It’s a sunny morning in August, and I decide to drive into town for a few essentials. Lately, I’ve taken an interest in pickling and baking, so I want to pick up vinegar, flour and yeast, which I don’t have at home. The roads are quiet. I park by the front door of the supermarket. It doesn’t take long to find what I need. But while I’m distracted loading the boot of the car, someone creeps up behind me. They’re on me before I can pull out my trusty crowbar. One quick, savage bite to the neck and it’s all over: I’m dead, like everyone else in town.

I’m playing a relaxing game of Project Zomboid, and I’ve fallen prey to one of its main causes of death: relaxing. In Project Zomboid (PZ), a computer game that simulates a zombie apocalypse, everyone besides the player is dead – and dying is what the player does in profusion. The superficially benign game environment is saturated with danger. Death is frequent, fast and often ridiculous. But underneath that immediate battle to survive is something else: almost a different game, identical to the first but tonally its opposite. This “other game” provokes interesting questions about what it means to play games, and to get on with life in a world where death is an inevitability.

PZ is made by a small games company called The Indie Stone, and was first released in 2013. It has been in continuous development ever since, regularly updating and expanding for a devoted audience of players. At first glance, it appears very crude, like a game made well before 2013 – its simple isometric graphics resemble the first iteration of The Sims, released in 2000. I first encountered it on YouTube, and found it puzzling. Why were so many people playing this rudimentary indie game, and making videos about it?

The premise is very simple. You’re going to die. The game spells this out every time you load it up, in stark white letters on a black screen:

These are the end-times

There was no hope of survival

This is how you died.

It’s 9am on 9 July 1993. You’re in a small town in northern Kentucky. Unhappily for you, this is the epicentre of “the Knox event”, a zombie virus outbreak, which has already overrun the district and, elsewhere, is toppling all civilisation. But that’s not your problem anymore. Your zombified former neighbours are shambling around outside. You have to survive.

The first order of business is finding some sort of weapon to defend yourself (beginner players start with a helpful baseball bat). But PZ is not primarily a combat game. Any bite wound will infect you with the virus and cause death – assuming you’re not immediately skeletonised by zombies. A simple scratch can spread the infection. Combat is therefore a risky enterprise. Winning a fight isn’t good enough – to stay safe, you must remain unscathed. Blundering about in your front garden armed with a rolling pin might be forced upon you by circumstances, but it’s not sensible. For the unprepared, a solitary zombie isn’t too formidable. The trouble is that they’re drawn by movement and noise, and combat tends to involve movement and noise. One of the routine mistakes made by new players is finding a gun early on, and blazing away. This is a great way to attract the whole neighbourhood.

Any confrontation means a calculation of risk, and that calculation often favours evasion, or quick retreat. But hiding under your bed isn’t an option: you have needs. Lots of needs, a whole hierarchy of needs. What lies beneath PZ’s unsophisticated graphics is a world of remarkable detail, in which almost everything can be manipulated and little is useless. Mouldy food can be composted, furniture can be rearranged or broken down into raw materials, walls can be demolished and rebuilt. Unfortunately, the level of detail multiplies the number of ways you can meet your demise. You need food and water, and pretty soon the taps will run dry, the power will shut off and the fresh food will spoil. You can loot houses and stores for tinned goods, but long-term survival means growing your own. You need tools and seeds and rainwater collection barrels. You will get tired pretty easily – especially if exerting yourself fighting – and that can be fatal. You need a safe place to sleep. You might suffer food poisoning or hypothermia or an infected wound of the non-zombie variety. The common cold can make you cough and sneeze, which draws attention. You need to wash and mend things. And you have psychological needs. You experience boredom, fear and sadness. You can’t be engaged in endless struggle: you need occasional respite.

It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before

If you move past the panicky opening minutes and reach that respite, something curious happens. Moments of peace and recovery feel genuinely restful. I first noticed this feeling when a change in the weather led me to abandon an expedition and return home. As a storm raged outside I sat in my living room reading a book, glad to be indoors and relatively safe. In game terms, I was not doing or achieving anything. But I was content. The game regularly creates these paradoxical moments of calm, made all the more sweet by the knowledge of the intense danger that lurks close by. You get back to your base after a dangerous excursion full of close calls, you wash yourself, have something to eat and then fall into bed. You stand on your back porch with a cup of coffee watching the sun set. You listen to birdsong.

“The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, his account of living for two years in a self-built cabin by a pond in the woods in 1854. After 180 years, Walden is still hugely entertaining thanks to the larger-than-life personality of its author. Thoreau is garrulous, funny and capable of scything moments of wisdom. He is also often grandiose, vain, prone to overstatement and occasionally silly. When one of his experiments goes well, such as growing his own food, he feels he is doing it better than any expert; if he cannot get the hang of something, such as leavening bread, he suspects everyone else might be doing it wrong.

Purely by chance, I first read Walden a couple of years ago, when I was also playing a lot of PZ. The two went together like salt and vinegar – it was almost like reading one of those “official guides” that sometimes accompany computer games. Indeed, I occasionally wondered if Walden had been on the developers’ minds. There are books in PZ, which can be read to reduce boredom and unhappiness, or used to start fires, but unless they are instructional, they aren’t given titles. However, CDs in the game do have titles, and some of them are audiobooks – and one of those is Walden.

When you are still learning the game, there’s a phase when you feel compelled to compulsively heap up stuff pillaged from your surroundings – not just all the food and tools you can find but also jukeboxes, pinball machines, posters, pot plants and so on. But mindless accumulation does not hold interest for long. Thoreau understood this well: “The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

A more productive use of time in PZ is to plan, as early as possible, for a permanent home in the world: somewhere you can farm, fish and find construction materials and firewood. A cabin by a pond in the woods. The game map encompasses a large area bounded by the game’s version of the Ohio River and deep forest. There’s the substantial and dangerous city of Louisville,  but the gameworld is otherwise made up of countryside and rural communities. It’s not huge, but most games will only explore a small part of it. You might elect to stay close to home, fortifying your house (or one of your neighbour’s) with planks over the windows and log palisades. Or you might load up your “borrowed” van and strike out across the map for a better place – either with a destination in mind, or just to explore.

“At a certain season in life, we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house,” Thoreau writes. “I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live.” The PZ player gets used to appraising the landscape defensively, pursued at all times by the possibility of an attack or sudden death. You will start to think to yourself: “Those plate glass windows aren’t ideal; this warehouse is surrounded by a good fence, but it doesn’t look good for planting crops; this farmhouse is only accessible by a dirt road that will get overgrown quickly.” This house-hunting is accompanied by the sombre probability that your “forever home” will not last very long. You are choosing a place to die, but before that, one where you would like to live. In one of Walden’s most-quoted passages, Thoreau writes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life [...] to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

That line about wanting “to put to rout all that was not life” takes on a very different meaning when you’re battling zombie hordes. This, of course, was not what he had in mind. Thoreau’s argument was that all activities and achievements expected by society had become an unacknowledged hell. Most men, he wrote, lead “lives of quiet desperation.” They were not living, as such, but had become the walking dead. The only solution was radical simplicity: growing one’s own food and building one’s own shelter. He thought that this practice would unlock fulfilment: “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.”

Is civilised life truly so unpleasant and worthless? You might disagree, of course – and probably will. As I said, overstatement and occasional silliness are part of the Thoreau experience, and he is often so funny on purpose that we can never be sure if his tongue is in his cheek or not. He repeats the arguments he has heard against his thesis, and isn’t very impressed by them. You might say, for instance: “It’s all very well for you, Mr Thoreau, you’re an able-bodied young man, but we can’t all gallivant around felling trees.” But he has seen you coming:

The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger, – what danger is there if you don’t think of any? – and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment’s warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity, [sic] a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

There you have it: death is inevitable, but living isn’t. Avoiding life out of fear of death is to be “dead-and-alive”.

In Walden, we can see the clear outline of a distinctively American philosophy of self-reliance, individualism and personal liberty, combined with disregard for what other people might think. This philosophy is alive and well today, and can be clearly seen in all those sourdough and smallholding Instagram accounts. There are obvious parallels in the dubious thinking of survivalists who organise their lives around preparation for the collapse of society. The dubious aspect of survivalism is the extent to which its adherents want society to collapse. They don’t want to endure: they want to win. This toxic, millennarian yearning for the end has thrived in tandem with the rise of the zombie apocalypse in the popular imagination. Why the fascination with zombies, when other, sadly more plausible, end-times are available? It may be a subliminal expression of a bloody free-for-all, in which the restraints of civilisation dissolve, and other people cease to be people. Moral qualms no longer apply. This is most gruesomely shown in the continuing success of the television drama The Walking Dead and its spinoffs, which is so bleak and sadistic in its worldview that it leaves a distinctly bad taste in the mouth.

Rather more thoughtful is The Last of Us, a television adaptation of another post-apocalyptic zombie computer game. In one episode, Nick Offerman portrays a survivalist in a small town near Boston – not so far from the real-life town of Walden, as it happens. He waits out military round-ups and the end of the world in his concealed sub-basement. When he emerges into a deserted street, there is an unmistakable glee in his expression. What follows is a cheerful shopping and DIY spree quite reminiscent of PZ. Then, it’s a carefree bachelor life of fine wine and home-butchered steak. It’s a selfish wish-fulfilment fantasy. But what happens next? The Last of Us spells it out: no man is an island, and eventually, he will get old or get unlucky.

PZ might sound like a survivalist fantasy as well. And it has its moments, when roaming deserted, well-stocked supermarkets or battling hordes. But, as the game said at the start: “There was no hope of survival.” Sometimes you come across survivalists in the game, and it’s a lucky break. Their houses are already boarded up and full of food and weapons – they were “laying up treasures”, as Thoreau said. “It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it.” The inhabitants are dead. Everyone is dead. You can’t win.

So, what can you do? For a brief spell, you can live. Once you’ve selected a place to settle, you’ve built a sturdy fence or log wall around it, your crops are planted, and you’ve got firewood, rain barrels and a stock of firewood, the game takes on a different atmosphere. I recall the first time this happened, in a comfortable base in a former bar overlooking the Ohio River. Night fell and I sat by the light of my stove reading and watching the dark, silent waters. Tomorrow, if the weather was good, I would weed the gravel paths in my kitchen garden. I felt a kind of contentment.

Lurking within this stressful, violent simulation is something like Stardew Valley, a very gentle farming and home decoration game. It’s as if you’ve finished the missions in Call of Duty and the game carries on while you adjust to civilian life. You potter about, repairing things, cutting down trees and tending your garden, and occasionally making forays into the world. You read by the fire and learn to forage and trap animals. Winter will come eventually, and you watch the changing weather. I’ve made it to 1994 in the game, but never out of winter. My most memorable time was planning Christmas Day. I had catfish instead of turkey, and it snowed. But before long, you let your guard down, carelessly open a door in an abandoned house or get a flat tyre in the wrong place and – chomp! – the game is over. This is how you died.

Can you live a life of perfect safety in PZ? If you wanted that, you could simply open the game’s compendious settings and set the zombie population to zero. Then you’d have an empty world to enjoy – but the game would be a lot more boring, and your island of calm and safety would be a lot less satisfying. It’s the danger of sudden, stupid and irreversible death that makes the peaceful moments all the more satisfying. Every glass of wine or cup of coffee was purchased with danger, and might be the last. The secret ingredient to contentment is death. Proceed simply and wisely, just as Thoreau advised. The words at the game’s opening, “This is how you died”, raise the unspoken question: how did you live? .