Dancing to global success
IN OUR increasingly impatient, datadriven society, where matters of style and aesthetics are largely seen as a waste, art for art’s sake is thriving in an unusual place – the massively popular video game Fortnite: Battle Royale.
The goal in Fortnite, as in most multi-player shooter games, is to blow your enemies to shreds. It follows a typical “battle royale” format, where 100 players brawl until there’s only one survivor. Though it costs nothing to play, Fortnite is raking in higher monthly sales – $126 million (about R1.9 billion), for example, in February – than its nearest competition, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
How does Fortnite do this? By getting players to buy “skins” – avatar costumes – and pay for avatar dance moves.
These elements of style are Fortnite’s secret sauce. Styling on other players is a big part of the thrill. After a kill, players can dance on the body, adding a fillip of humour to the victory. In gamespeak, the dances are called “emotes”. You can choose from dozens of these quick, secondslong snatches of choreography in the game’s Item Shop. Most of the emotes are drawn from real-life dances or gestures: from fist bumps and the brush-the-shoulders dust-off to full-body expressions such as the “worm”, the criss-cross swivel of the “Electro Shuffle” and a riff on Korean pop star Psy’s wide-legged “Gangnam Style” gallop, from his 2012 viral music video.
The Fortnite emotes are contagiously fun to watch, and they’ve also become fun to do, in real life.
Professional athletes have been known to bust some Fortnite moves as victory dances. England soccer player Dele Alli, after scoring against Sweden in last July’s World Cup quarter-final, wiggled his knees in the “Ride the Pony” emote, Fortnite’s reference to the choreography of “Gangnam Style”.
The swift, punchy little emotes have also taken off with little kids, teens and young adults.
Why have the Fortnite emotes taken off in the real world? After all, dance emotes for avatars are nothing new. “It’s a function of how popular the game is,” says Dave Thier, who writes about video games. “You see people dressed up in the skins of the game, but it’s easier to just do a few moves.”
As a highly competitive game, Fortnite has a natural fan base among athletes, Thier adds. “Athletes have a lot of opportunity to do dances and have people look at them, and that ties in to how the emotes are used in the game.”
The Fortnite emotes reflect a truth as old as the first human footprint. They tie into a collective understanding of the body and its language. A message is transferred from the player to the community, through an avatar that’s eerily able to conjure emotion through gestures and movements. In however small a way, the dance matters.