a fucking idiot. It's my favorite game of the past few years, and according to Steam, I've sunk 250 hours into it. There are and will be tons of other games to play, and it's not like I'm going to chuck out my entire computer and start, like, reading books or something. Granted, this still may not sound like whole lot in the way of stakes. I'll stop playing DayZ, and I won't play it again. So, today I'll play DayZ, and if I die, I won't simply start over. Survival Week on RPS seems like an apt time to finally give it a try. For a while now (a couple years, to be honest) I've been thinking about a way to up those stakes, to go a step beyond perma-death: perma-permadeath, where dying means you don't just lose your stuff, you lose the game itself. Rather than reloading your last save after you die, you lose all your gear, you lose all your progress, and you essentially lose all the time you've spent playing up to that point. Games with permadeath - wherein you start over completely when you die - provide certain stakes to a gaming session.

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