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After 20-something hours of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, my Steam recommendations are a wasteland. I've sunk a meaningful amount of time into a game with the words 'early access', 'survival', and 'shooter' in its tag cloud, and Valve's algorithm knows something about those. The earliest manifestations of that 'what if DayZ but dinosaurs' phenomena occupy three slots in a row in my 'you may also like' queue; an age gate indicates that we've arrived in 'what if DayZ but penises'. Zombies fill the gaps.It's hard to draw up a strict definition of these games. There are a lot of them, for certain. They're the product of the unlikely union of the Minecraft phenomenon and, of all things, ArmA's modding community: the discovery, obvious perhaps in hindsight, that the midpoint between 'playing with Lego' and 'being in the actual army' is 'paintball'. It is very modern, this marriage: impossible without the flexible standards of early access, the convergence of traditional modding and cheaper access to powerful game engines, and the emergence of compatibility with YouTube and Twitch as arguably the most important factor in the success of a PC game.
This unlikely chemistry means that the survival shooter doesn't really have a set form. Is it an MMO? A crafting game? Horror, action, a social experiment? Short or long-form? Modern? Fantasy? Dicks? Dinosaurs? Yet you know one when you see one, and those loose definitions, coupled with early access' looser standards, conspire to make these games as easy to click past as they are to click on. The fastest route to success, for a survival game, is to have a gimmick that looks good on a YouTube title card (see also dicks, dinosaurs). Survival itself, as a game system, is a shortcut to drama that circumvents the need for traditional multiplayer concepts like structure or balance. You're in a featureless desert. Your hunger bar is ticking down. That guy's got a melon. Here's a stick. Go.
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