Situating the Appeal of Fortnite Within Children’s Changing Play Cultures

Abstract

Fortnite is a massively multiplayer online “battle royale” game that rapidly grew in 2018 to become one of the most popular digital games in the world, with a reported peak of 10.8 million concurrent players and 250 million registered players in March 2019. Based on 24 interviews with young people aged 9–14 (17 boys and 7 girls), this article sets out to provide an account of the appeal and experience of Fortnite. While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly why Fortnite has been such a phenomenal, global success, in this article, we argue that its appeal can be better explained by its intersections with YouTube and game livestreaming, the way the game acts as a vehicle for social capital and the performance of identity, and the rich sociality of play.

Children’s perspectives and attitudes towards Fortnite ‘addiction’

“…We want to reiterate that while they often described various games as 'addictive', or the play of other children as 'addiction', their use of the term was overwhelmingly not describing practices or behaviours that would meet a definition of addiction. 2 In fact, digital play held an important and positive position in most of our participants' lives as an enjoyable pastime and a key part of their social lives (see Carter et al, 2020). As we demonstrate, our participants were both aware of and engaged in addiction discourse resulting from media panic, but used the term in different ways.…”

“…This present article focuses on a major theme that arose around addiction and the negative characterizations of Fortnite that our participants expressed or encountered. In a separate article (Carter, 2020), we have separately presented a broader overview of these participant's experiences with Fortnite, where we provide an account of the appeal and experience of the game for younger players and situate this appeal within children's changing play cultures. All names used in this article for research participants are pseudonyms.…”

“…During each 10-week season, various events occur affecting the gameworld, and players with a battlepass are able to complete challenges to unlock rewards such as costumes for their avatar ('skins') or dances ('emotes'). As we've argued elsewhere (see Carter et al 2020), understanding what Fortnite 'is' means also engaging with the abundance of Fortnite-focused content on YouTube and Twitch, which keep players up to date on this changing game world and overviews the best ways to complete challenges and the different ways of playing the game.…”

It is Not an Island It’s A World: Fortnite and “Worldness”

“…During an individual season, players compete to win challenges, unlock content, and follow narrative events that impact the playable world. While prior work has discussed the pressures that this temporality places on players to play [3], in this paper we argue that the significant effect that the seasons mechanic has on players is that it creates a sense of worldnesssimilar to games with pervasive virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or EVE Onlinethat is core to understanding its widespread appeal and phenomenal success.…”

“…Like all games, the play and appeal of Fortnite is not simply situated in engagement with the game itself. In our prior work [3], we discuss how Fortnite's experience is a social one, deeply interwoven with practices on sites like YouTube and Twitch. The result is thatfor the children players we studied -Fortnite becomes a vehicle for the accumulation and performance of social capital, both online through gameplay but also offline through the demonstration of expertise about the gameworld or game practices.…”