on fortnite

Decided to write a few thoughts about Fortnite while I'm on vacation after reading Trevor Strunk’s article on it. I’ve played a lot of shooters in my life, and this article turned into an opportunity for me to think about video games, neoliberalism & utopia.

For me, again someone who's played a lot of shooters, the most interesting in Fortnite is the building. Battlefield Bad Company’s much heralded Frostbite game engine introduced destructible environments a decade ago, but the destructible gameplay created new problems: the level designs at the beginning of a match produced the traditional tactical play of shooters like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty and previous Battlefields, but the planned play of the levels would break down as the buildings were reduced to rubble. On open levels especially, the value of infantry was drastically reduced as cover was destroyed in Bad Company. Fortnite, I think, solves this gameplay problem: cover can be created and destroyed. I think this explains the ‘unconventional’ gameplay:

“What this unconventional blend of gaming elements — the coordinated violence of a Call of Duty combined with the cartoonish world-building of Minecraft — produces is an army of Twitch streamers performing acrobatic, operatic maneuvers around each other, building while shooting and dodging upwards as a storm crowds in around them.”

I think, in terms of audience, this mashup of influences, from DayZ to Minecraft to Battlefield, helped Fortnite appeal to a large audience. Fortnite appeals to both the kids who grew up playing Minecraft and the adults who’ve been playing Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Halo, etc for over a decade. (The combat in Fortnite most reminds me of Timesplitters 2. Though, I think the best comp might Battlefield’s late aughts free-to-play Battlefield: Heroes. Something others have noticed. Interestingly, the game heralded as innovative for its game engine a decade ago, Battlefield: Bad Company, was less of a ‘game of the future’ than its ‘cheap’ free-to-play cousin Battlefield: Heroes.)

But, to talk about the ‘ideology’ of Fortnite, I think we need to go into the history of the battle royale genre a bit. Fortnite was initially announced around 2011 when the video game industry was trying to monetize the success of the open-world zombie survival mod DayZ. DayZ was a fan created mod for an open-world military game called ARMA 2. Players of the mod DayZ could join servers and build bases, fight OR cooperate with other players, and gather supplies during a zombie apocalypse. As the genre progressed, the zombies were never much of a threat the way they were in the Left for Dead or Resident Evil franchises; there were never hordes in these open-world zombie games. Because of this, the most fun thing to do, often, was fighting other players.

It is through this route that we ended up with H1Z1, PUBG, and Fortnite. This was the route the studios could monetize, but all these games are descended from the zombie apocalypse. In one sense, Fortnite happened because the overlap between shooters & the open world of Minecraft is the post-apocalyptic.

In order to facilitate more & quicker ‘player vs player’ (PvP) combat, battle royale games instituted shrinking play zones to force players into a smaller area where they’d have to fight. The most neoliberal thing about Fortnite is time, not the kill or be killed play. The ‘economy’ of the game encourages extremely aggressive play because of the heavy time constraints: eliminating the other players causes them to drop whatever they’ve gathered. In effect, their time & labor then goes to the player who eliminated them. Unlike in PUBG, this encourages a much more aggressive gameplay that disincentivizes passive play styles like hiding in a bush.

So, to return to Trevor Strunk’s article, instead of coming to the conclusion that

“Fortnite isn’t about scarcity, but it could not reach its popularity in a world that wasn’t shaped by scarcity. What we recognize in Fortnite, at an almost unconscious level, is the logics of our own world reflected back on us. There’s comfort in being able to manipulate and control those logics so that we end up on top, for once.”

Where I differ more strongly is that Fortnite also expresses utopian desires due to its legacy in the post-apocalyptic (zombies) & dystopian (Minecraft Hunger Games). There are moments of Fortnite where alternatives are possible either by the fun of imagination or through the building system inspired by Minecraft, itself a very utopian game. This may seem contradictory:

“Fortnite is a totally bloodless and innocent game while, somehow, being about desperate murder for survival — a game every child plays where the basic goal is to murder an entire island full of people and do funny dances.” (again, from the article)

“What struck me about the video game Day-Z when I heard about it was not that it was a zombie apocalypse simulator, but that it was really a kind of utopia. For a player who understands how to play Day-Z, it’s not really difficult to survive; it offers a chance to do all the cool shit you’re not allowed to do IRL: you can get an Escalade and fill it with mountain dew & RPGs and blow up anyone who tries you. There’s a way in which the apocalypse contains utopias. The tv show The Last Man on Earth offers a lot of these moments. On the other side of the spectrum, a trope in the genre going back to at least Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is a band of motorcycle outlaws/ white supremacists wreaking havoc on everyone. For the men in those bands, it’s kind of implied that the break down of society offers them the a chance to live their repressed lives, their best lives. It’s a utopia for them.

To quote Toni Morrison “All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.” The breakdown of society, according to the liberal myth, means people formerly excluded reenter and wreak havoc; the budding utopias of the good guys are always found and destroyed. In the Walking Dead, the characters seek refuge in a prison. Prison’s function remains the same in this scenario: protecting society from the inherently evil.”

It's also worth saying that the utopian & neoliberal can coexist. I think Twitch is an example of this IRL: real time commenting on videos undermines the fascism of one way broadcasting by making both the thoughts of the audience known & the creator somewhat responsive to their audiences. Fortnite is a perfect partner for Twitch in this sense. There is a utopian element to Twitch in the audience getting to broadcast back, but it's currently buried under an Amazon sized load of shit.

There is something utopian in Fortnite. It’s been limited by the corporate control (I haven’t talked about it, but Fortnite two main influences, Minecraft & DayZ are heavily mod drive), time, & competition, but Fortnite is one of the first esports-y games that feels like it’s primarily meant to be fun. (Rocket League falls into this category, too.) Despite the creeping neoliberalism, Fortnite does feel like a game where utopia is possible; building an alternative is possible. I think part of it is Fortnite strives to be fun, and fun’s a crucial part of building a utopia for me; to paraphrase Emma Goldman in a way that will infuriate luddites (and probably everyone): “If I can't dab, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” Look folks, I’m sorry I did it, but I was born to post world is a heck 410,757,864,530 elims