Fortnite: It's not coming back - The game of the generation

I started reading, and I'm loving this article. It captures so much of what I love from the kind of multiplayer game that Fortnite is. I feel like I usually only see this kind of writing about cinematic or quirky single-player games. Multiplayer games, especially anything containing in-app purchases, seem to always be written off as immature or fake experiences for children or mindless consumers that aren't worth examining. I previously watched the Folding Ideas video on Fortnite, and while it had neat parts, I had some quiet annoyance at its refusal to engage with the game. I realize I shared the author's criticisms of the video:

Amidst these very real problems, a slew of less real ones infected talk of Fortnite. Typical among them was Folding Ideas’ video about Fortnite’s ‘manufactured discontent’. It begins with bad jokes and Tencent Chinese scaremongering and ends by calling Fortnite “a weaponized product targeted at kids”. Of course the children. Always the children.

Dan Olson’s main claim is that Fortnite isn’t really a game; it’s a storefront. Which initially sounds smart, in that facile, thinkpiecey sort of way. And which just so happens to suit his form of distanced analysis that doesn’t require deep engagement with the actual game everyone is playing. It’s not even clear that he played the main battle royale game much during his month-long tour, given his arguments. Or given that all his video footage is taken from Team Rumble, a side game mode which is just a large scale deathmatch, not a battle royale.

Like I find it interesting to see a video talking about the store aspects of the game, but personally I never really engaged with that aspect of the game, and it's tiring to see that as the aspect almost exclusively discussed of any game containing a storefront.

Each of these scenes I come upon vibrates with occurrence, with incident. They feel different than the environmental storytelling of so many other videogames, the kind that Fortnite also excels at. No, here you follow the tracks of other players on the fly, without the aid of videogame vapor trails. You read the signs and try to imagine what must have gone down not days or years but minutes before. Yet in the end it usually proves too messy to fully reconstruct. It’s less carefully arranged dioramas and hamfisted graffiti and more crime scenes that cannot be solved. You look around and think: something definitely happened here. But you can’t be sure exactly what.

For a while I found all the makeshift structures, the titular forts of Fortnite, ugly. They looked like mistakes out there on the field, plain goofs. Each prefab annex marred the rolling hills I wished to lose myself in. I held to my old taste for landscape, for its private meadows and illusion of permanence. My years in the open world trenches had taught me: even virtual landscapes can make you feel a little immortal.

But over time, these awkward towers became more beautiful to me. They were not built to be beautiful, or even functional, really. They were built desperately. Without meticulous planning, in some space before conscious design, almost natural in their way. These elaborate vertical shanties that popped up all over Fortnite island were fossils of desperation, rickety monuments to our brief gaming lives. This was what happened when present needs dominated, when there was no real future to consider. This was the architecture of survival.

I feel this a lot while playing Rust lately. Rust has some vague similarities to Fortnite in that there's building and constant danger from other players, though it has the difference that the world generally lasts for a week instead of a single ~30 minute match. People build bases to live in rather than build temporary structures for battles, so there's a lot more purpose and interaction to the structures. There's something really neat to encountering the structures and trying to guess whether they're still actively used or abandoned, whether they pose a threat or may provide cover, what intent the creator had, whether they can be broken into and stolen from or repurposed, and wondering what battles and stories once defined the structure.

On multiple occasions in Rust, I've found a partially decayed base, rebuilt it to use as my own base, placing my own lockable doors on all the empty door frames, but found a pre-existing locked door from the previous owner that I was never able to open. There's something weird about inhabiting a player-made structure, half-made by you and filled with all of your stuff, defending it from others as your property, and yet still having a locked door in your home that you don't know what it leads to. It's like the common dream of finding a room in your house that you didn't know about.

Still, I think of all the game worlds I’ve inhabited over the years and wonder why Fortnite feels so different. How does its world achieve such a powerful thereness? Why do I feel so attached to its landscapes? [...] Fortnite’s main battle royale competitors, Apex Legends and PUBG, do not have living worlds. [...]

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at least has size and emptiness and awkward mechanics on its side for world feeling. But its world is dead. Whatever happened here, it happened in the unplayed past. It is, like so many videogames, fundamentally post. Not just post-apocalyptic or post-war but post-world. There is little evidence of life, of movement, of anyone passing. Time itself has been frozen, lost. The battle royale is the only present left.

I've thought about this sort of thing a lot. In most games, the game map is something fixed, that was created through processes entirely separate from the gameplay sandbox sometime before the player ever arrives, and then is immutable. Literally, the game world is usually made long before you got the game by devs in a map editor, a thing that doesn't exist in gameplay to players. Canonically, the game world is created by people making buildings or even breaking things, sometime before the player arrived, and the player can never view that process in the act or contribute to it.

Minecraft is interesting because it mostly removes that division. Almost any structure you find already placed in the world can be unmade, remade, or added on by you. There's no sense that the world mysteriously became immutable immediately prior to your arrival.

Fortnite also avoids this feeling of the world suddenly becoming immutable prior to your arrival, not by letting you completely freely edit it with persistence like Minecraft, but by having constant updates changing the world. This technique seems uncommon outside of maybe some active MMOs.

But I cannot return to Wailing Woods. It doesn’t matter what I do. The loss is permanent. Fortnite is remarkable not only in how giddily it adds to the island, but in how ruthlessly it subtracts. The game takes a radical attitude towards continuity and loss. One that embraces not the usual videogame smorgasbord, not player choice, not availability, but rather: finitude. These limits create a striking sense of lived history. Not only that what happened happened, but that some things are no longer happening. Some things are just plain gone.

It wears on you. The more you play, the more you feel attached to some corner of the world, the more you have to lose when the end finally comes. If in Minecraft you domesticate space, block by block, then in Fortnite, loss by loss, time domesticates you. And part of me wants to be domesticated. I relish the loss of Wailing Woods. It’s so rare for a game to mark me this way, wound me, make me actually ache. I get so tired of exerting my vain will on a virtual world. I want to feel it work its will on me.

This reminds me of playing Minecraft in hardcore difficulty, where dying once wipes your save file, or playing Rust and losing a base to an end-of-the-week level wipe or to raiders who steal it. It's an interesting feeling. It's stressful in the moment of course, but having that finality as a risk adds so much to the experience while playing. It's strange how rare the feeling still is in games.

I've finished reading it now. I've really only touched on the first half of the essay. It starts talking about the structure of games overall, games criticism's failure to look beyond that, politics, philosophy of life... I thought I was just getting into an article delving into the fun of online games. A little melodramatic at parts (is Fortnite really all that different now that the island doesn't change in the same way?), but it's deeply invigorating. I see myself returning to this article often in the future, especially as I try to brainstorm about what games can be.

Nice writing. It sort of makes me want to try the game and at the same time gets across what I probably won't like about it. The author also spends a fair bit of time thinking about what video games are about. And then moves on into philosophy:

But this whole mindset is wrong. Feeling contingency is not about control. It’s not about getting what you want. This is the same poisonous game thinking of optimization and winning. Our notions of alternate histories and multiple worlds can’t actually fathom the radicalness of contingency. We can only imagine minor variations, tracked along limited vectors. Timelines, not fields of constant motion, ripples out and in, an ever-shifting web in which we are all caught. But we don’t need perfect knowledge or mastery to act in this web. We never have. Most of us don’t master anything, certainly not our own lives. And so what? Our lives remain no less valuable.

So why then ask the questions? Why feel contingency at all? Because it admits our power and limits both. Because it’s a chance for change. Because it scares us. Because it’s true. Contingency is both the source of our loss and the grounds for our hope. Put your hand out right now and feel it happening. That vibration. Let your hand ask: why this world? Contingency allows us to ask this question again and again, to truly imagine otherwise. And with this otherwise come a whole host of radical possibilities. Radical openness and vulnerability. Radical wrongness without shame. Radical empathy and connection with every fellow creature in this contingent world. Even just the radical feeling in itself. Feeling is always being asked to justify itself, to prove its worth. But that’s like asking the wind to justify itself. The wind is a gift. And so is this feeling.

Really, the question should be: why not feel contingency? Because the dangers in not feeling it are so much worse. So many resist, especially with age. The threat is too much, the fear too overwhelming. Radical contingency ruins their conspiracy theories, mocks their designs, proves their control the ultimate fantasy. The uncertainty left in its wake, it’s the last thing they want. The past feels safer. They covet its reasons, its explanations, its seeming stasis. It’s just so fucking hard to change.

I say ‘they’, but I feel the struggle too, all the time. I vacillate between fear and hope. I cling to my illusions. And yet the longer I dwell in this feeling of radical contingency, the more it feels like liberation. Instead of a fatalistic determinism, it says that nothing is inevitable, nothing is permanent, it can all be changed. If not the whole world, not right away, then at least my life. I am not comforted by this, I am provoked. I am called to see my life and act.