Surviving planet Earth

Surviving PUBG

About 6 months ago one of my sons took up creative killing as a hobby. Each morning he was to be found in front of a screen, holding a controller in his hands and calmly maiming strangers. It was, he told me, a great new online game called Player Unknown Battlegrounds in which you pit yourself against up to 100 other people all over the world in a simulated and randomly generated world.

I sat for a while and watched as he first parachuted from an aircraft, landed in a startlingly-realistic world, equipped himself with an astonishing variety of weapons with nasty sounding names like Uzi or Scar-L and then proceeded to fire upon startled players. The whole point of this game is, obviously, to win — and there can only be one winner, unless you are playing in a 'squad' of up to four others.

Sounds simple enough, but there are caveats: the world shrinks every few minutes or so; a blue electric wall sweeps over the landscape. Get caught inside the blue wall and your health starts to deteriorate rather quickly. Stay there long enough and you 'die'. So you have to move frequently. However, the worlds are also quite large, and in order to get around quickly you can steal cars, bikes, light aircraft and even the occasional armoured truck, but even these run out of fuel eventually. As the world gets smaller, players get killed by others, but it also means that the numbers left are pushed inexorably closer to one another. You can sometimes play for ages without encountering another player, and then suddenly you are confronted by half a dozen masked and crazed individuals carrying bazookas.

I was extremely impressed with the attention-to-detail given by the programmers of this game, but rather unprepared for the zeal with which my son, and now also my wife, plays it.

As I type, try to type, this story in my office, the background noise of machine-gunning is often punctuated by a wild cry:

'Over there! There's a guy right behind that tree! Shoot the b*****d!'

And some machine-gunning and explosions later:

'No, you missed him! Get in your car and run him over!'

A screech of tyres, some insane crashing noises, another explosion, then:

'What? WHAT?? No, NO; Where did he come from? Why are you not DEAD?

Really, REALLY? WTF? You sweaty sap. WHAT?'

And so on.

A brief autopsy is usually held over the still twitching digital corpse, and yes, they do twitch rather alarmingly in death, as the killer opens you up like Christmas for whatever items you have picked up.

'Why did you do that? Why did you even get out of the car? Why didn't you just get behind that blasted rock and shoot him?'

'I hate this game, I can't stand it; I am just no good at it...!'

'Want to play again?'

'Hell, yes!'

And so on it goes, game after game in which victory seldom comes, yet it doesn't stop my wife and son from leaping into another game of frenzied killing. It is not too long before another sad body is rendered full of holes and the same cry is heard:

'What, WHAT??'

The last time this happened I had just taken a bite of a sandwich which also included part of my tongue. Yep, it hurt.

Another annoying thing about the game is that you can never tell when the yell is going to come. Games can last up half-an-hour or so, or for less than a minute; you either win or you die, so the yell is random and you can't mentally prepare. It's a kind of cruel psychological torture inflicted upon those of us who are not watching.

So in the interests of trying to understand why being pursued relentlessly by murderous strangers in an alien landscape is meant to be fun, I decided to watch a few games. It is rather tricky, you have to land somewhere that the others are not, find a house, collect your weapons, collect the right calibre bullets for your weapons, load them, find a bag to carry all your extra bullets, locate a vest, helmet and any other extras like sights, attach these to your weapons and then you can get moving.

It is a strange experience to walk out of the house you have just looted into a landscape in which the grasses move in the breeze and leaves fly past your head. And it is quiet, too. You may sometimes hear nothing except for the tread of your boots on the ground or the very distant burst of gunfire that declares another player out of the game. It could almost be a pleasant walk in the wild, apart from the huge gun you carry over your shoulder, of course. And then you hear it. Footsteps; someone running, and getting closer.

My heart actually missed a beat and I held my breath as my son took cover in a handy bush. The individual was running right for him and my son took careful aim. The burst of gunfire was loud and the other player flopped unhealthily to the ground before contorting like a rubberised mannequin. This he quickly 'looted'. They call it that mainly because 'grave robbing' is antiquated and so out of touch with today's youth. But never mind all that; the game was on!

He found a car easily enough and after driving crazily through the countryside, damaging fences, signposts and bales of hay, managed to flip the thing into a ditch. It is amazing what damage you can inflict on your digital self without apparent harm.

So now we were on foot, my son playing, and me hovering next to him giving him helpful advice like, 'Why don't you hide in that house over there?'

'I can't Dad, the zone is coming in.'

The zone is actually the scariest part of the game. A wall of crackling blue, it glides insidiously over the landscape, humming menacingly. The zone gives me nightmares. Occasionally something called a Red Zone appears randomly, a small area on the map that drops bombs in a terrifying mini blitz that lasts for about 30 seconds but feels much longer. Get caught in this one and you will die unless you are in a building, but even these seem to shake as dust falls from the stricken ceilings.

I glance at the tally of survivors on the screen: 57 alive out of 96, it says. There's a long way to go to win, but I am caught up in the game. I start scanning the landscape as we trot through the woods, looking for bad guys to evade or to shoot at. Suddenly there is a roar of noise and a car appears incongruously through the trees. Everyone shoots at once and I feel the urge to duck as bullets whistle overhead and bounce off helmets. My son throws off a few frags (yeah, I'm hip with weaponry talk) and the car explodes, as does the person inside. Another kill. Yes, now we are cooking with something hot and explodey!

He hides whilst he heals, literally bandaging and taking painkillers which is another necessity to locate before hitting the road.

He is nearly healed when a single shot rings out: BANG! He flops lifelessly onto the ground.

'What, What?? WTF? Where did he come from, WHERE?? You sneaky greasy b*****d; you utter crap-head camper!'

It seems a sniper had been hiding in the hills opposite and had been attracted by all the noise that killing people with grenades usually involves, but the suddenness of it was a shock, even to me; especially to me.

'It's no use, I'm just no good at this game,' says my son disconsolately.

'Wanna play again?' I ask.

'Hell, YES!'