As Fortnite continues its transformation into a social space, its platform is being used to explore important ideas
We The People, Fortnite shows that it has the potential to exchange
This past weekend, Epic screened the townhall documentary We The People within Fortnite. The movie is presented as a series of conversations with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices in the media and beyond discussing the black experience in America. The film, which ran every other hour on America’s Independence day and was even uploaded to Fortnite’s YouTube channel, and it marked the first time Fortnite used its theater social space for something other than concerts or scripted theatrical movies.
I attended. I had no idea what I was doing.
Even for someone as lost as I, who had only booted up Fortnite for the third time, it was a simple enough process to figure out how to get to the social space where I could watch a screening. Sure, I may have ended up literally bouncing between jump pads in the concert area for a while, but it would not be a social event if I did not show up late and half-lost on the way. One of my few cold comforts is that there were other people running alongside me to get to the outdoor theater, though I had hoped for their sake that they were not following me.
The layers of abstraction between the player and the movie feel prominent at first and gradually begin to wash away over the first few minutes. It did not take longer than the intro to We The People for me to forget that it was my third-person avatar watching the movie. At the beginning of the feature, host Van Jones explains “Black culture is celebrated and beloved. The black experience that gives rise to that culture is often disrespected, dismissed, and minimised.”
Video games have been historically unwilling to embrace subject matter that might be controversial or political in nature. Actually, that is a little unfair. Large, successful video games are risk-averse and, for whatever reason, society has deemed statements like “Black culture is co-opted without attribution to the experience” to be a risky thing to say. As such, it is strange, though welcomed, to see that message be a part of Fortnite, a game which commands a young audience that is presumably more curious about their next skin than the color of anyone else’s skin.
A few months ago, director and movie theater traditionalist Christopher Nolan debuted a trailer for his upcoming movie Tenet within the confines for Fortnite’s social space. He coupled
One of my few cold comforts is that there were other people running alongside me to get to the outdoor theater, though I had hoped for their sake that they were not following me.
that trailer with an announcement that he would air one of his movies, which varied by region, in the game just a few weeks later. In some strange way, Fortnite became a modern salon for people to congregate in. In an equally strange way, Epic found a way to wield that power to deliver a message both younger and older people probably needed to hear.
Some aspect of Fortnite’s transformation into a virtual hub can be attributed to the global pandemic currently at differing states of disaster depending on geographic location. In an age where movie theaters are struggling to open and people are unable to gather, Fortnite provides a safe space to live the little aspects of life that were previously taken for granted without fear of bringing something deadly home. Players can even come to the theater paired up in squads so that they can voice chat with each other without bothering anyone else.
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