Dancing for Inter-Death Peace: The Story of the Wigglers Luna Brekke Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 2, 2017 Rarely has a game attracted such a fervent following as battle-royale shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. PUBG, as it is often abbreviated, is a 100-player last-person-standing (or last-team-standing) PC game that has taken the internet by storm. Over eight million copies of the game have been sold since its initial release (in early access) in March, and that number continues to grow. The game remains in early access. In PUBG, players are dropped onto an 8x8 kilometer island with nothing but the clothes on their backs (and optionally 1 or 3 teammates) and are left scrambling to find weapons, ammunition, and armor so that they can kill everyone else before they’re killed by other players. It’s high-pressure, it’s terrifying, and (most importantly) it’s fun. Thumbnail for Awful Squad, 8/22/17 (photo credit Polygon) Starting in May 2017, a couple months after the game’s initial release, entertainment and video game website Polygon started a new video series on their YouTube channel called Awful Squad. In their weekly streams, a rotating cast of Polygon employees including Griffin McElroy, Patrick Gill, and Simone de Rochefort play PUBG, originally starting with squads of four but later using the newer custom game options to expand team size to as large as eight players. In these custom games, the streamers at Polygon would give out a custom password to viewers, allowing them to join the massive 100-player games. These games often filled to capacity in less than a minute, which speaks both to the popularity of PUBG and of the Awful Squad series. As the series progressed, its own unique culture evolved into being alongside it. Terms such as “ear contact” (hearing gunshots) and “beeps” (backpacks) became common among players and viewers, and certain other players’ usernames (Memeshart, Todd-Howard, and VapeMom69 chief among them) were commonly referenced and joked about on the streams. However, the most prolific story came in the stream from August 22nd. During that stream, the Awful Squad decided to make a custom game with the zombies mode enabled, in which all of the other players would be zombies trying to kill the Polygon streamers. The humans were doing pretty well, and as the circle (an arbitrary, shrinking playzone boundary) compressed, their options for places to go were limited. As they approached a bridge to try to get across a river in the city they had found themselves in, they saw a strange sight: several zombies on the railings of the bridge, wiggling back and forth.

The Wigglers (photo credit Joe Clark, PUBG user VapeMom69)

These zombies had banded together and taught each other their dance, wiggling to the left and the right using the Q and E keys. Those controls were originally intended for leaning around corners and edges to shoot around them, but they had adapted them as a form of communication. Much like spamming “Hello!” in Overwatch skirmishes, they were trying to signal to the other teams that they were peaceful and just wanted to wiggle. I managed to get in touch with these Wigglers through a friend of mine, Oliver (allofthenorth on PUBG). They were one of the original Wigglers and were communicating with the others through a Discord server they had started called Awful Squad Jr. They had started it for people who enjoyed Awful Squad and wanted to play PUBG with people who wouldn’t laugh at them for how bad they were at the game, and from that, its culture developed into something more. “This entire Discord… is full of Surprisingly Nice people, like, the diamond in the rough of gamers,” Oliver said when I reached out to them over Discord. “Now it’s a safe haven for a lot of people, people who are constantly alienated in gaming spaces for being too soft and not technically proficient enough.” Rye, one of the Wigglers, took a video from his point of view including the audio from the Discord call, which you can find on YouTube here. It shows fellow Awful Squad Jr. member Pinky starting the Wiggle phenomenon and then it spreading to the rest of the team. They then plan to go wiggle on the bridge so that the Awful Squad can see it, and their goal eventually evolves into human-zombie peace. Finally, the wiggling spreads to the Polygon streamers, and peace is achieved for a short while before they finally kill the zombies to win the game.

The Wigglers establish contact with the humans (photo from Rye’s video, linked above)