Fortnite is utterly now– its an absurdist dystopia constructed around watching the world’s destruction by “natural” disaster (along with an entire networked community) while competing for the scraps of resources on the dying earth with faceless strangers. Ok we get it, blah blah techno-libertarian, climate-change-induced dystopia– what else can we learn from it?
Innumerable words have been devoted to the rise of Fortnite as the networked game of our time. Considerably less have been devoted to examining it through the lense of Network Aesthetics. Here I consider how the hyper-networked quality of Fortnite contributes to its unfolding narrative and other forms of meaning-making in the game.
When I say hyper-networked, I’m referring to extreme online-ness of the game. Not only is gameplay itself dependent on an internet connection and the presence of ninety-nine other people (at least at the beginning), but all of the culture surrounding the game is produced and experienced through the internet. From fostering online communities spanning social networks, to dominating YouTube uploads (not to mention beating cable television in viewership), to owing its initial popularity to streamers of the game, Fortnite is embedded in online culture in a way that few games can match (help me: What would those games be? Are any as rich narratively as Fortnite?). So when a game with such an enormous community contructs a surreal, absurd environmentally-mediated narrative, it provides a glimpse into the possibilities of networked story-telling.
Fortnite possesses a complex lore which continuously unfolds live on the battle-island.
From crashing meteors, to slowly expanding rifts, to a mysterious cube, a rocket launch and spaceship crash, Fortnite’s developers are carefully crafting an extended narrative that transcends traditional modes of story-telling to create a kind of networked narrative experience. Without the explanatory mechanics of typical game narrative, often provided by cut-scenes or dialogue with non-player characters (both absent in Fortnite Battle Royale), players are forced to turn to each other to make sense of the bizarre events that take place in Fortnite’s virtual world.
Television networks have used contrived mystery as a technique to foster social media “buzz”, but Fortnite employs the technique differently. In such a show, the producers are simply pressing play/pause on a story once a week and cutting the narrative flow off at strategic points designed to get the most viewers to come back for the next episode. But in Fortnite, the narrative is not so episodic, and information is not revealed or withheld through a script and dialogue, but is inherent to the system. That is, the narrative information is the environment; to create narrative mystery and foster emergent online story-telling, Fortnite does not need to use the contrived episodic mystery of television. Instead it simply creates in-game events which unfold on the island simultaneously for every player, leaving it to the players themselves to divine the meanings of the ongoing super-natural events. Though I’m not going to do the work of digging through Fortnite community archives to find all the evidence of this collective process of meaning-making (just for this blog post), it is at the very least mentioned in several of the articles linked throughout.
So, Fortnite has produced a form of networked environmental story-telling and allowed it to animate a collective networked imagination. The narrative is more explicit than Journey’s stories that emerge from silent one-on-one collaborative gameplay or those that came out of Between’s “impenetrable barrier” to communication. It produces an affective experience that feels uniquely now both in its content (climate-wrecked, resource-scarce, fight-to-the-death hellscape) and mode of consumption (mediated by both the online network of Fortnite itself and the communities through which the narrative is reproduced and understood). Though it is certainly not the first to do so, Fortnite positions networks as spaces for not only play, but collaborative story-telling/world-building. A possible evolution for this form of story-telling could be democratization of the environmental phenomena that comprise in-game narrative not just the communal meaning-making present now. (But maybe that’d just be Minecraft plus fan fiction).
Networked imagination and storytelling is a really interesting aspect of games—I love it when a community creates a narrative around little plot elements slipped into the game itself. I knew almost nothing about Fortnite before reading this but it immediately reminded me of the massive lore that sprung up around Twitch Plays Pokemon and the community's attempt to build a narrative around the player avatar's erratic and random actions. The coherence of the narrative was actually really surprising, like the development of the Helix/Dome AKA order/chaos conflict that paralleled the random nature of the game.
I also think another reason why Fortnite and Twitch Plays Pokemon can create a more engaging narrative than, say, a TV series is this level…
Cavell, my argument was not that Fortnite's narrative is necessary for it's success or even that it's narrative is cohesive. Rather, my point is that what narrative there is is mediated by a collective, networked process of meaning-making. In fact, the broken, opaque story produced by the game presents greater possibilities for this networked meaning-making than a story told directly to players in language (i.e. only mediated by the developers), though the latter might appear more cohesive and less "loose" and "not connected".
The narrative being given in Fortnite is, for me at least, very loose and doesn't seem very connected at all. I mean, at one point in the game, you had to fight in Battle Royale with Thanos from Infinity War. For me, the thing that gives me pause from saying that Fortnite has an extended narrative is that the things in question just begin to exist, while other things cease to exist at the same time. What was once Moisty Mires is now Paradise Palms, with the only explanation being either a new season or a new update. The cube mentioned only existed for one day basically, which is an interesting idea, but there was no follow up to it,…
This is really interesting to me because I never knew Fortnite had this much narrative behind it. I don't really play it, so that could be the reason why I never knew; however, I don't think I've ever seen it advertised or talked about much either. It seems as though when things like the mysterious box appearing happens, players just mark it as a new update and don't bother looking into the narrative reasons behind it. That being said, I don't think a game like Fortnite needs narrative to be successful or even to convey the a reason for playing. I would like to know how many people playing actually pay attention to the narrative rather than playing just because…
The episodic television narrative formula is a valid comparison; I'm glad you made it. Fortnite's narrative unfolds as if you're really living in the world. In the temporal sense, it feels much more real than any televised narrative.
Reading your comment Henry, I also wonder why Fornite lacks local coop online play. Reading/hearing about Fornite I assumed this was an option and I'm surprised that it is not. Are players supposed to have their own personal experiences with the game?
Given your example @jwiltzer (of a game that created an optional lore database), I wonder what percentage of players actually care about adding narrative/lore to their gameplay experience. Is a detailed backstory a high enough value-add to encourage players to…