Your body armor is shot up and about to break. Say someone's ambushed you from a second-story window-they've tagged your friend, who's now incapacitated behind a tree and bleeding out. What's more gratifying about PUBG's gunfights to me is the ad-libbing and creativity it takes to manage the complex situations it puts you in. Luckily for those of us without divine aim, it isn't everything. Check Twitch on a weekday and you'll see CS:GO ex-pro Shroud at the top of the channel list, prefiring around cover and pulling off sick spray transfers. Guns have touchy, individualized recoil and bullet travel time. Damage is modeled differently across the body, limbs, and head. Despite its spacious maps, winning a team duel at short range takes about the same mixture of snap reflexes, aggression, stealth, and peeking ability you'd need on de_dust2. I also like that distributing duties among a three- or four-person squad is itself a skill: hand the scoped Kar-98 to your best shot, and the keys to the Dacia to your daredevil. The breadth of verbs and micro-skills makes PUBG a richer experience over time because it always feels like there's another trick to learn about driving, vaulting, grenading, whatever. That doesn't undercut its status as a skillful shooter, with many merit badges to earn: cartography, looting, boating, tactical driving, parachuting, cross country, sieging, spotting, first aid, airdrop retrieval, boxing. The mindset PUBG cultivates in its players-let's call it 'casually competitive'-may be its biggest achievement.

Most people I play with measure success by how much trouble they get into-whether your match generates a good Twitch clip, whether you were able to get revenge on the group that KO'd your friend, or whether you took the opportunity, in a kill-on-sight game, to backflip your motorcycle off a hill at the least appropriate moment.

Despite PUBG's booming skirt economy, loot boxes are probably the last thing on your mind.

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