Survival game facts for kids
Survival games are a type of video games where you try to stay alive as long as possible. They usually take place in big, open worlds that can be dangerous. Players often start with very little gear. To survive, you need to find or make tools, weapons, and shelters. You also need to gather resources like wood, stone, or food.
Many survival games create new worlds randomly each time you play. This means every game is a bit different! A lot of these games can also be played online. This lets players work together or against each other in the same world. Survival games usually don't have a clear ending or a "win" goal. They are often similar to survival horror games, which might have scary monsters or a zombie apocalypse setting.
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How to Play Survival Games
Survival games are like an expanded version of a common video game idea: your character is alone and must survive. These games focus a lot on staying alive and exploring a huge, open world. You'll often manage your items and craft new things, which are key parts of games like Survival Kids.
When you start a survival game, you are usually by yourself with very few items. You might not meet any friendly computer-controlled characters (called NPCs). Most NPCs in these games are enemies, so you'll try to avoid them. But sometimes, you have to fight to get important things like food, weapons, or armor.
In some games, the world is made up randomly. This means you have to search for food and weapons. The game might give you hints, like sounds or pictures, to show where resources are. Your character usually has a health bar. You can get hurt by falling, starving, drowning, fire, or attacks from monsters.
Other things can also affect your character. For example, in Don't Starve, you have a hunger meter and a sanity meter. If these run out, your character can die. Dying might not be the end of the game, though. You might be able to reappear (or respawn) and go back to where you died to get your lost items. Some survival games use permadeath. This means your character only has one life. If you die, you have to start the whole game over!
While many survival games keep you in danger, others are more about open-world fun. You can still die if you're not careful or don't have the right gear.
Playing with Others
Most survival games can be played by one person. But many are made for multiplayer, where game servers host a world that many players can join. Because these games are open-ended, players often work together. They team up to survive against the environment and other dangers.
When you play only against the game's dangers, it's called player versus environment (or PvE). When other players are in the same world and can fight you, it's called player versus player (or PvP). This often leads to players forming groups, building strong bases, and protecting each other from both the game's dangers and other players.
Making New Items (Crafting)
Many survival games let you craft new items. This means you combine two or more resources to make something new. For example, in Subnautica, you might use just one resource to make another. Crafting lets you collect basic resources to make simple tools. These tools then help you get better resources, which you can use to make even better tools and weapons.
For example, you might make a wooden pickaxe. This pickaxe can dig up stone, but not metal ores. Then, you can use the stone you collected to make a stronger stone pickaxe. This stone pickaxe can then dig up metal ores! The same idea applies to weapons and armor. Items made from harder-to-find materials give you better attack or defense.
Crafting systems often include how long tools and weapons last. They might break after you use them a certain number of times. Sometimes, the game doesn't tell you how to craft things. You have to figure out the recipes by trying different combinations or by looking up game guides.
Goals in Survival Games
There's usually no "winning" in survival games. The main challenge is to survive for as long as you can. Some games might set a goal for how long you need to survive. Because of this, there's often not a big story. The story usually just explains why your character is in a survival situation.
Some survival games give you quests. These quests help you learn how the game works. They might also lead you to more dangerous areas where you can find better resources. Because of the open worlds and crafting, some games let players build their own structures. For example, Minecraft lets you place blocks to build simple shelters. As you get more resources, you can build huge structures, even copying real-world buildings!
Survival games often have resources that don't grow back on their own. But you can usually do things to make new resources appear. For instance, in Terraria, if you chop down a tree, it's gone. But you can plant seeds to grow new trees.
How Survival Games Look and Work
Many survival games are played from a first-person perspective. This means you see the game through your character's eyes, which helps you feel like you're really there. Other games use different views. Games like Terraria and Starbound are seen from the side, like a 2D drawing. Don't Starve uses a view that looks like 3D, but the characters are flat pictures.
While most survival games are action-packed, the survival idea can be found in other types of games too. For example, Dead State and NEO Scavenger are turn-based role-playing games with survival themes. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is a story-driven first-person shooter that also has survival elements. Even games like 2013's Tomb Raider and the Far Cry series have added survival features like gathering resources, hunting, and crafting.
History of Survival Games
The idea of survival has been in video games for a long time. Simple survival concepts can be seen in early sports video games like Pong (1972) and fighting games. Classic arcade action games like Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980) also had survival challenges. Even survival horror games like Resident Evil (1996) focus on staying alive.
A more specific type of modern survival game started to appear in the 1990s. But it wasn't clearly defined until the early 2000s.
One early example is UnReal World, made by Sami Maaranen in 1992. This game is still being updated today! It used simple text-based graphics and put the player in the tough conditions of Finland during the Iron Age. Unlike other games of its kind, UnReal World's only goal was to survive as long as possible against wild animals and harsh snowy weather. Another early survival game was SOS, released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993.
Wurm Online also had ideas that influenced many survival games. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Players create characters in a medieval world, change the land, build structures, and even create their own kingdoms. The game started being developed in 2003.
Markus Persson, one of the original developers of Wurm Online, later helped create Minecraft. Many people think Minecraft made the survival game genre super popular. When it first came out in 2009, Minecraft focused on gathering resources and crafting in a world that was different every time. Players had to defend themselves at night and gather resources during the day.
Another very important survival game was DayZ. It started as a special addition (called a mod) for the game ARMA 2 in 2012. Later, it became its own game and earned a lot of money very quickly. DayZ puts players in a world after a zombie apocalypse. You have to avoid zombies and search through old human towns for resources.
Because Minecraft and DayZ were so successful, many new survival games came out starting in 2012. Some people felt there were too many games with similar zombie apocalypse settings. Others thought many new games were just copies of popular ones, or were released too early to make quick money. Still, survival games became a huge part of the video game industry.
See also
In Spanish: Videojuego de supervivencia para niños
- Battle royale game
- List of survival games
- Survival horror
