First game, first win in PUBG, what I learnt about people and design

This weekend my cousin was at our place and he asked me have I played PUBG. I replied, “No, but I have read about it, it is very popular and is good at getting people engaged in the gameplay”. That night I explored the game as he explained how things worked and what was the main objective of the game.

Next morning when he was playing the game, he just handed it over to me and asked to finish the game. He was going out for just a few minutes, so as he cannot just quit the game he asked me to play and roam around for some time before I die (the character, otherwise it would have been very scary and I would not have taken the phone 🤔).

The game begins

He already had a vehicle which he was driving, so I simply started roaming around for some time and just tried to be inside the safe area.

It was getting a little boring so I stepped out of the vehicle and started to walk towards a house. On my way somebody started shooting at me from behind, I looked around and with a few shots I managed to kill that guy. That triggered the dopamine in my brain and I started looking for other people whom I can kill 😜. The other members of my team were already killed and I was left with around 11 other people.

My strategy

So I got in the flow, I went inside that house and found someone already inside. Before he could turn around to aim at me, I shot him. As there was only one door in that house I moved to the other side of the room and laid down on the floor aiming my gun towards the door. The idea was, if anyone enters the house I will kill them. So I waited there for quite some time, sticking to my plan, but the safe area started shrinking and it was time to leave the house.

Out in the open again

Now I was out of the house and more vulnerable to be killed by someone, so I slouched down and started walking slowly. I also made sure that I was walking in the long grass area with trees in between. I really liked my idea of sitting inside a house and aiming at the door, so I started looking for a house. I found something towards the center of the safe area and slowly started walking towards it. I killed 2 more people on my way towards the place, I guess those guys were also planning to go inside the same place. But they seemed to be in a hurry and were walking too fast in the open area, so they were easy to kill lying in the grass 🤪.

The final battle

So as I was heading towards that place, I realized that the safe area was shrinking too fast and I am one of the 2 people left in the game. I was still not thinking that I can win, instead, I thought that the guy will kill me as there is no one left in the game to kill him. So I was in the grass and thought I will just lie down and wait for the other person to show up. I kept waiting for about 3–4 minutes and soon I heard gun shots. While I was hiding safe in the grass he was running around in the middle shooting at random directions. He seemed to be in a hurry to win 😂. I started shooting at him and to my shock he was killed, and I won the game.

I was expecting the last guy to be more patient and tough to kill.

The design of the game

The game has a great gameplay design forcing you to be engaged in the game with the safe area getting shorter. This shortening of the safe area makes sure that you are not roaming around and avoiding other people just to be the final one to survive. Playing in a team is also an interesting part of the game and if you can work in a team it gets easier to win.

People lack patience

If you are playing this game you have to spend a longer time in the game which depends on your opponents and your skills. Spending time in the game requires longer attention span and a lot of patience because everything is unpredictable and different every time you play the game. It is not like other games where you can memorize patterns of the game and get better at it. Here you cannot get better in the gameplay, you can only get better in the skill needed to be part of the gameplay, be it your strategy, shooting skills, reflections, mastery of the controls and so on. This is not just about this game, but you can apply a lot of this to your day to day life as well.

Life also shoots at you from different directions and you have to defend yourself. Sometimes you will shoot back at it to kill the challenges waiting for new ones. While the other times when you are hit by the challenges you can always try again by hitting the restart button.

While this was just the initial level as my cousin has not been playing it for very long and I believe people at the higher levels would have learned these things and might be approaching the game differently and more strategically. It was a good experience playing the game, but if I consider the amount of time it took me to complete one game, I might just only play it when my cousin is here.

If you have something interesting to share about your experience playing PUBG do share them in the comments section below or tweet me @paritosh_pundir.