I've been hiding in the bathroom for the past five minutes now, an eternity in game time. I might look like I'm camping, crouched in the corner with my shotgun pointed at the door, but this isn't about taking advantage of unsuspecting prey—it's about survival. My eyes wander, tracing the cracks in the tiled walls, examining the mouldering toilet. No one has lived here for a long time.
I wait, and wait some more. I wait until I get the alert that I'm no longer in a safe zone. I need to move. I open the bathroom door, creep out of the abandoned house—slowly, slowly—and crouch-run through an open field. I hear gunfire, but before I can even pinpoint where it's coming from, I'm dead. It's random, brutal.
This is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a PC game that takes survival of the fittest as a religious mantra. First released onto the Steam marketplace as an unfinished Early Access title in late March, it initially bears a strong resemblance to most other unfinished titles on the platform. It's missing features and limited in scope—its own description says it's "being developed with community feedback." It's rife with glitches and errors that range from minor to game-breaking; it's the sort of game that you sometimes have to struggle with to play.
Yet, in the two months since its release, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has become dizzyingly, overwhelmingly popular, occupying the Global Top Sellers spot on Steam for weeks. How did an in-progress title become a legitimate gaming phenomenon?
Player-What Now?
"PlayerUnknown" is the handle of Brendan Greene, a game developer who rose to prominence thanks to popular military simulator game ARMA 3. The ARMA series is easily moddable and has become in recent years a sort of incubator for creative multiplayer ideas (a few years back, the hugely popular zombie survival simulator DayZ began its life as a mod for ARMA 2). Greene created an ARMA 3 mod called Battle Royale; Battlegrounds is the stand-alone version of that game mod, still in development.
It takes place on an isolated island loosely modeled after some derelict Eastern European war zone; abandoned houses and brutalist apartment complexes nestled into verdant hills next to silos, Soviet-styled military installations, and a quarry with the look of an open grave. In the middle of this location, one of a few planned for the full game, Battlegrounds drops 100 unarmed players. You begin each match in a cargo ship soaring over the topography, and before the plane reaches the other end of the island you have to jump out.
Once you parachute safely to the ground, you'd better start looking for ways to protect yourself. The goal of the game is to survive, and each match ends when only one player is left standing. The map is peppered with weapons, vehicles, and hiding places. As the match goes on, the viable play area gets smaller and smaller, hemmed in by a blue wall of death that deals damage to any player outside of it. This forces the ever-dwindling set of survivors into closer and closer contact. As a player, your game has two possible outcomes: either you die, or everyone else does.
That Greene's original mod shares a name with the 1999 novel by Koushun Takami isn't a coincidence, as they share the same basic premise: a bunch of unarmed, probably innocent people in a confined space, forced to murder each other. In Takami's novel, which was adapted into a cult film a year after its release, the killers/victims are a group of Japanese teenagers drafted into a terrible fate via a dystopian lottery in a police state. I first encountered it as a teenager, and I remember regarding it with a mixture of fascination and disgust. It's a lurid, violent horror story, as cruel as it is bitingly satirical.
The West got its own version of the premise in The Hunger Games almost a decade later, but Battlegrounds hews closer in style and tone to its Japanese antecedent. The Hunger Games is grim, but it's more of a tragic hero's journey than straight horror; Battlegrounds, at least in my experience, grips you with unrelenting tension. Whether you're playing with friends or alone, every moment is spent in a state of quiet terror. You move from place to place, looting for better weapons and equipment, always looking over your shoulder. When violence comes, it's fast and shocking, fueled by loud and powerful weapons. Death happens in seconds, usually.
This is the power of PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds. The tension, the waiting, the miserable slow crawl through fields as you scan the pixelated horizon for movement. In a landscape where most competitive multiplayer games are about complexity, fast play, and high player engagement, Battlegrounds is willfully sprawling and anxious. In half of my games, I only ever see a handful of people, and I rarely see my killer at all. It's possible I'm just terrible, but if every game has a hundred players, it stands to reason that most of them have similarly uneventful and frightening experiences. And yet they keep coming back. The paranoid anxiety is addictive, somehow, like living out some deranged survivalist fantasy you'd rather not articulate in polite company.
What makes Battlegrounds doubly fascinating, though, is its utter contextlessness. Battle Royale and most stories like it—The Purge, The Belko Experiment—revel in their commentary, perverting authoritarianism or corporate conformity or celebrity culture into full-on mass murder. Battlegrounds doesn't have any story to speak of, no justification for what's happening. Just violence, senseless in the most literal way. What you see there is up to you. Is it an exaggerated critique of the market in the form of an outsized competitive space, where everyone is forced against their will into a zero-sum game? Or something more nihilistic, a Lord of the Flies-esque meditation on the humanity's intrinsic violence? Like so many videogames, it has a surreal dreaminess that turns it into a mirror, a nightmare waiting to be psychoanalyzed.
Also like so many videogames: it never insists on any of those readings. It lets you have your violent nightmare guilt-free, if you want it. And if the sales numbers are any indication, a lot of people do.