Zombie apocalypse games have been quite popular in the last few years and one of the more unique was definitely DayZ, the game that began life as a mod for the shooter Arma 2. It's being developed as a standalone game now, although the process is a long one and creator Dean Hall has made it quite clear that if you're not willing to play a game with bugs - do not buy DayZ yet. It's still being updated.
One of these updates is going to bring with it an opportunity for many players to answer a common if quite disturbing question that gets asked about apocalypses and especially this type of end of the world situation: if you had to would you turn cannibal?
The community has expressed concern about it encouraging the 'kill on sight' reputation that DayZ players have, but Bohemia are addressing that by making it so that there are some fairly dire consequences for consuming your fellow, slightly unluckier man.
Kuru is a brain disease that actually exists in real life. Consuming raw human flesh in the game (although not cooked yet) will have a chance of giving you this disease. The symptoms include uncontrollable laughing, crying, shaking and eventually, death. It's not pleasant and you better believe that the developers are not encouraging this as an option unless it's your last resort.
It's already running on experimental servers and some feedback on it suggest that players feel gun shake should also be a symptom as well as the cooked flesh also having a chance of giving you the disease, albeit a smaller one than the raw flesh would do.
What are your thoughts on this new addition to the game? It just makes me shudder a little bit...