Deathmatch Royale

Let's get this clear once and for all: there is no such thing as a "battle royale" game.

Fortnite spammed my e-mail recently trying to get me to buy its latest expansion... or something. I didn't stop to read through the damn thing. I want nothing to do with Epic Games after they ripped me off with their vaporware Paragon. But thanks for reminding me of this topic.

Some game genres have more mass appeal than others. They require less effort to play, less arithmetic, less planning, less logistic reasoning, less attention span, less organization, less cooperation, less combobulation. (If that's not a word yet, I'm making it one.) In short, games which require less intelligence to play can attract a wider audience, given the sheer stupidity of the naked ape.

In some cases developers abuse the good reputation of a worthier genre to fabricate a dumbed down version for wider mass appeal. This is how you get "action" RPGs grindfests vastly out-selling the more intricate Baldur's Gate types, or how the the endless loot-farming treadmill inspired by Korean products of the early 2000s and Diablo 2 destroyed the reputation of MMOs via World of Warcraft, or also how the Aeon of Strife team strategy concept degenerated into so-called MOBAs, a.k.a. Mortal Kombat with a built-in audience. Such devolved supra-popular sub-genres trade away complexity, creativity, novelty and anything else which might intellectually challenge their intellectually challenged hoi polloi target audience, in exchange for gambling addiction or status symbol marketing or sheer adrenaline addiction.

In other cases, however, the concepts were simplistic to begin with, and represent some primitive technological form from the 1980s or '90s which retained its appeal because its very limitations made it more comprehensible to the average imbecile. Platform-jumping games are a prime example, endlessly reiterated even in other genres whether their customers paid for such twitch-gaming dross or not. It made no difference whatsoever that platformers graduated from 2D to 3D. And of course Mortal Kombat demonstrated the timeless appeal of not thinking beyond the next punch long before the developers of MOBAs decided they wanted a cut of that action.

And, of coarser, some of the first multiplayer games with actual graphics were first-person shooters, with Doom and Quake leading the way. Not much room for frills in those days. It's not like the half-second lag times, the 400x300 resolutions and the chugging Celeron processors allowed for much nuance on teh internets. The most popular multiplayer format for a decade simply threw players into the same arena to run around, grab the biggest gun they could find and shoot every single person they could find, preferably before their modem timed out. It was called Deathmatch. It was the most dumbed-down format imaginable, devoid of objectives, devoid of relevant choices, devoid of long-term consequences, requiring all the foresight of rats scrabbling over a moldy lump of cheese called the top score.

It's still Deathmatch. I don't give a single shit if you did expand the arena, added more guns and more powerups and more copies of Duke Nukem with the muscles in different places. "Battle Royale" is meaningless marketing fluff meant to dress up the shamefully primitive nature of the same mid-'90s, 28.8k modem pissing contest, to save you from acknowledging the lack of depth, breadth or duration of your nonexistent cognitive skills.

There is only one bright side to this idiocy. Some people who played deathmatch back in the '90s eventually wanted more. They advanced to team games, strategy games and persistent worlds. So maybe, over a generation later, the cycle is merely repeating. Maybe of all the degenerate little pissants scrambling for the biggest rocket launcher now, some will realize they want more depth, more permanence, more degrees of organization, vaster landscapes.

But you're not going to find that in Deathmatch Royale.