Surviving Digital Asia: <em>PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds</em> and the Affective Economy of the Battle Royale

Abstract

One of the most important video games to come out of East Asia in the twenty-first century, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (2017), or PUBG, owes its premise to Battle Royale, both Takumi Koushun's 1999 novel and Fukasaku Kinji's 2000 adaptation. As with Battle Royale, PUBG consists of a deadly competition situated around scarcity in resources in a relentlessly dwindling playing field. Considered in the context of Japan's "Lost Decades" and post-IMF Korea, the popularity of such a cruel contest becomes self-evident. Read in relation to its historical context not as allegory but rather as symptom, PUBG intimates an ideological and affective shift in the twenty-first-century players reorienting their relationship to labor as they negotiate the terms and conditions of the zero-sum game of neoliberal Asia.