Joss Widdowson is the first photojournalist of MMORPGs, telling tales from the front line of an endless online war.
"A customer arrives to make a trade."
Source: dayzpvp.com
This picture comes from DayZ, a brutally realistic zombie game built on top of ArmA II, a popular combat simulator. The bulk of the game is simple kill-or-be-killed combat, but because of its loose structure and large player base (over a million), DayZ has fostered a lot of surprising talents along the way. There are doctors, wandering merchants and, most recently, at least one photojournalist.
His name is Joss Widdowson, a former arts student from York, England who cut his teeth photographing itinerant dancers in Ghana. His latest project is the thorough, clear-eyed depiction of the endless war going on inside DayZ. He filed his first report this morning, after a skirmish at a trading post the weekend before. "It was a night's work," he told me, "but a really good story emerged from it."
A group called Freeside Trading Company had staked out a camp where players could trade items safely, with remote snipers keeping the peace. A group of bandits appeared out of nowhere, driving the traders and their customers into a small tower, where they were picked off one by one. The climax came after the last traders had been wiped out. The attackers swarmed into the tower and a third group arrived to blow it up, killing the remaining attackers and wiping the slate clean.
Widdowson was killed halfway through, as part of a failed reconaissance squad, but thanks to some reporting outside of the game, he still managed to put together a surprisingly detailed account, complete with the kind of photography you usually see coming out of a war zone.
"Juicebox and Santaman wait round a fire for the Company to regroup."
Source: dayzpvp.com
I was atop the tower photographing of one of their sniper team when it happened. The shot rang out and the sniper fell to floor before my eyes. I immediately hit the deck and crawled panicking back down into the tower.
The report is likely to be the first of many, thanks to the gushing response from Reddit and the DayZ fan sites. It's not just journalism about a game world; it's journalism told from within the game world, with all the reporting and writing done entirely in character. All of the names in the piece are handles. Skimming Widdowson's work, you might easily think DayZ's Chenarus was a real place. The only tip-off is the section on hackers, who frequently pop into the game to destroy the traders' camp, or turn all the players into chickens.
"I really didn't want the piece to be about hackers, but I do kind of have to mention them," he complained to me a few days after the skirmish. "It's their biggest problem."
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