The best times are with friends.

Pretty much no matter what you’re up to, doing it with friends enhances it in a positive way. Maybe that’s cooking, watching a movie, going to see a ballet or playing video games. Sometimes, the experiences within those experiences, those meta-experiences, are also enhanced because of the presence of friends.

Like trying a brand new spice for the first time in a dish you’ve made before or seeing a cameo from your favorite actor in the latest film. Or finding a bus, repairing it and taking it camping in the apocalyptic zombie wasteland of Day Z.

Emergent gameplay and stories, that is to say interactions and results that aren’t intended by the developer, provide some of the most exhilarating, memorable and downright best moments in video games. And Day Z provided that through its structure. Day Z was so good because it was, when it first released as a mod for ARMA 2, an incredibly unique game.

This was a game that had persistent characters and, while you could hop to any number of servers, players typically stayed on the ones that had the fewest hackers while still maintaining a high player count, almost 100, all sharing a single, seamless map with no loading screens. Proximity voice chat was enabled, so you didn’t need to be in a third-party program to talk with your friends, though you should have been. Else, other players might hear you talking about your plans and the cool guns you’ve found.

And those strangers might just come up and accost you, demanding everything you have with a gun pointed in your face. And that’s just something that could happen. And that’s something you’d have to confront. Was that gun loaded? If it was, were they still going to fire or would they let you go after you gave them all of your hard-earned items? Was there any chance that you could stall long enough for your friends to come to your rescue?

This is a game where you roleplay a survivor in a fictional land called Chernarus while the zombie apocalypse is upon you. It was hard. It was buggy. It was never finished.

But man was it a good time.

Day Z, the mod version of it at least, was a sandbox game – it told you its general rules and that’s it. The fun and adventure was for you to figure out. But this isn’t unique to Day Z, not anymore at least, what with the influx of sandbox open-world survival games that sprung up after it launched about six years ago. They all paled in comparison to the original vision, but that vision never came to be fully realized. That’s neither here nor there, but it was in Day Z that emergent storytelling really seemed to first take root in first-person online survival sandbox games.

In Day Z, everything was an enemy. Fellow players might have tried to befriend you and tag along for the adventure, but those were lies perpetuated online. This was a dog-eat-dog world and most of your fellow players would shoot first and nothing else later. You’d respawn on the server and start over, having lost all your valuables.

Plus, there’s zombies everywhere. And the hit detection and lag increased the difficulty, not to mention the hackers that would suddenly teleport to your position and blast you with a gun that shouldn’t be in the game. But somehow, despite all that, Day Z kept me and my friends hooked.

And it led to some wonderfully fantastic results that other games couldn’t replicate.

The game didn’t tell us to set up an ambush in a bar that overlooked the main road of the city we were looting, but we did anyway. We formulated the plan as we heard their car approaching. We’d been content just looking for food, water, medicine, and most importantly, ammunition. Still, we attacked them.

It also didn’t tell us to make our own adventure and travel from end of the map to the other just to save a friend.

A squad of four of us were traveling together. In Day Z, the mod at least, you spawned at a random location along the southern coastline. And because you can’t choose where you spawn, it’s either a long time of killing yourself and respawning over and over and over to try to find a good starting place or to just play the hand you are dealt and try to locate each other eventually.

We just about always went with the latter. It was more fun that way. And along the coast are some high-value cities that are enormous in size and always full of good loot, buggy zombies and vicious players – those who have just spawned, those who need some better supplies and those who are just looking to pick a fight.

After a little bit of cross-referencing online maps, telling each other where we thought we were and what landmarks we saw near us, we met up and had a good time. Rolling through the dense forests with a pointman leading the way, someone covering the rear and watching our six and the other two fanned out watching the sides.

In cities, two of us would stand guard while two others looted. We’d call out what we’d found and see if someone needed it. But the person who did wind up needing it wouldn’t leave their post. Instead, the looter would come and take over, say where the item was located if they didn’t have room in their backpack for it and the guard would then become the looter.

It was efficient. It was thrilling. And the threats always remained. Zombies, other players who were probably doing the exact same things we were and cheaters.

But we continued along with our survival for a good long while, sometimes getting into skirmishes with other players. You had to be smart though, you couldn’t just win with overwhelming numbers and firepower. Ambushes and strategies, and at times, tactical retreats to lead your pursuers into an advantage for you was the way to play.

It was a dangerous world and you couldn’t trust anyone. Our survival mattered and we couldn’t trust them.

And then one time we heard a cough. And a cough is a bad thing.

That means you’ve been infected. You won’t turn into a zombie, but you will die. Your health slowly whittles down, your hunger and water levels drop faster than they usually do and worst of all, it’s contagious.

Our squad of four became a squad of three plus one – a pointman, someone covering the rear and just one person watching the sides. Far behind the rear, our infected squadmate followed. And it was on us to find some antibiotics, the single rarest item in the game with the lowest odds of appearing in a loot pile, to save him.

Our journey had originally been to get armed, get equipped and then go hunting for players – that was the general gameplay loop. With a sandbox structure, there was no endgame to speak of. Much like the stories, you made the fun yourself.

But now? Now the journey was to save our friend. We were on the northwest part of the map, as far as you could get in that area – home to the fabled Northwest Airfield – where next to no one went due to the distance. But, much like the far more populated Northeast Airfield, military-grade equipment could spawn there. That meant the best guns and armor and ammo and other fun things, like backpacks to stuff more cans of beans into.

However, the hospital with the greatest chances of spawning antibiotics was on the northeast side of the map. The far northeast. Farther east than most people usually go. To a city where no one usually goes. But that just means some people do go there. When you go into Elektro, you expect to run into company. But it’s hard to get ambushed because of how many players visit that city. But when you go to Svetlo, meeting someone is terrifying. They aren’t supposed to be there.

And so we went. And we hunkered down. Watched the trees, chose not to cross open fields but instead went around the long way. Survival was the game, yeah, but survival at that point was all that mattered.

And it was threatened. But not just by our diseased comrade, but by the sandbox.

One time we stayed stuck behind a ridge in thick foliage with a sniper trained on us. We weren’t sure how he spotted us or how long he’d been watching our movement. A bullet whizzed past us and we dropped down behind cover, trying to put trees between us and where we thought he was.

The cough gave away our position though. We knew he knew where we were, but we had no clue where in the trees he was watching us from. And we didn’t know if he had any friends circling around to find a better position to attack us. The stalemate lasted forever.

We tried calling out to him, but we weren’t sure if our voices carried with the proximity microphones. We tried talking our way out of this situation. Our friend was sick, we were on our way to the hospital. We mean you no harm. Is there anything you need? Maybe we can help each other out?

If only we’d kept those smoke grenades. We could have masked our movements and ran away.

Our tense moment ended when one of us decided to play hero and see if he was still there. Poke our head up and if it was still attached, we might have been safe.

The sniper had left. He was apparently content enough to scare us into giving him time to escape a situation where he couldn’t have taken us on as a squad. Instead he could put distance between us and him. He lived to die in another way.

We didn’t want to shoot. We didn’t want to stumble across other players. A shootin’ zombies and players video game turned into an escort mission that no other game has or could pull off. And that’s because of the sandbox.

Eventually, after a long trek of jumping at shadows and being wary of places we’d usually have no issues scoping out and looting, we made it to the hospital. And all of our crossed fingers, miraculously, were enough to roll the dice to hit the right random number for antibiotics to spawn for us.

We saved that friend. We’d later find a bus in that same city. We’d repair it, which involved going to other nearby towns and scavenging for parts, hoping the bus would still be there waiting for us when we came back. We weren’t sure if we were just wasting our time. How were we to know that no other players were doing the same thing? That they had found that same bus?

We were more carefree though in that hunt. We’d accomplished our goal. We’d saved our friend. It was time to get back to the gameplay loop of looting and shooting, but now we wanted to have a vehicle to travel around in.

We named it Dixon. He was a good bus. He was loud though, and he did what we wanted to him to do when he attracted the attention of a nearby player who then got cold feet and ran when he saw our majestic mount.

To keep Dixon safe, we drove into the woods. We built a campfire to warm ourselves up with and talked about our adventures. How amazing this whole experience had been. How great this bus is. Dixon took us to a few more destinations before he simply couldn’t make it any farther and broke down. We could have repaired him, but it would have taken ages and given our proximity to the cities, we didn’t want to risk any other players coming and taking him. He ran, but he didn’t run well.

So, on the count of three, we put him down. We took him into the woods and put Dixon out of his misery.

With hand grenades.

Day Z was a fun game.