Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, colloquially known as PUBG (pronounced pub-gee), is if nothing else conceptually efficient. 100 players parachute onto an island. The last one alive wins. An unoriginal idea executed in an original fashion: That’s the merit of Battlegrounds.
Battlegrounds is the culmination of years of genre experimentation by designer Brendan “Playerunknown” Greene. Where contemporaries polish the graphical and technical edges of an established formula through iteration after iteration, Greene has been honing the very formula itself. The game is aesthetically bland and prone to technical hiccups, but compared to its battle royale-inspired predecessors — a few Arma mods and H1Z1 — Battlegrounds is refreshingly accessible.
Newcomers who don’t religiously monitor video game trends can grok the beginning, middle and end of their first match. Players float onto an island, raid vaguely Eastern European towns or dusty ramshackle forts for randomized gear, and stay within the confines of an electric blue circle that slowly shrinks the map from miles of open terrain to a single square foot, forcing all survivors into the limited safe space.
Along the way to the center of the circle, the player eliminates the competition — or allows it to fight amongst itself. Whether the player is sniping from a distant cliff, going house to house with a shotgun or simply hiding in the brush, the number of survivors will inevitably tick down as the blue circle pushes them into a spot like a giant trash compactor of conflict.
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