I haven’t gotten to play PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds but I’ve watched a fair amount of footage. I’m pretty sure people have wanted a Hunger Royale-style game forever, and I’m no different. It’s a brilliant idea.
*HOWEVER~~~~*
A friend of the family saw the game and was pretty put off by the concept. They didn’t like the concept of commodifying war. While I don’t think PUBG and the literature it references will lead to real world Running Man situations (that was a similar thing, right?), I think that the discussion of the long terms effects media trends will have on a culture is a worthwhile one. When “realistic” first person military shooters become popular, especially in multiplayer modes where there isn’t room for satire, you’re gonna see military get romanticized.
I don’t think PUBG has any intentional problematic elements, but engaging with the media you consume is fun!
What do y’all think about the game? Is it already pretty satirical? Could it be more up front? How would you change it?
i have only briefly seen it around and it looks virtually indistinguishable from DayZ except there’s no zombies and it’s short deathmatch instead of completely open world?
straight military themed games are really disgusting imho. i only make an exception for CSGO and every time i hear “remember, this is bandit country, shoot everything that moves” at the start of a round i shudder a lil bit.
I had a whole post here and just deleted it because it wasn’t satisfying me.
I think that the biggest problem that the game has is that it’s intended to be an oppressive gun-zone simulator, and since it’s mimicking some of the worse-off parts of Eastern Europe, it’s unintentionally drawing a line there that I don’t think is fair.
I also think that the game is po-faced enough that it encourages pseudo-military-style banter and play from more serious gamers playing in squads, which is generally gross to me. I wish it was a bit goofier - rocket launchers and rubbery grenade physics or something. That might discourage the “i’m a super cool military dude” style that some people put on.
With all of that said, though, the game is a fairly blank canvas. Stylistically, it’s limited to some gun fetishism and weird Eastern European apocalypse theming. There’s no text other than functional text, no voices (because I muted voice chat), and everything else seems to be run of the mill graffiti. I think this is part of the appeal to me, especially in Solo play. I get to play the game how I feel like playing most games, being cautious and paying attention to my surroundings. It never feels like I’m being pushed to be more aggressive or get more kills - the rewards are much better for simply surviving.
If anything, the game reinforces how horrible it would be to be put in a situation like this. Death comes from any direction, and most of the time you won’t even see the person who killed you. Every gunshot and distant explosion is quite possibly somebody trying to kill you. The best strategy is to hunker down with lots of supplies and move as little as possible.
So I guess what I’m saying is that, it’s quite possible that this game could get much worse if they start adding pseudo-militaristic flavor, and that gamers generally ruin everything. But I’m enjoying it very much for what it is and I do think it’s something outside of the typical CoD or Rainbow Six or CS. I hope that it stays in its current state: a very complicated and loud version of Tag.
Cats want to attach Battle Royal or Hunger Games associations to these but they don’t seem to have the same gravitas about killing or–as best as I can tell from having watched an awful tournament special on network tv–foster any sort of dynamics between players beyond the standard red team/blue team thing.
Day Z’s impromptu uneasy alliances appealed to me, but twisting it into an e-sports friendly team thing seems to jettison the most interesting part.
It seems like the setting and circumstances are carelessly vague. Not for any narrative purpose, but because the game isn’t concerned with them.
I told my brother that I would prefer the same concept in the Metal Gear universe with MGS5’s sandbox. I’m sure there’d be significant technical hurdles with that - MGO3 had much lower player counts and smaller maps for a reason - but the context would be perfect. War for war’s sake to crown the Biggest Boss. The End that never ends.
The mechanically different but narratively similar The Club did the vaguely Russian lawless area thing for its last section, and that didn’t bug me as much since it was more of a action movie modeled sort of thing starring the Gordon’s Fisherman.
Most modern day/near future shootmans twist my stomach in the same way that pretty much any novelty t-shirt or bumper sticker sold at an army surplus store does.
As a matter of historiography I’d take issue with the fact that PUBG is the first “finally a Hunger Games game” game. It’s refined and gameified from what’s come before (namely Day Z and… that other one they made after that without zombies).
I dunno about the moral panic. It seems less like there’s any particular movements or sea changes to chart and more that everyone just has a limit at which they have a personal epiphany of the damage of glorifying war (which has been happening literally as long as human civilization).
