Let me begin this piece by relating two very different experiences I had, so I can better explain my use of the term “ideology”. First – imagine you’re in a crowded local train compartment in 2016. This is back when Candy Crush and Angry Birds were all that mobile gamers could handle on their phones, and the ordinary traveller was usually playing these or, simply watching a film/listening to a song. Now imagine further that you have a couple of colleagues with you, who have more than the average level of interest in the progress of the fine arts. One of them has noticed that you had put up a post on Facebook a couple of days back claiming that gaming is the future and movies were simply outdated forms of expression of art.
He strongly disagrees. Being a film connoisseur himself, he cannot fathom how an educated person can claim that what is basically a format for children and young adults can overtake one which has produced such rich expression of human emotion. You explain to him that games are basically more interactive, and unlike movies, get you involved the same way as interactive experiments are better than just reading a book. He asks – “But how many people can afford such devices ? This is basically entertainment for the elite, whereas movies are for the masses.” You don’t have much of an answer to this, since gaming rigs do really cost much more than what the ordinary person would be willing to afford. You point out that gaming rigs are getting cheaper, but you know in your heart that the price differential between a cheap smartphone or TV and a gaming PC (or console) is still substantial.
Time passes, and eventually, something called PUBG comes out. It’s called PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Unlike the majority of games, this was actually developed as a collaborative effort by gamers themselves, and the end result is breathtaking. Even when it is not discounted and priced at a somewhat hefty INR 999 on Steam, it sells like hot cakes. Within days, the gaming community is abuzz and the game swamps practically all others, including the likes of GTA V ( highest earning game of all-time, whose total earnings to date dwarf the most successful movies), Counter-Strike (easily the most competitive game in the last decade), Overwatch (the new shiny kid on the block), World of Warcraft (which survives courtesy a somewhat different format) and Destiny (which was already on the decline by this point).
At this point, one of your many Facebook friends gets a brand new PC. Mind you, he’s not one to go in for nitpicking CPU part numbers and deciding on RAM voltages. He plonks the cash, and gets a sweet-looking rig. All the latest hardware, including a display that blows your 3 year-old one out of the water. You hit him up on Steam, ostensibly to welcome him to the Steam community. He asks what games you are playing. You inform him of some single-player title you’ve been trying out, hoping to find some common interests. His reply is – “dude don’t you play PUBG ?” You take a moment to consider his preferences – he must be a multiplayer-heavy gamer with not much interest for story-rich titles. He must also have little interest in pushing his rig to its limits, since PUBG can hardly be called the most demanding of titles. You politely tell him that you’re not so much into multiplayer. Does he play single-player as well ? Surely he must, otherwise that monster rig would simply be wasted. He replies that he basically just plays PUBG, and he can’t believe that you being a gamer don’t.
On the face of it, the two experiences have a common thread – the argument of the first one i.e. gamers are rich kids – is substantiated by the second experience. However, there is a more subtle thread here. Note that the novice gamer built a big rig, but took up the game that was most popular. He could have had a more mediocre rig (I honestly doubt he knew the full potential of the stuff he had bought, except that it was value for money), and still would have taken up PUBG. In a way, PUBG had become the calling card of the novice (I don’t use the word noob, since it is derogatory) into the party that is PC gaming. Many more like him, who had never heard of PC gaming, were also installing PUBG on their old and gaming-unworthy hardware simply because of the craze that surrounded the game. These were people who had only gamed on-and-off and could not be counted as part of the dedicated gaming community. Yet they took up gaming with PUBG, and forced their ageing rigs to bear the brunt of this new, fast-paced game.
So in a way, my argument from the first experience was proving to be partly correct. More people were gaming, but not because rigs were getting cheaper. It was because a product had arrived that people were genuinely prepared to play without first going through the baptism of a gaming parlour, a friend’s gaming rig or YouTube binge-watching professionals game. Naturally, the better you computer is, the better it would handle the requirements of the game. While a really high-end system would not be required, older and weaker PCs would also struggle to maintain the frame rates needed to give gamers the speed they needed in the game. So there was an urge to upgrade, though I doubt it would have had a major impact on the lowest gaming segment, who simply had neither the enthusiasm nor the money to improve their experience. Yet they at least knew that PC gaming was more than the by now grainy CS and CS: GO and something that could be looked forward to.
But the real reason I’m writing this article, and have included the word ideology in the title, is not because PUBG was a success on PC, but because it was a success on mobile platforms. You see, PC gaming always had a somewhat muted substratum of people who would play older and often free or very cheap multiplayers like Counter Strike once in a while. They may even play it regularly, and never think of upgrading to a different game or a different rig. PUBG opened up new possibilities, and forced them to question their gaming addiction to know whether they had it in them to truly upgrade. Even if we add to these people the new converts (like my dear rich friend), we can still see progress as incremental rather than revolutionary. This is especially true in India, where the pricing ensured that PUBG on PC remained the province of actual dedicated gamers who would spend money on Steam.
On the mobile platforms however, the barriers were lowered spectacularly. Contrary to how most people see their phones, smartphone SoCs actually have rather decent integrated graphics solutions. Compared to the PC market, wherein an integrated solution would deliver pretty shitty results in any game, mobile SoCs offer much better graphics for the buck. This is partly because the mobile market developed in an integrated rather than modular form from the very beginning. So while a dedicated high end PC owner would definitely have a discrete graphics card, a high end mobile owner would still have an integrated solution. This integration trickled down the price ladder so that even mid-range devices could at least run a good number of games without giving up the ghost.
Another notable difference was in the pricing models on PC and mobile. Even today, PC games are usually expected to be sold with an upfront price that will cover most of the features. DLCs and in-game perks can be bought separately, but you should be able to access the basics and “complete” the game if you coughed up the digits noted on the price tag. In case of gaming, Freemium became the go-to model since apps started out with such few features that selling them made no sense. Hence, the mobile user became accustomed to getting the very basic product for free, and then spending money to gradually buy features in the game. While many PC devices are approaching the freemium model today, it can still be said that mobile games offer much less for free than PC games do for a price tag.
In keeping with this tradition, PUBG was made free for all. This, and the lower tech barrier, ensured that when the PC enthusiasm for PUBG filtered into the mobile scene, it became a tsunami. College students, Youtube personalities and next door aunties (to a limited extent), who had never bothered to find out what a GTX 1080 was, were now gaming. This was particularly notable in India, where the earlier gaming revolutions, eg. Pokemon Go, never quite caught on so well. So for many people (including my girlfriend), the shift was from Candy Crush to a full-fledged PC game ported to mobile. Not surprisingly, they were hooked, and this brought still more people to the PUBG party, and today we have practically everyone with a mobile playing this game. Parents are counselling their kids to focus on studies instead of this game, college hostels are banning the game (really?) and (this may sound sexist) there seems to be a lot more female gamers all of a sudden.
But how does it all relate to ideology ? You see, as someone who has plonked close to a lakh of rupees (or more) on my current rig and more than thrice that amount over the years on a variety of other gadgets (including three laptops), I pride myself as a gamer. I swelled up with pride when the Regional Manager of a major GPU brand (Zotac I think it was) asked me how often I gamed per week and was impressed by my conservative estimate. I happily flaunt my Nvidia Gamers Connect ID tag and the mousepad I won there. I happily admit that I suck at multiplayer, but claim to be a good gaming critic who analyses games in depth and detail. I may not be one of the fancy band of gaming historians but I can provide a good sociological account of gaming any day.
And all of this has to do with PC gaming. For long, every gamer, including myself, considered gaming to be either for PC or consoles. When mobile gaming came along, we saw it as a junior wannabe for those who don’t/can’t dump the cash required to get a proper gaming rig. We felt sorry for them, but like elites of yore, we did not consider mobile gamers part of our tribe. Chances are, if you talk to a gamer today, s/he will reiterate this opinion. If you wanted to be a true gamer, you had to save up for a rig (took me a decade to get the upgrade I wanted) and then upgrade incrementally, carrying out research or at least knowing which brands produce the most value-for-money ready to use PCs or gaming laptops. This was our ideology. This was my ideology when I studied games, stocked up my Steam library and generally played games that I knew most people in the world never would.
[Statutory Disclosure – I consider gamers on gaming laptops to be PC gamers.]But PUBG has changed all this. For the first time, we have a game that is played by both the elites and the mobile gamers. It has created a link which neither World of Warcraft, nor the others could forge. Hence, PC gamers today are faced with the very real fact that their tech superiority doesn’t mean anything in at least one test case. So does it mean that they have to consider every PUBG wannabe with a smartphone to be their equal?
Nope. As galling as this may sound to my egalitarian friends, PUBG is simply one game in a million. Most games which deliver the ground-breaking experiences associated with modern gaming are playable solely on PC. Sure, you could jerry-rig your Android to run some version of Windows and then play in it, but the controls would be atrocious and the graphics lags would simply make you want to tear your eyeballs out. The shift from the passive engagement provided by movies to the active involvement provided by games will not be achieved by multiplayer games like PUBG, no matter how hard they try. It will be achieved by games like Hellblade : Senua’s Sacrifice, which makes use of efficient Dolby Atmos and other tech, aside from the graphics engine itself, which work best on PC. It will be achieved by games like Far Cry 5 or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, both of which offer graphics (and now Ray-Tracing) which go far beyond the capacity of the best Snapdragon 8xx SoCs. And the messy touchscreen controls would never match up against the precision afforded by the keyboard or even the console controllers.
So while mobile gamers may have breached a certain barrier on their cheap devices, they still have a long way to go. Most of them will not walk the path, and will continue playing PUBG. In India, where gaming is considered such a luxury that devs like Blizzard don’t even bother to have dedicated servers for South Asia, this trend will ensure a gradual division between true PC gamers who will move onto newer and better titles, and the others, who will continue playing PUBG or similar titles. The twain shall not meet.
Okay, so now that my bruised ego is patched up, I must also acknowledge what this PUBG business has accomplished. It has, first and foremost, brought more people to gaming in countries like India than ever before. This is both a boon and a bane. It is a boon because the issues relating to gaming- ping rates, connections, frame rates, hardware, etc. – would be better understood by the multitude because it would directly affect their ability to play the game. While Fraps may remain Geek Greek for some time to come, the basics are increasingly being grasped. This is necessary if we are to build up support for any major India-related changes by major developers. Democracy, after all, finds its strength in numbers.
Secondly, more and more women are taking up gaming. This is a good sign, because gender bias tends to produce stereotypes which really don’t take any genre forward. If women play more games, they would also be more aware of the inbuilt biases, and would campaign for their removal. Once they have sufficient numbers, this can actually lead to positive change and more inclusive, diverse narratives.
Thirdly, there is a real chance that the growing numbers of gamers from India would persuade the devs to actually look beyond the clichés associated with India. Every Indian game level doesn’t have to be a picturesque hill station (or a hill country like Nepal/Kyrat). Every character doesn’t have to be called so and so Singh. And we deserve better than to have simply the expletives translated into Hindi. It can be hoped that the diversity of India can be made to reflect in the games, one level or character at a time, as the market for games in India grows. PUBG, with its multiplayer format, isn’t the best start, but we can hope that some people would find other games and then become a focus group for devs who wish to explore new cultural boundaries.
But there are pitfalls. The biggest one is that a lot of people are playing games who have not played it before. This democratization runs the real risk of half-literate demagogues demanding idiotic actions like censorship of a specific action or element. We have already had our brush with this in Fallout 3, where the two-headed cow named Brahmin led to the game almost being banned in India. Thankfully, the furore has died out with Fallout 4, though the Brahmins continue to graze the post-nuclear wasteland (and yield delicious meat).
Chances are that someone would find something irresponsible, hurtful, etc. etc. and begin demanding that it be scrapped. If enough people raise such demands, we can find a Gaming Censor Board of India on the lines of the film one. Given how thin the gaming base in India still is, it is highly unlikely that big developers would be willing to make more than cosmetic changes to appease this censor board. The result could be that many games are never formally released in India. This would in turn damage the very necessary move towards legitimate purchase of games in India, and encourage unnecessary piracy (which many Indians still justify on grounds they would find appalling if applied to their own jobs and functions in society).
But all in all, I believe this is a positive development. The PC master race’s pride is hurt, but not destroyed. At the same time, gradual increase in the number of gamers would increase the possibility of India being a viable market, and lead to more development jobs and studio focus moving towards the country. God knows we need decent-paying jobs which require coding (and designing and voice-acting and….) skills. Further, we can finally have more variety with AAA titles actually offering South Asian servers (I simply can’t stand more Mandarin chats) and variations going beyond the titular “Singh” guy and touristy hill station level. PUBG, while not being the most ideal one, is a start, and we can hope that will a little bit of awareness and some inducement, we can grow our ranks of actual PC gamers (ah my dear sweet ego) without facing the pitfalls that come with having a large and illiterate user base.