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Fortnite isn't a game, it's a lecherous advertising platform

For lack of connections to other media properties, Fortnite would lack a personality of its own.

Last month Fortnite announced a new Imposters event, a ten player mode pitting eight agents against two undercover "imposters". It's a social deduction game basically, and a dramatic departure from the main game's battle royale bread and butter. It's also pretty heavily inspired by Among Us, an indie game phenomenon developed by three people that blew up in 2020, after two years spent in complete obscurity.

This is hardly a new phenomenon in games; clones are as old as the medium, and Fortnite itself gained popularity by quickly pivoting from a failing co-op game to a PUBG-aping battle royale. Some Among Us developers expressed disappointment following the mode's announcement, and studio Innersloth's third-party business development head revealed on Twitter that he had previously "reached out" on the subject of collaborations. But their disappointment doesn't make it legally wrong.

But it does kinda suck for Innersloth because, after all, Fortnite is no stranger to collaboration. In fact, it has somewhat transcended the status of "game". Nowadays it's basically a platform for various lucrative marketing tie-ins, whether promotions for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or high-profile pop stars like Ariana Grande and Travis Scott. Other games advertise inside Fortnite: God of Way, Halo, and Rocket League have all appeared in the game (the latter is owned by Epic Games).

Shorn of these connections with well-established franchises and personalities, Fortnite is a curiously hollow game. It doesn't have an identity of its own: it's a strange amalgamation of zeitgeists, with a straight-out-of-the-box game art style reminiscent of Zynga's slappers (credit where it's due though: Fortnite's improvisational building aspect is definitely unique in the battle royale field).

Epic Games does give "personality" a red hot go, and obviously there are a lot of players - probably millions of them - invested in how the game's optional plot develops between seasons. But overall, it's less of a game and more of a metaverse, though it's not quite even there yet. Look to something like Second Life, or Roblox; those are legit worlds, meaningful in-game economies (people get rich designing Second Life apparel) and town square structures: these are less games than they are portals into various virtual ways of interacting.

But Second Life and Roblox, despite being obscenely popular with their converts, don't make a huge dent on the gaming industry - or culture - as a whole. They're weirdly self-contained. Fortnite on the other hand does, and it's quickly starting to resemble a kind of ruinous roaming hurricane, subsuming everything in its path. It's moment-to-moment free-to-play gameplay is just grist to the mill of its lucrative collaborations with other gargantuan entertainment properties.

By now everyone's heard of Fortnite addiction, and the difficulty parents have weaning their kids off games - harder nowadays given their cross-platform ubiquity. In 2019 one Canadian lawyer filed a legal notice against Epic Games, accusing it of using psychological techniques in order to hook players to Fortnite.

Those things are terrible, but Fortnite also represents a more abstracted malaise, a kind of hollowing of the popular imagination, where entertainment is just a crush of familiar multi-million dollar franchises, where its proximity to "art" has been utterly eroded. Over a decade ago when the "games in art" conversation was indelicately raging, could we have imagined logging into Fortnite in order to grind enough V-bucks to afford the Captain America skin in order to look amazing during the Fortnite Marshmello gig?

Anyway, the art question doesn't matter so much as whether we want to keep engaging with a phenomenon that so transparently seeks to enslave us, sucking up every marketable object in its trail, whether EDM or the efforts of a tiny game studio who managed to hit a winner.