It was getting late in Tomato Town. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground. Gizzard Lizard had made his way there after plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by avoiding the Wailing Woods and keeping the storm just off to his left. He spied an enemy combatant on high ground, who appeared to have a sniper’s rifle. In a hollow below the sniper’s perch was an abandoned pizzeria, with a giant rotating sign in the shape of a tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who had quickly built himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, said, “I think I’m going to attack. That’s one of my main issues: I need to start being more aggressive.” He ran out into the open, pausing before a thick shrub. “This is actually a really good bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”
Two men enter, one man leaves: the fighters closed in on each other. In the video game Fortnite Battle Royale, the late-game phase is typically the most frenetic and exciting. Suddenly, the sniper launched himself into a nearby field and began attacking. Gizzard Lizard hastily threw up another port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy fire. The goal is always to get, or make, the high ground.
A moment later, Gizzard Lizard was dead—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from various vantages, to analyze what had gone wrong. To be so close to winning and yet come up short—it was frustrating and tantalizing. One wants to go again. The urge is strong. But it was time for my son to do his homework.
I spent more time as a kid than I care to remember watching other kids play video games. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Usually, my friends, over my objections, preferred this to playing ball—or to other popular, if less edifying, neighborhood pursuits, such as tearing hood ornaments off parked cars. Every so often, I played, too, but I was a spaz. Insert quarter, game over. Once gaming moved into dorms and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I learned that I could just leave. But sometimes I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided attention, the knack that some guys (and it was always guys) seemed to have for staying alive, both in the game and in the battle of wits on the couch, as though they were both playing a sport and doing “SportsCenter” at the same time.
I thought of this the other day when a friend described watching a group of eighth-grade boys and girls (among them his son) hanging around his apartment playing, but mostly watching others play, Fortnite. One boy was playing on a large TV screen, with a PlayStation 4 console. The other boys were on their phones, either playing or watching a professional gamer’s live stream. And the girls were playing or watching on their own phones, or looking over the shoulders of the boys. One of the girls told my friend, “It’s fun to see the boys get mad when they lose.” No one said much. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—came from the kids’ little screens, in the form of the pro gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.
Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, is the third-person shooter game that has taken over the hearts and minds—and the time, both discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate America. Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times. (The game, available on PC, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free, but many players pay for additional, cosmetic features, including costumes known as “skins.”) In terms of fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents speak of it as an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial service, in the bathroom at 4 A.M. They beg one another for solutions. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon while trying to stop his son from playing; there was a time when repeatedly calling one’s father a fucking asshole would have led to big trouble in Tomato Town. In our household, the big threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.
Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before. Its relative lack of wickedness—it seems to be mostly free of the misogyny and racism that afflict many other games and gaming communities—makes it more palatable to a broader audience, and this appeal both ameliorates and augments its addictive power. (The game, in its basic mode, randomly assigns players’ skins, which can be of any gender or race.) Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that girls are playing in vast numbers, both with and without boys. There are, and probably ever shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at such newcomers, just as they gripe when there are no newcomers at all.
A friend whose thirteen-year-old son is deep down the rabbit hole likened the Fortnite phenomenon to the Pump House Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-well teen surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe happened upon in the early nineteen-sixties. Instead of a clubhouse on the beach, there’s a virtual global juvenile hall, where kids gather, invent an argot, adopt alter egos, and shoot one another down. Wolfe’s Pump House kids went on beer-soaked outings they called “destructos,” in which they would, at local farmers’ behest, demolish abandoned barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking little homebodies demolishing virtual walls and houses with imaginary pickaxes. Young people everywhere are swinging away at their world, tearing it down to survive—creative destruction, of a kind.
Shall I explain the game? I have to, I’m afraid, even though describing video games is a little like recounting dreams. A hundred players are dropped onto an island—from a flying school bus—and fight one another to the death. The winner is the last one standing. (You can pair up or form a squad, too.) This is what is meant by Battle Royale. (The original version of Fortnite, introduced last July, for forty dollars, wasn’t fight to the death; it is the new iteration that has caught fire.) A storm encroaches, gradually forcing combatants into an ever-shrinking area, where they must kill or be killed. Along the way, you seek out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, while also collecting building materials by breaking down existing structures. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is an essential aspect of the game, and this is why it is commonly described as a cross between Minecraft and the Hunger Games—and why aggrieved parents are able to tell themselves that it is constructive.
Before a game begins, you wander around in a kind of purgatorial bus depot-cum-airfield waiting until the next hundred have assembled for an airdrop. This is a strange place. Players shoot inconsequentially at one another and pull dance moves, like actors walking aimlessly around backstage practicing their lines. Then come the airlift and the drifting descent, via glider, to the battleground, with a gentle whooshing sound that is to the Fortnite addict what the flick of a Bic is to a smoker. You can land in one of twenty-one areas on the island, each with a cutesy alliterative name, some suggestive of mid-century gay bars: Shifty Shafts, Moisty Mire, Lonely Lodge, Greasy Grove. In patois and in mood, the game manages to be both dystopian and comic, dark and light. It can be alarming, if you’re not accustomed to such things or are attuned to the news, to hear your darlings shouting so merrily about head shots and snipes. But there’s no blood or gore. The violence is cartoonish, at least relative to, say, Halo or Grand Theft Auto. Such are the consolations.
The island itself has an air of desertion but not of extreme despair. This apocalypse is rated PG. The abandonment, precipitated by the storm, which has either killed or scattered most of the world’s population, seems to have been recent and relatively speedy. The grass is lush, the canopy full. The hydrangeas are abloom in Snobby Shores. Buildings are unencumbered by kudzu or graffiti and have tidy, sparsely furnished rooms, as though the inhabitants had only just fled (or been vaporized). Apparently, everyone on the island, in those prosperous pre-storm times, shopped in the same aisle at Target. Each time I watch a player enter a bedroom, be it in Junk Junction or Loot Lake, I note the multicolored blanket folded across the bed. Those cobalt-blue table lamps: are they for sale? Maybe one day they will be.
Players, young ones anyway, don’t seem to notice such things. They’re after assault rifles (preferably the Legendary SCAR), pump shotguns, bolt-action sniper rifles (the scope is a boon), chug jugs, slurp juices, bandages, medkits, and shield potions. They see, and covet, skins that look cool but have no bearing on game play; for twenty bucks, you can don the Leviathan or the Raven. Or they fixate on dance moves, the so-called victory emotes you can have your avatar perform, in the heat of battle or after a kill. The Floss, the Fresh, the Squat Kick, the Wiggle—these have spilled out into the world. You may notice people around you, or professional athletes on TV, breaking into strange dances. The one known as Take the L is big these days in the Bundesliga and at Minute Maid Park.
Plenty of accomplished gamers look down their noses at Fortnite, the way, perhaps, that some jazz and blues diehards, in 1964, dismissed the Beatles. The dances, the alliterative place-names, the dearth of true postapocalyptic menace: these can indicate a lack of seriousness that to some seems spell-breaking. A classmate of Gizzard Lizard’s, ZenoMachine, a gamer for longer than seems plausible (he began playing Team Fortress 2 in kindergarten and now develops his own games), is the eighth grade’s resident Fortnite Scrooge. “First of all, I’m not a fan of the polygons,” ZenoMachine told me. We were on a park bench, after school—a rare hit of sunlight. “It has a hi-res texture but low-res polygons.” Gizzard Lizard had warned me that I wouldn’t understand ZenoMachine, but I gathered that he was critiquing the game’s aesthetics. He liked a realer look. He objected to certain inconsistencies. The pickaxe, for example, which players use to demolish walls and buildings, causes almost no damage to other players as a weapon. “How can that be?” he said. “I see why a lot of people like Fortnite. It targets players who aren’t experienced. But it violates the laws of consistency.” He said that the first time he played he won—by hiding out until everyone else had pretty much been killed off. This is known as camping, and is frowned upon by regular players. “If something as simple as player choice affects the other players’ experience, you’ve got a design flaw,” ZenoMachine said.
ZenoMachine develops his own games using a platform called the Unreal Engine. Fortnite, as it happens, is built on the Unreal Engine, too. The game is the creation of a company called Epic Games, based outside Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1998, Epic released a first-person shooter called Unreal, which enjoyed only moderate success but which, almost by accident, had an enduring influence on the evolution of video games. Epic used Unreal’s underlying architecture, and some of its parts, to make what came to be known as the Unreal Engine, a basic platform that supports all manner of games, be they shooters, brawlers, platformers, or sandbox R.P.G.s. It’s basically a suite of tools that developers can use to design and build games and other simulations. Rather than starting from scratch in, say, C++, the popular graphic-coding language, independent developers and other companies use the Unreal Engine to make their own games. (The licensing of the engine, in turn, gives Epic the cash flow to commit time and resources to the development of hit games like Fortnite.) Each year, Epic uses existing games, some of them all but forgotten, to soup up the Unreal Engine, so that it can handle an ever more sophisticated array of demands. Fortnite was the first Unreal Engine 4 release. Among other things, Epic had to adapt the engine to help its servers accommodate the huge amount of data that has to be processed instantaneously when a hundred players are competing in a single Battle Royale round. The question of which actions affect others, and from what distance, on this vast storm-sieged island—the old if-then problem—is much more complicated than it would seem.
“Think of Fortnite as a visual form of media,” Jamin Warren, the editor of the culture-and-gaming journal Kill Screen, told me. Whatever Fortnite’s allure as a game to play, it is also apparently the most beguiling one to watch. As video-game spectatorship fills arenas, and siphons a generation away from actual sports, Fortnite has become the most viewed game on YouTube—by March, there had been almost three billion views of the millions of sessions that players had uploaded—and the top game on Twitch, the streaming platform. Watching isn’t just for spazzes anymore. “It’s created a kind of global arcade,” Warren said. “Instead of a few kids looking over the shoulder of the hot-shot older brother or whatever, down at the mall, you have millions of people watching, and the person playing the game is a millionaire.”
The medium’s breakout star is known as Ninja. He is a former professional Halo player named Tyler Blevins, who has said that he makes more than half a million dollars a month by streaming his Fortnite sessions, and his free-associative commentary, on Twitch (which is owned by Amazon). His YouTube channel has more than ten million subscribers. Last month, he hosted a Fortnite tournament in Las Vegas, in an e-sports arena, and almost seven hundred thousand people tuned in to his Twitch stream. I’ve heard many teens refer to him as America’s biggest entertainer—which is not as hyperbolic as it sounds. In April, Ninja ranked higher than any athlete in the world in “social interactions,” a measure of social-media likes, comments, shares, and views. Cristiano Ronaldo was No. 2. In March, Ninja consented to a Fortnite session with Drake.
Blevins, who is twenty-six, comes from outside Detroit and lives near Chicago (he won’t say where) with his wife, who handles his business affairs. He streams ten to fourteen hours a day, typically from about 9 A.M. to 3 P.M. and then from 6 P.M. until whenever. All told, he logs about three hundred hours a month. What one sees is his game screen, with his avatar in whatever skin he has chosen, and, in an inset, a perpetual shot of Blevins himself. A ninja headband girds a Bieber-ish shock of hair that he dyes different colors: emerald green, platinum, yellow. He’s a lean, boyish guy who seems to make an effort to maintain some semblance of a smile at all times. His spiel is goofy, caffeinated, and moderately cocky. He does impressions. In March, he was mumbling some rap lyrics as he played, and somehow the word “indica” came out as the N-word. Amid the backlash, he apologized, sort of, and, when it came time for me to talk to him last week, his manager’s one condition was that I not ask him about it, as he’d already said what there was to say, which was, in part, “I promise that there was no mal intent (I wasn’t even trying to say the word—I fumbled lyrics and got tongue-tied in the worst possible way).” A scrupulous journalist might have called off the interview, but the teens I’d been talking to about the game were so impressed that I might talk to Ninja that I caved. At the last moment, though, Ninja bailed, claiming illness. Burn! (“I’m pretty sure that was BS,” one of those teens texted me. “I think he was streaming today.”) At any rate, Ninja’s sensitivity is a sign that gamers like him are entering the mainstream. They have to watch what they say.
Onscreen, the millionaire maintains the environs of the gamer boy. The camera takes in an acoustic-tile ceiling, wall-to-wall carpeting, bare drywall, and a fourposter bed. There’s a framed Detroit Lions poster propped against a wall, alongside a mini-fridge stocked with Red Bull. Ninja is a lifelong gamer, but he makes a point to remind his fans, lest they get the drop-everything bug, that he did well in school, played soccer and other sports, finished college while holding down a job at Noodles & Company, and even appeared, with his family, on “Family Feud.” The game skill is legit. He wins something like half of the hundreds of games he plays every week, against all comers. He’s a crack shot and has a nose for the high ground. As often as not, it seems he’s hardly paying attention. He’s reading fans’ messages out loud, like a talk-radio host, or jabbering with another Fortnite star, such as Dr. Lupo or KingRichard, if they’ve teamed up for a game or two: “The recoil on this thing is stupid”; “You said you had a full shield, ass”; “So hold my dick”; “That guy was trying to drink a chug jug. What a noob.” All accompanied by occasional bursts of gunfire. “To anyone watching the stream, I hope you guys are enjoying the content, man.”
Gizzard Lizard’s shoot-out in Tomato Town took place on the last night of April, which was the last night of Season 3. Anticipation was running high. One of the ingenious innovations of Fortnite is to introduce seasons of about two months, as on a cable-television series, and to integrate new plot and game elements. (Last week, in a crossover masterstroke, Thanos, the indestructible villain of the new Avengers movie, dropped in on the game—that is, players could adopt a Thanos skin—and so, for a while, the Fortnite set gleefully schooled various Thanoses in a way that the Avengers could not.) On April 30th, a comet that had been hovering over the island was supposed to strike after midnight. For days, meteors had been showering the game. Teasers—the latest being “brace for impact”—had inspired a raft of speculation and conspiracy theories. At first, people expected the comet to hit the crowded urban setting known as Tilted Towers, but some clues led others to predict, correctly, that the comet would wipe out Dusty Depot, which was thereafter to be known as Dusty Divot.
It was hard to do homework on a night like this; Gizzard Lizard returned to the game. He played on a PC he’d built at school. It didn’t have a graphics card. He’d never been a big gamer—his parents were fairly strict about screens and had never consented to an Xbox or even a Wii—though he’d played Minecraft for a while. This level of obsession was something new. He saw on his find-your-friends bar that a bunch of schoolmates were playing, so he FaceTimed one who goes by ism64. They teamed up and hit Lucky Landing. Gizzard Lizard wore an earbud under a set of earphones, so that he could talk with ism64 while listening for the sound of approaching enemies. From a distance, it appeared that he was talking to himself: “Let’s just build. Watch out, you’re gonna be trapped under my ramp. I’m hitting this John Wick. Oh my God, he just pumped me. Come revive me. Build around me and come revive me. Wait, can I have that chug jug? Thank you.”
I’d been struck, watching Gizzard Lizard’s games for a few days, by how the spirit of collaboration, amid the urgency of mission and threat, seemed to bring out something approaching gentleness. He and his friends did favors for one another, watched one another’s backs, offered encouragement. This was something that I hadn’t seen much of, say, down at the rink. One could argue that the old arcade, with the ever-present threat of bullying and harassment and the challenge of claiming dibs, exposed a kid to the world—it’s character-building!—but there was something to be said for such a refuge, even if it did involve assault rifles and grenades.
And then the John Wick was upon him. “Oh God! Oh God!” Foiled again.
A John Wick was an accomplished player who had earned a skin that bears a resemblance to the character played by Keanu Reeves in the “John Wick” movies. (Officially, the skin is called the Reaper, presumably to avoid licensing fees, but players call it John Wick.) It was available to anyone who had attained all hundred tiers of the game in Season 3—a combination of achievement and experience which would have required playing for between seventy-five and a hundred and fifty hours.
As the last hours of Season 3 expired, players scrambled to reach Tier 100, and get their John Wick skins. Gizzard Lizard was nowhere close. He’d started the season as a noob. Come the next morning, Day One of Season 4, he had a plan to put in the hours to get to Tier 100. It would take serious commitment. For the first time, he purchased a thousand Fortnite V-bucks, for $9.99, with which to buy skins. He went with the Carbide, a sleek one that brought to mind a wetsuit. This was the first time he—or, more to the point, his parents—had ever spent anything but quarters on a game. ♦
