Bhubaneswar: The onslaught of coronavirus and the forced quarantine, keeping people across the world confined to their homes, has led to a number of unexpected and interesting scenarios in digital socialization. One of them being a massive upsurge in online gaming.
With people having a lot more time on their hands and having to stay indoors while maintaining social distance, an online game provides almost everything one would have to forego: a large online community of people whom you can interact with from the safety of your home without risk of contagion, staving off depression due to social isolation; a large time sink to keep you from getting bored or frustrated while indoors and tearing out your hair; a way to stay in touch with your friends and continue doing fun things with them without having to go outside and, most importantly, an alternative life with a strong sense of purpose and direction, given to you in the form of in game goals, milestones and objectives, to temporarily replace that of your real life to keep you from feeling unproductive or meaningless and adrift.
This has not only led to increased numbers in online games across all platforms, but also gaming-related ventures in general. Gamers, both hardcore and casual, specifically have a lot more time on their hands to follow their passions wholeheartedly without the cumbersome needs, intrusions and obligations of real life. Thus, they freely get to invest their time and effort without consequence, thereby giving the game industry a huge boost not only through a much larger and active playerbase but also significantly higher viewership numbers for E-sports events and especially Twitch and YouTube streamers; which has directly led to an explosion of new content being released regularly by these new age influencers.
With a plethora of gaming content now flooding the online content channels and more people playing online games than ever before, gaming has finally made its way into the cultural mainstream, to the extent where you are considered to be ‘living under a rock’ or a ‘boomer’ if you still have not heard of them.
This brings us to our topic; the question nearly every parent is asking today with the most confused and exasperated of expressions: What is PUBG!?
PUBG is an acronym for Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds and is an Online FPS, i.e., First Person Shooter game, belonging to a genre of games called Battle Royale, which have recently taken the top spot in the game industry as the most played games in the world.
For the layman this means – it’s a game where you go to an area with 99 other people playing online at the same time as you and find guns and weapons to shoot and kill these other people, until you or your team is the last one standing.
The real question here is: what is it about PUBG and its older brother Fortnite, which are currently the 2 most played online games in the world, with over 2 million active players, that makes it so popular?
Well to begin with, it is available on mobile platforms. So unlike most popular games, which can usually only be played on stationary platforms like the PC or console, PUBG brings high quality online gaming to mobile phones, making it accessible to nearly anyone with a decent smartphone. It allows people to simply download an app from the Appstore on their phone and login to start playing with friends like any other free mobile game instead of having to invest in the costly purchase of a gaming PC or console and then buying the game separately. With the barrier to enter such a talked about gaming phenomenon being so low, it immediately makes large audiences flock to its call.
Apart from this, PUBG has taken the position of the new fun activity or hangout, that you normally have with your friends. In many communities, sitting and chatting over tea or coffee in a good hangout spot outdoors has been replaced by getting together with your friends to play an exhilarating shooting game online from the comfort of ‘anywhere you get network’, for teenagers and tweeners alike.
Another significant development is the growth of a large community of skilled female gamers, who were stereotypically either uninterested or unskilled in the area. This was primarily a result of high barriers to entry for gaming and the lack of cultural and mainstream relevance which made getting into it as a hobby much less appealing. However, with the ridiculous upsurge in the popularity of PUBG in the last 2 years, women have been taking to it as much as men and often crushing their male counterparts in this previously male-dominated field. This has naturally contributed greatly to the development of a massive player-base and community behind PUBG in India who play anywhere, anytime from their cellphones regardless of their gender, caste, creed or social milieu under the united banner of ‘gamers’.
PUBG, however, is not the first addictive mobile game to be available to everyone. Clash of Clans and Lords Mobile are also examples which have popular mobile games that achieved similar feats in the past with the same community but to a much lesser degree of success. So what was it that made PUBG finally break the glass ceiling that was marginalizing such games and become a cult?
Well, the first, would be an extremely simple format – 100 people in an arena, last man standing wins.
The second, would be how to achieve your goals – shooting and killing, one of the most primal concepts to mankind which were almost always emulated through gaming even in its earliest days: Doom on MS DOS is among the best examples.
The third, would be a nearly non existent yet very compelling premise – you are nobody; aka player unknown; you are simply a random person who has been airdropped into an island where a time-bound 100-man Hunger-games event is going to take place and all you have to do is: survive through any means necessary.
This further reduced the barrier of entry, as literally anybody could get into it without any prerequisite ‘background knowledge’ per se. This also meant that you need not necessarily have superior aim or game skills, it meant you could find reasonable success through any basic survival tactics; like hiding, scouting, forming alliances. This was a deviation in design philosophy of shooting games in general as they emphasized precision and fast reflexes from individual players, but this is what made it more appealing and much easier to get into for an average player or non-gamer.
The fourth reason behind the addictiveness of Battle Royal games like PUBG and its older brother, the current world title holder FORTNITE, is the replay-ability and time commitment. Every single game offered a completely new experience with a different group of 99 random players and no two games ever played out the same way. Each game also lasts upto a maximum of 1 hour after which you can stop or start another for a fresh start with different outcomes but familiar settings. This is what primarily makes people want to keep coming back.
The above elements combined with a learning curve designed to make the game easy to play but hard to master, is what keeps players hooked like zombies. While seemingly simple enough to the casual player, to be ‘good’ one needs to understand the several layers of complexity that are subtly carved into the game to give opportunities to keep you a cut above the rest.
Hence, veteran players often have more successful and rewarding experiences, as they put in huge amounts of time and effort to polish their skills. These skills were, however, not limited to gunplay or aiming. To climb the ladder and make your way through the very competitive ranking system and to reach the coveted higher Ranks and Leaderboards one needed to learn map routes, have surrounding awareness, know how to locate items and gain advantages by securing strategic locations and vantage points, along with many other in-game ad-hoc skills that can only be sharpened through practice or watching and learning from the best.
This is the biggest reason why high-ranking players in PUBG are some of the most viewed streamers on YouTube and other OTT platforms. It is the monetary success and fame that is enjoyed by many such streamers and professional gamers today, in the form of highly influential community figures, that motivates many of their viewers to aim for similar glory.
And, thus, begins their unending journey to be hindered by nothing on their path to the top and reinforces the cult status of online games like PUBG.
(The author is a marketing communications professional)