'Battlegrounds' Helped Me Understand People Who Argue Over Patch Notes

My eyes are trained on two topics these days: politics and patch notes for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It's the first time a live game, one being continually tweaked and updated every few days, has gotten under my skin, to the point that I'm finding myself having extensive conversations with people about what it means for loot drops to be rebalanced. What have I become?

This isn't a new phenomenon, of course. I've watched (and covered) people having these conversations about shooters, fighting games, and other genres. But it's never happened to me. I've never understood what it's like to be on the inside.

Even though I'm traditionally drawn to single-player games, experiences with a definitive "end," I've been pulled into multiplayer games every so often. Overwatch was one of my favorites last year, and Destiny's The Taken King add-on helped me finally understand what my friends had been yelling about for more than a year.

But while I enjoyed both Overwatch and Destiny, I always felt like an outsider, an observer. It was more about finding the fun so I could understand what the fuss was about. I never crossed the fuzzy line between academic study and personal investment. As it turns out, when you're getting cranky about how usable vehicles will now face random directions, instead of always facing to the east, you've crossed that line. You're one of those people.

(There are tons of broken vehicles scattered amongst the rubble in Battlegrounds. Until very recently, you could always tell whether one was usable if it was facing east. Changing that is smart; it's not intuitive to a player who hasn't read a tips article. But knowing the trick made you feel like part of a secret club!)

Every year, I play through the new Call of Duty, the same way I somehow watch every new Transformers movie. (Ghosts is the only one I skipped recently.) And as someone that knows next to nothing about guns, I'm always flustered by the way weapons are named. Take, for example, the variety of assault rifles available to players in Infinite Warfare: NV4, Volk, X-Eon, R-VN, KBAR-32, ARX-160, R3K, Type-2. I couldn't have told you the difference between any of them, even while I was playing, so I usually end up sticking with the first one that works.

Battlegrounds, though? I could spend 20 minutes debating the merits of picking the UMP9 or an uzi, depending on the situation. (Both are SMGs, mid-ranged weapons.) I won't blink when someone screams in delight after saying they've found a Kar98k. (It's a sniper rifle, albeit the only one you can find as a random drop. The rest are in high-risk crate drops. Screw those things.) And when it comes to the prospect of being able to vault over fences, instead of going around?

It's hard to know when my Battlegrounds fever might break, given how much the game might change in the weeks and months (and years?) ahead. And while I described my interest as having crossed the fuzzy line from academic study to personal investment, in a way, it's actually both. I've never cared about the minutiae of a game in this way before, making every day thrilling and terrifying. Will the developers blow up my murder house strategy? Might they wise up and add bicycles with bells, so I can troll before I invade? "Ding-ding, assholes!"

I've been playing games for more than 25 years. This is new. And it's awesome.

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