The World Is Beyond My Control, So I Have Begun to Play Fortnite
I’ve started to resent the news lately. I don’t mean the billionaire-funded puppet show that is Big News Media — that resentment started much earlier. I mean that I’ve started to resent the idea of news, because all of it is bad. Checking my various feeds is a wasted effort of hoping that the trajectories of society’s progression will tick even a degree or two upwards, only to watch them gleefully steepen their downward grade.
But it’s not just the content. It’s the unavoidability. Everywhere you look, the proof demands attention: headlines about government corruption and American political dysfunction, shared links to updated figures on how we’ve allowed COVID-19 free reign across the country, tweets counting how many days have gone by without any action taken against Breonna Taylor’s killers. Each story is something that should be — needs to be — paid attention to, and that knowing makes it worse. Any attention you steal back for yourself feels like an irresponsibility. There are so many things that need doing. Why aren’t they being done? Why can’t I do more?
The world is a vampire, and its fangs are everywhere. That’s why, in the year 2020, I’ve started to play Fortnite.
The initial Fortnite craze missed me almost entirely. During the game’s ascension, I didn’t really interact with it beyond watching with a vague sense of terror as Epic Games fostered the growth of their behemoth, its player base and viewership numbers on streaming platforms eclipsing every competitor. I tried playing it once or twice, no more than a couple games. It didn’t stick. Fortnite and I weren’t made for each other.
It’s been years since I got much out of competitive multiplayer games. That fever broke in my early twenties, somewhere around 2014, when I realized that matches of Call of Duty, or Destiny’s Crucible, or whatever else left me more frustrated and exhausted than satisfied — even when I was usually winning. That old fire had been so thoroughly extinguished that, by the time Battle Royale gametypes came into vogue, they only offered me the fantasy of wandering around in distress for 20-ish minutes before hearing a distant, loud crack, and accepting that I’d been murdered by someone I never would have seen. This was only underlined by Fortnite’s building mechanics, which empower other players to design and conjure a combination fortified-shooting-position-slash-murder-labyrinth in seconds, while I’m doing my best not to trap myself under my own staircase.
But more than that, it was an issue of aesthetics. Fortnite looks like a pocket dimension where rejected ’90s KidsWB Saturday morning cartoon characters are banished, where their torment is eased only in temporary death. My attempts at playing it felt like submersing myself in an action figure commercial. It was too bright, too loud, too overstimulating. And the game’s font of choice is an act of violence against me, specifically.
It wasn’t for me, and I wasn’t for it. And that’s fine! It didn’t need my stamp of approval to become an unstoppable juggernaut. There are plenty of good things that I’m incompatible with. I’m used to it. I have the bad cilantro gene.
What attracted me to Fortnite now? Did the plummet into global despair teach me to stop being so pretentious with my tastes? Not really. Some people from a Discord I’m in were getting others to play. But the hours that followed were a revelation: Fortnite is a designer drug masquerading as a video game. It’s purpose-built to relieve you of the burden of having to think about the world. It’s perfect.
When I say that I don’t pair well with Fortnite’s aesthetic, that doesn’t mean I think that it’s poorly executed. Fortnite is a masterfully crafted product. It’s clean, colorful, smooth-edged. It’s rendered in vibrant Crayola crayon hyper-saturation, but anchored with a realistic lighting model. I stopped in the middle of a match just to tell a friend how even the render distance fog looked better than it had any right to. The entire space is reactive, each structure and object — down to each individual plank and brick of a player-built wall — jostles with every impact. Its basic interactions, animations, and sound effects —all the spots marked for your teammates, the fountains of loot belched from a treasure chest —are their own shots of dopamine, rewards for the exhausted brain.
Fortnite doesn’t just draw the eye; it devours attention. It’s precision-targeted at evoking the specific chemical responses from your brain that say “look here, and not there. The thinking time is done.” It’s a virtual narcotic fuzz of moving shapes and colors, the mobile hanging above your crib come to life, with all the joy it brought you before you had any use for words. Fortnite isn’t high art. It’s artisanal, magnificent trash.
Of course, Fortnite was designed in pursuit of a specific goal: the longer the game commands your attention, the more time it has to convince you to spend your money on it. Normally, this would offend my sensibilities, because I have other games that I’m more comfortable allowing to abuse my psychology for profit. They’re Smarter, and Artsy, and have very interesting Implications. That’s the whole problem. The shit I like is thought-provoking, with plenty of room for enlightened contemplation, and I’m trapped in a hell where I’m already thinking too much, and badly. Any contemplation slants inevitably toward despair. Fortnite, meanwhile, has only the one implication, which is that your fake murder would be more fun if you spent money to make your guy look cool. It’s a technicolor oblivion, and it’s one I’m content to weaponize — for now — against myself.
There’s never been shame in taking refuge in junk media, as long as you’re honest about the trash you’re weaving into your safety blanket. Trash can be magical. Enjoy it. 2020 is about to enter its eighth month, in what will probably feel like its eighth year. Find what peace you can, wherever you can find it. Mine will be the peace of watching as someone builds a cathedral around me with lethal intent, knowing that my ensuing death isn’t one I can avoid, but that it’s at least one I can understand.
Lincoln Carpenter is a man with passing ambidexterity and a talent for whistling. Sometimes he draws things. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/lhcarpenter.
