It’s Not Coming Back
Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics
Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics
The Game of the Generation
1. Some games mark you. Wound you. Create a before and after. You feel this turn. A permanent corner. And you can’t go back.
2. Some you share with gamers. The Witcher 3. Some with everyone else. Minecraft. Some with next to no one. Problem Attic. Some when you’re a child. The Legend of Zelda. Some when you’re an adult. Desert Golfing. Some when you’re in-between. Final Fantasy VII. Some with delight. Mario 64. Some with disgust. Bioshock Infinite. Some with anger and despair. Red Dead Redemption 2. Some without warning, that very first night. Demon’s Souls. And some slowly, gradually, day after day, until you find yourself rearranged, somehow, though you can’t tell exactly how or when.
3. Fortnite is a strange one for me. It’s nothing like my favorite game of 2017, Butterfly Soup. That game was so easy to love. A queer visual novel created by one person, Brianna Lei. Honest, hilarious, and so very generous. And in 2018 I played an obvious masterpiece in Subnautica. This was my easy out. Gorgeous and mysterious, made by a relatively small team. It got me, got inside, laid me out, like so few do. It would be so easy to call it best and move on.
And yet Fortnite. It was always the one. It was never really a question. Even though so much about it ran contrary to my usual preferences. It was too busy, too loud. Everything happened too fast. It would not wait for my slower playstyle. I like discrete game experiences, not endless daily ones. I dislike most games with guns. I don’t play much with strangers. And I have no particular feelings for Epic, outside the natural revulsion I harbor for any big company.
4. Then there were the more serious problems. Epic stole dances, particularly those of black artists, and sold them to players without crediting or compensating those artists. As Yussef Cole so persuasively argues in an essay for Waypoint, this fits into the long history of appropriation of black culture, in which artistic expression is decontextualized, stripped of its original power and meaning, and repackaged for a mass, often white, audience. And while this practice appears to have stalled, Epic has made no moves to rectify what they’ve already done.
In the spring of 2019 it also came out that Epic’s crunch culture had, unsurprisingly, created a toxic work environment in the company. This is an industry-wide problem, but Fortnite’s constant patching and weekly updates made it particularly grueling and unsustainable. One of Fortnite’s most compelling qualities — its fundamental embrace of change — had a clear cost. Even with the game’s current slower pace, it’s not clear how much Epic’s crunch culture has itself changed. Or ever truly will without the unionization of game workers.
5. Amidst these very real problems, a slew of less real ones infected talk of Fortnite. Typical among them was Folding Ideas’ video about Fortnite’s ‘manufactured discontent’. It begins with bad jokes and Tencent Chinese scaremongering and ends by calling Fortnite “a weaponized product targeted at kids”. Of course the children. Always the children.
Dan Olson’s main claim is that Fortnite isn’t really a game; it’s a storefront. Which initially sounds smart, in that facile, thinkpiecey sort of way. And which just so happens to suit his form of distanced analysis that doesn’t require deep engagement with the actual game everyone is playing. It’s not even clear that he played the main battle royale game much during his month-long tour, given his arguments. Or given that all his video footage is taken from Team Rumble, a side game mode which is just a large scale deathmatch, not a battle royale.
But even his dabbler’s analysis of the storefront and player psychology is unconvincing. Every monetization ‘concern’ is predicated on the idea that no one could actually enjoy playing Fortnite itself, for its own sake. Only a fool would get suckered in. So Olson plays the completely free version and chafes at the limits it imposes. The very idea that you should pay anything for this game seems to offend his gamer sensibilities. And so it must be a skinner box, even though it’s not. The Battle Pass must be a scam, even though it’s the best of its kind and expands the battle royale in remarkable ways. The storefront must be built solely around false scarcity and fear of missing out, not limited choice and unpredictability, which just happen to be core tenets of the game.
But then, how would he know any of that? When you engage from a distance, what value can you discover other than what you came in with? How can you analyze a game’s ‘rhetoric’ when you can’t actually read it? How convincing can all your doomtalk be when half your arguments would evaporate if you’d just pay 10 bucks for the Battle Pass and play the damn game?
I’m not sure which is worse: critics not paying attention to Fortnite at all, or critics playing the tourist, wanting authority without investment and coming home thinking they understand another culture better than us poor saps who live there.
6. I started playing Fortnite in March of 2018, and I generally played a couple matches a night through the end of 2019. Sometimes more on weekends or around updates. Sometimes less when playing other games.
I bought the Season 3 Battle Pass for 10 dollars during my first month, and it’s all I’ve ever spent on Fortnite. Virtual currency awarded by the first pass bought the next one, which bought the next, and so on. At the moment I have about 66 dollars in unspent V-bucks earned through regular play. I’ve never felt compelled to buy a skin or dance or emote. I have a closetful just from playing through the Battle Passes. I’ve never seen the need for more.
I fell in love with Fortnite wearing default skins, but eventually I did try my new outfits. A catgirl hacker in a hoodie, a rookie agent in a svelte pencil skirt, a dead ringer for a night elf. As for the rest, I try to keep it simple. I don’t wear back bling. I harvest with unfussy blades. I still parachute with my first prize, a Chinese parasol. I dance the shimmer or laid back shuffle when it suits me. I trail lightning, lava, starlight, anything that screams brightly across the sky.
I’m primarily a solo player. I’ve played with friends and teamed up with strangers a handful of times. I try the limited-time modes when they appear. I admire but don’t mess with creative mode. And I don’t play the original Save the World game that predates Fortnite the phenomenon.
No, the solo battle royale is my game. When I talk about Fortnite, this is what I mean.
7. I know others play differently. Maybe they spend more money. Maybe they only play with friends. I can’t speak to that. I’m not interested in speculating about some ‘average player’. With a game as popular as Fortnite, there’s obviously no average player. Of course there’s no such thing in any other game either. The ‘average player’ is a phantom you conjure to avoid your own experience.
Firsthand experience is the hard problem in any game. What it feels like, what it means. That games writing so regularly fumbles this, when it even tries at all, speaks to the hardness. But in truth, subjectivity is always unstable ground. It’s up to you to voice it, probe it, own it. Some game critics claim to value subjectivity, but only so far. It eventually proves too rickety for their ideology, too incriminating for their unexamined pieties. Better to cordon it off, deem it passé, call it something like ‘new games journalism’. Even though there’s nothing new about it.
What’s older than an experience you don’t understand? That you try to feel out and through with words?
8. What makes the hard problem of experience even harder is that Fortnite keeps going, keeps changing. It’s not just the patches or updates or new content. There’s this flux at Fortnite’s heart. It’s perhaps easiest to feel during the live events. A rocket launches, the sky cracks, and everyone asks out loud: “what is happening?!” No seriously, watch a few reaction videos and you’ll hear the same giddy question again and again: What Is Happening?
Fortnite’s narrative, insofar as it has one, is a story of instability, rifts, unexplained happenings. A swamp becomes a desert, a sentient cube is born, now you can fly. The game’s ongoing unfolding of possibilities always gestures towards some uncertain future. It really feels like anything could happen. Even individual matches have this wild, Heraclitan quality. Truly never the same stream twice.
But how do you capture change? How do you capture time? How do you capture yourself amidst them? Games usually offer structure, stability, control. But Fortnite feints, deflects, forces you to ask its central question over and over. What is happening? The answer keeps shifting because the happening keeps happening. Maybe it’s better to ask: what is happening to you?
9. For a long time I was afraid of this change. I couldn’t get my mind around it. I didn’t know how to describe it. I had no idea what it meant for me.
But over weeks, then months, then a year, I felt something shift within. I saw a few things in Fortnite more clearly. How I dwelled in its landscape like no other. How I’d come to love losing. How there was something playing out in each match that was so…familiar. Something from my life. Something in fact alive. At the heart of Fortnite was this contingency. This radical contingency.
And each time I played, I could feel it. I could feel it.
Landscape
10. First, we jump.
As the island looms closer, echoes of ActRaiser, our minds race ahead. Calculating trajectories, plotting routes, tracking other jumpers, taking it all in. All the possibilities of the next, what, twenty minutes if we’re lucky. And all distilled into the one actual decision we have to make: where to land. There’s a reason where we dropping? became a thing. Because this first decision determines everything else.
11. This is the only time we see the island this way. As a whole. Every other view will be partial, a fragment, incomplete. We but glimpse the world of Fortnite.
12. For most of 2018, my favorite place to land was this ramshackle house past Wailing Woods, out on the edge of the world. It was itself incomplete, full of unpatched holes and half-finished add-ons. Someone’s This Old House dream project left to free weekends that never came.
Why did it become my favorite? Because I landed once and survived. Then landed again and survived again. With each good landing it felt safer, the land around it more familiar. It had a few chests, enough to get started, and other players didn’t come here much. It also had a prime view of Mount Purgatory back on the mainland.
Most importantly, it had safe paths out. South to Lonely Lodge, west across the empty northern hills, southwest through Wailing Woods. The more I played, the more I sensed that really good players rarely came to these woods. For a long time I didn’t know why. I only knew that when I crept through these trees, I usually survived.
13. Survival is my whole game. I’m a slow builder and a middling shot. My stats tell me I kill half a person, on average, per match. What I possess is patience and a keen sense of spatial awareness.
In practice, this means every match plays out like a slice of survival horror. When any encounter can prove final, your guard goes so far up that it infects your entire nervous system. The chemical bath of fear heightens your senses, trains you to identify exits, to read spaces for any signs of threat. Your ears become primed for footsteps, your eyes to the merest flicker. I’ve had more than one butterfly scare me shitless.
A side effect of this survival mentality is that you also become more attentive to the world. Your eyes crawl over every surface looking for purchase, for some advantage to eek out a few minutes more. You stumble over new details in the process, drink deeper of the atmosphere, marvel at the island’s beauty with a fresh desperation. Because you’re still afraid all the time. And yet this blooming, buzzing world feels all the more there precisely because of your fear.
14. The flipside of such vigilant perception is that you also become hyper-aware of being seen. Sightlines matter so much because who sees whom first is often the best predictor of who will survive. So you reverse the lines, imagine eyes everywhere, feel out your exposure from every vantage. You stalk yourself, mercilessly, and conjure every horror movie killer’s point-of-view shot at once. Your presence expands beyond the borders of your avatar, and you see yourself for what you are: a vast and shifting field of vulnerability clambering across landscape.
It’s because of this that I came to love the sheltering hills and hollers of Fortnite’s island. They bulge and dip everywhere across its face, especially in the wild stretches between named locations. From the battle bus above, the map can seem a lumpy thing. A king-sized sheet on a queen-sized mattress. But on the ground, the land’s curves and folds and local horizons enclose me, cradle me, somehow become me. I am the bluff. I am the downs. I am the gentle frosting of grass. You over there with your twitchy jumps and throaty guns can go on blaring. I will wait here, low, quiet as dirt, while you catch your death.
15. So obviously I do not build much. Building announces you, refuses the curves, reaches up and out of the landscape, screams: over here! The flash of a finished wall declares your position seconds before and makes the whole scene hot with attention. And in my world, attention is death.
I barely build, yet I move through a world of building. Long after some battle, I creep amidst the cooled architecture, skulk beneath the elaborate underbellies of rival towers, sift through the guns of the dead. I’m part vulture, part detective, part guest always late to the party. Sometimes I take refuge in an abandoned alcove and watch for other scavengers. Eventually, the storm arrives and I move on.
Each of these scenes I come upon vibrates with occurrence, with incident. They feel different than the environmental storytelling of so many other videogames, the kind that Fortnite also excels at. No, here you follow the tracks of other players on the fly, without the aid of videogame vapor trails. You read the signs and try to imagine what must have gone down not days or years but minutes before. Yet in the end it usually proves too messy to fully reconstruct. It’s less carefully arranged dioramas and hamfisted graffiti and more crime scenes that cannot be solved. You look around and think: something definitely happened here. But you can’t be sure exactly what.
16. For a while I found all the makeshift structures, the titular forts of Fortnite, ugly. They looked like mistakes out there on the field, plain goofs. Each prefab annex marred the rolling hills I wished to lose myself in. I held to my old taste for landscape, for its private meadows and illusion of permanence. My years in the open world trenches had taught me: even virtual landscapes can make you feel a little immortal.
But over time, these awkward towers became more beautiful to me. They were not built to be beautiful, or even functional, really. They were built desperately. Without meticulous planning, in some space before conscious design, almost natural in their way. These elaborate vertical shanties that popped up all over Fortnite island were fossils of desperation, rickety monuments to our brief gaming lives. This was what happened when present needs dominated, when there was no real future to consider. This was the architecture of survival.
It made sense to me, fellow survivor, though my own strategies rested in the shadows of their towers. Even for the last survivor, the ‘winner’, there would be nothing permanent. Everything would reset, everything would remain unfinished. Just like my favorite landing spot out past Wailing Woods.
These forts spoke ephemeral. Said the simplest things. Someone was here. Someone tried. Someone didn’t survive. You know how it goes. Names carved in trees minutes before the whole forest burns.
17. What I mean to say is: in Fortnite, most forts are graves.
18. None of this comes through the first time you play. Seeing anything in Fortnite takes repetition and waiting and many many deaths. Even then, we don’t all see the same things. The island reveals itself slowly, personally, like any real place.
The method at play here is gradual accrual. Not in space, like a coral reef, but over time, like a palimpsest. Fortnite’s world certainly bears traces of its own past — the roofs of Greasy Grove poke out from a frozen lake, the hollow mountain villain lair steadily falls into disrepair, the original meteor wound dominates the center of the map for an age. But the vast majority of accumulating traces are within the player. A thousand patchwork memory palaces built overtop each other. Your very experience of Fortnite’s world is in fact composed of these traces.
Fortnite, like life, is a continual rewriting. That flux at its heart. There is no past to revisit, only a constantly updated present. Unlike life, though, the reinscriptions here are always punctuated by your death, your eviction from the world, even when you win. This is what shapes and structures the whole experience. In each match you face the sting and swell of virtual annihilation. The everyday scandal of death.
19. We’ve been dying in videogames all our lives. It’s easy to forget how central this is to the experience. But Fortnite, and the battle royale genre in general, is particularly devoted to this ancient videogame god. Death reigns over the entire island, dire but approachable, pitiless and intimate both.
This everpresent death takes each match’s one-time-ness, never to play out exactly the same way again, and combines it with the stubborn persistence of Fortnite’s evolving world to produce strange effects on the player. We die and return again and again not to a similar world reminiscent of some past life, as in so many roguelikes. No, we return to the exact same place.
It’s weird. Over time, my many deaths bleed together in my conscious memory. And yet some part of me still knows. I pass a bald hill and am suddenly afraid. I crouch near an exposed tree and feel unexpectedly safe. I let my guard down, or I flinch, or I rubberneck at nothing, for no apparent reason. Why am I doing this? What is this feeling? Sometimes it comes back to me. Oh right, I died on that hill months ago. And that tree, it gave me shelter many times despite its bad position. I kind of love that tree.
But mostly I’m just a mess of fugitive feelings as I make my way across the island. Why does this path make me nervous? Why does that ridge loom so? Did my death come charging over it once, or am I just imagining that now? Was it another ridge with that same shape, or is it this time of day I’m remembering instead? The light breaking just so before I was sniped. I stumble through these uncertain scenes constantly, wondering if I’ve developed a kind of low-grade virtual ptsd.
Sometimes this makes Fortnite’s world feel richly textured, full of echoes and allusions, compulsively footnoted by past lives, almost like a personal poetic tradition playing out in landscape. Other times these survival poetics leave me a little ragged. The pressure is always on, and I’m never quite free to explore my recursive memory palace at leisure. More often I’m lost in its hedge maze, or hiding in one of its thousand closets, or running down its halls in a blind frenzy, like someone who just discovered they’re on fire.
Whatever my mood in a given match, what is constant is this: my deaths make the world come alive. Death herself makes the land speak. The more I die, the more I return, the more I hear it. I have infused this landscape with so many lives, with all my common losses and rare wins, with my drama. And this virtual world, it speaks to me, of me, even as the world outside grows quiet.
20. Put another way: Fortnite is a haunted house. Where you are both the haunting and the haunted. The ghost who haunts herself. You flit through galleries of strangers, seeking expression, a witness, some satisfaction that never quite arrives. You are there and not there. You dwell in-between.
The haunting goes for the island too. Outside the big seasonal events, the background ‘action’ across the landscape is invisible to the player. Time moves forward in fits and starts in island reality, but for you it’s all frozen loops. One day a giant footprint is there that wasn’t there before. Another day a film crew sets up a scene. Trucks arrive. The junkyard fills with familiar debris. Things happen, but somehow you’re always too late. You miss the movement itself. It’s like the creepy doll that moves whenever you’re out of the room. Except the whole world of Fortnite is that doll.
But even this description is incomplete. Because you’re not the protagonist contending with the haunted doll. You’re not the prime mover of anything on this island but your own memories. You affect nothing, change nothing in this world. You only echo and repeat yourself, as ghosts will do. You never even see the people who seem to live here.
21. I’ve been feeling like a ghost for a while now. A writing ghost. An online ghost. A ghost to my own life.
I wake up to myself still on this couch, still in this room, still under the roof of this old apartment, and nothing feels like it will ever change. I’m surviving, I’m surviving, I say, or think. I’m afraid I’ll still be here, in this room, when I wake up again.
Because once you’ve been in the room long enough, you always suspect you’re in the room. That you’re still there, right now. That you never really leave.
22. My Fortnite is a game of waiting. It’s the main thing I do between deaths. I’m tucked into a crawl space, or perched on a sink, or wedged between a mountainside and the stormwall. Maybe I’m even sitting out in the open but in an unexpected position, which renders me practically invisible as long as I don’t move.
I ask questions, so many questions while I wait to die. Though only a few of the more practical ones do I ever answer. Like: why don’t good players come to Wailing Woods much? Because they don’t like building around trees, all the unpredictable geometry of their branches. Or: when should I run past that rival tower battle? When I hear exchanges of gunfire, meaning their attention is on each other, not me.
But most questions just linger, unanswered. What are those clusters of lights on the surrounding islands? People just going about their lives, oblivious to the battle royale happening here? And what’s up with all the nostalgic Americana of the early seasons? The cold war suburban bunkers and heartland farms, the space age rocket fixation, the fast food wars, the southwestern mesas and Route 66 kitsch and drive-in theater movie magic. And why are all the named locations alliterative? Anarchy Acres, Flush Factory, Lucky Landing. The very unnaturalness verges on the supernatural. The coordination of sound and sign betrays some intentionality, something apart from the regular flow of language. Like poetry, or superheroes’ secret names. Alliteration is where things get mythic, metaphysical even.
23. These are all just different ways of asking: what is the place, really? Or Lost’s opening question: guys, where are we? There’s a hatch in Wailing Woods after all.
But Fortnite will not open it. This is a game absolutely committed to mystery. There are no explanations, no backstories, no lore dumps. No lore at all except what happens in the game and then becomes history. As with many of the greatest videogames, there’s barely any text to digest. There’s loading screen advice, brief mode descriptions, the names of things, and that’s about it. There’s certainly no worldbuilding relegated to collectible offworld grimoire cards.
No, in Fortnite things just happen, and keep happening. It answers mysteries by moving on. Even when things get meta, with its narrative loops and rifts and alternate realities, it poses the most natural resolution: and then something else happened. It is exactly the obliqueness of Fortnite’s world, its givenness, that helps make it feel so profoundly alive.
Because a world simply is. It doesn’t explain itself. You can ask your questions, sure, but all the while a light is growing in the sky. Your breath has clouded from an invisible chill. Something’s coming. Something is always coming. What can you do but wait for it?
24. Still, I think of all the game worlds I’ve inhabited over the years and wonder why Fortnite feels so different. How does its world achieve such a powerful thereness? Why do I feel so attached to its landscapes?
It’s not just the givenness. Many other game worlds embrace their own mystery and do not explain themselves. It’s not just the haunting. Other haunted virtual places feel paradoxically alive too. It’s not just all the tiny developments, the micro-narratives that suggest some decentralized fullness. Open worlds have embraced dispersed details and environmental storytelling for years. It’s not just the constant sting of death that frays your nerves and primes your memory. There’s an entire Souls genre now that centers your death. It’s not just the palimpsest of rewritten experiences. This is something fundamental to most games that require repetition. It’s not just the time spent on the island. I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to other gameworlds as well. It’s not just the beauty of its landscapes, though people don’t talk about this enough. It’s not just the reality bestowed by the presence of other players. But I think many of them feel it too.
Fortnite’s world possesses all these things, and yet its thereness does not simply come from the aggregate either. No, something else makes it feel uniquely alive.
25. Is it the battle royale structure that makes the difference? Does it bind all these aspects of Fortnite together and somehow bring its world to life? It clearly plays some part, and yet it feels insufficient on its own. Fortnite’s main battle royale competitors, Apex Legends and PUBG, do not have living worlds. They’ve adapted over time, tried to keep up, and yet throughout 2018 and most of 2019, there was no real comparison.
Apex Legends went for big sweeping changes via alien dinosaurs to make its world more dynamic, and then switched maps altogether half a year in. This was in keeping with its world design ethos, one of scale and overwhelm. That feeling of smallness among jutting crags, towering megafauna, and sci-fi superstructures. In other words: the bog standard awe of videogames.
But these cataclysmic changes could never alter the fact that Apex’s world feels like a collection of deathmatch multiplayer maps hastily stitched together, not a lived-in place. There are few spaces to breathe or signs of unseen inhabitants. There is instead plenty of military-grade steel and echoes of shooters past. Its changes are meant to create new tactical situations, more diverse arenas for your character abilities, not intimations of world. Because battle royale or no, the shooting is the point of the game.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at least has size and emptiness and awkward mechanics on its side for world feeling. But its world is dead. Whatever happened here, it happened in the unplayed past. It is, like so many videogames, fundamentally post. Not just post-apocalyptic or post-war but post-world. There is little evidence of life, of movement, of anyone passing. Time itself has been frozen, lost. The battle royale is the only present left.
Instead, PUBG offers multiple maps, in rotation. No forward momentum, no irreversibility, only flavors for different moods. When change does come, PUBG frames it as an update, a revamp, bringing a map in line with the technological gaming present. It provides ‘enhancements’, not risky alterations that might fail. It adds a retrofit backstory, offstage, not a living history actually played by survivors. PUBG knows the way of videogames, and we know it too. Games require improvement, not continuity, not a throughline for some wild in-game reality. These are periodic game updates after all, sensible and expected, not ongoing developments within the gameworld itself.
And yet it is exactly what the worlds of Apex and PUBG lack, this meaningful, believable persistence, that points towards the ultimate Fortnite difference. Sure, a battle royale match is persistent as long as you’re alive. But Fortnite models this persistence on a broader level. It takes the battle royale’s one-time-ness, its felt duration, its live moment, even its death drive, and brazenly expands it from individual match to shared world.
26. It’s hard to get at just what Fortnite’s persistence means in game terms. For years gameworlds have focused on space. Larger spaces, more detailed spaces, spaces to inhabit and ‘do what you want’. Handcrafted or procedurally generated, these game spaces are generally meant to persist. You go back to them and they’re still there. Maybe you overcome some obstacle and see more, maybe you fail and reload, maybe you colonize their space, maybe you leave them to their own devices. A game’s persistence may not even be absolute. Walls might shift on purpose, a file might be accidentally corrupted. But the space is basically bottled and preserved. It’s set off from the world, our world, outside the game. The point being: you can return to it. And without significant loss.
What this typical videogame persistence obscures is the degree to which we, as players, control time in these spaces. We are in fact so used to this control that it’s become practically invisible to us. We move time forward by making progress in a game. We reverse or repeat time if we don’t like the result. We need a break and freeze time at will. We walk away and return at a time of our choosing. We lose a save file and rage at not only our lost time but our lost control of time. We reset the game and start time over again. Videogame time is intrinsically bound to us. Or rather: in gaming, time is fundamentally ours.
This has become so normalized that it hardly seems worth mentioning. And yet the persistence of Fortnite’s world is not like this. It persists not for you, as in most games, but regardless of you. It moves on whether you’re there or not. It does not return. Its time is simply not tied to you, or anyone else. Fortnite’s world persists on its own.
27. Perhaps no game has succeeded with raw virtual space better than Minecraft, that other defining game of the generation. I like to think about it by contrast, to better understand Fortnite. Both are ubiquitous, both have a younger player base, both have central mining and building mechanics, both are phenomenons. And both have worlds that feel radically there, profoundly alive, though they achieve this by very different means.
Minecraft redefines the possibilities of a videogame world through a total commitment to the materiality of space. Everything is there, everything is real. No gorgeous skyboxes, no false horizons, no invisible walls. No, it’s all stuff. And this world of stuff is yours, though it’s also independent of you. You terraform the land, make its blocks useful, convenient, but there’s always more out there, beyond your private borders. Its world is fundamentally too much, and even now it has not been exhausted.
But in Fortnite, you are faced with a world that is, repeatedly, not enough. In each match, there is simply not enough time to see the whole island. On a given patch of land, there is never enough time to settle in and truly call it your own. Over a season, a year, there is not nearly enough videogame control over worldtime itself. In fact, there is none. Things keep changing, but it’s not because of your crafting, your effort, your design. The changes come, unwilled, and you just have to deal with it. The world burden is yours: not a surplus of space but a deficit of time.
Minecraft has its own time, and it presses, especially at night, but this is just your basic videogame day cycle. You contend with it, sure, but it’s not unmanageable. Nothing’s irreversible. Minecraft’s material space is one without entropy, where broken things can be reconstituted, the milk always unspilt. Labor is the only thing required. But time in Fortnite doesn’t care about your efforts. It remains obstinate, unmoved. It doesn’t even know what you’re talking about. You cannot persuade, cannot bargain with it. You can only face its plain truth: in Fortnite, as in life, time is not yours.
Fortnite’s felt reality comes from just how intensely it is not yours. There is no dominating this island, no colonizing fantasy. It trades control of space for submission to time. Nothing lasts, and yet your sense of being in a world thrives anyway. Because a world doesn’t only happen in openness and freedom. A world can happen within the severest of constraints. It can happen with very specific, pressing goals, like staying alive. We know this is true because it happens every day. We are under pressure, under the boot, and yet we still conjure worlds, still live defiantly within them, even as the storm closes in.
28. Call it persistence, call it a thereness, call it a haunting, call it alive. Call it a happening, and definitely call it change. Call it time. Fortnite brought time into videogames in a way I’d never felt before. It took me a while to figure this out, just how I was feeling. What this feeling even was, so unusual in a game. What is happening? I kept asking. What is happening to me?
Oh, it’s time. Time is passing. This feeling is time passing through me.
29. One day I woke up, and Wailing Woods was gone. The trunks I’d crouched behind, the branches I’d hid among, my house on the edge that wasn’t really my house. No more. I could no longer visit the lab hidden beneath the former hedge maze, or the scar left by Kevin‘s lonesome wandering, or any path I’d walked for the past year. All were lost. There was no file to load, no save state to restore. It was all gone.
In its place, a massive volcano had erupted from the ground to mark a new season. The night before, I’d noticed Wailing Woods browning on the map. I muttered a lone the fuck? at my TV and dove straight for my home. An iceberg had obliterated the southwestern corner of the map in the last season changeover, and now my ancient northeastern forest felt marked for some cosmic balancing.
I made a solemn final tour: house to hatch to underground lab. The woods had already changed a lot in the year since I’d begun haunting them. Cabins had been built, artificial rifts had been hidden in their basements, corrupted patches of earth had begun to sprout new greens. My house that wasn’t my house even had some ugly new additions, though it still remained unfinished.
I ran in broad, pointless circles through the trees and wondered: what am I even doing here? What am I hoping to capture in this place one last time? The storm was coming. No one else was around. I couldn’t imagine it all gone, couldn’t yet feel it. How do you say goodbye to virtual trees anyway?
Time passing and change happening sound all exciting, but then the bill comes due. Videogames have been wary of this for a reason. Time is a threat to virtual worlds because with time comes loss. Not the game over try again variety, but the never ever ever ever again kind. Even some of the more famous feelings of modern game loss don’t really compare to Fortnite’s. Your unrecovered souls in Boletaria or your very save file at the end of Nier: Automata can be totally lost, and damn do you feel it. But the loss is really of your own progress, your own time. The game, the place is still there. If you put in the time again, you can always return.
But I cannot return to Wailing Woods. It doesn’t matter what I do. The loss is permanent. Fortnite is remarkable not only in how giddily it adds to the island, but in how ruthlessly it subtracts. The game takes a radical attitude towards continuity and loss. One that embraces not the usual videogame smorgasbord, not player choice, not availability, but rather: finitude. These limits create a striking sense of lived history. Not only that what happened happened, but that some things are no longer happening. Some things are just plain gone.
It wears on you. The more you play, the more you feel attached to some corner of the world, the more you have to lose when the end finally comes. If in Minecraft you domesticate space, block by block, then in Fortnite, loss by loss, time domesticates you. And part of me wants to be domesticated. I relish the loss of Wailing Woods. It’s so rare for a game to mark me this way, wound me, make me actually ache. I get so tired of exerting my vain will on a virtual world. I want to feel it work its will on me.
30. I used to wonder: at what point will every original piece of the island be lost? Throughout 2018 and most of 2019, Fortnite felt increasingly like a ship of Theseus. Not only were large swaths of land regularly replaced, but even little details like the slurp juice drinking animation or the color and swirl of the storm would change without notice. At least my landscape-haunted mind would often remind me of the bog or putting green that used to be right there, seasons ago. With smaller details, though, I’d get used to them after a week and hardly remember the game ever being any other way.
In its first two years, Fortnite seemed to almost celebrate itself as the site of an ongoing apocalypse. Another season, another end of a world. The island without Wailing Woods sure didn’t feel like the same world to me. Such instability strikes at the very heart of identity. With time, even Fortnite’s name seemed less a goofball pun and more the average lifespan of a reality. The flux raised a fair question: how much can Fortnite change and still be Fortnite? Related: How much can I?
It’s almost as if Fortnite has been willing to wear its own mortality on its sleeve. Of course all games are mortal, despite their dreams of timelessness and the virtual forever. They are prone to all the vicissitudes of history, hardware availability, software support, publisher caprice, capitalist logic, player interest. Even the loss of servers can hobble an otherwise still-playable game like Demon’s Souls, stripping it of the essential online components that made it feel so alive and leaving preservation to dedicated fans. But Fortnite has seemed willing to admit its ephemerality from the start, to almost flaunt it. To stake its claim as an openly mortal game.
31. And yet, despite the constant transformation, the island persisted as a place for me. My only longterm relationship in Fortnite was with its landscape. Amidst the unseen island inhabitants and the walk-on roles of other players and even my own changing skins, it was the only real character. One I loved all the more because it would not last.
Landscape is a primary way to experience world. A shifting fragment that stands for the whole. It’s more than a window, it’s what roots me in place, it’s what I mourn after a world moves on. I used to walk through Fortnite’s landscape and just marvel at its casual radiance. I wanted to feel it all over me, that world feeling that so often eludes me in life. I wanted to throw myself against its background, hard, give my foreground a little relief. Some days I wanted the landscape to just gobble me up, swallow me whole.
Landscape can give you a sense of something permanent, something that will outlast you. A sense of scale, a background for the human. But when landscape too is marked for death, it offers little refuge. You’re left instead with a strange kind of sympathy. A tenderness. A fellow feeling with world.
I want to sit with that feeling a while. I’m not sure what else to do.
32. When did you first know the end was coming? When did you realize that none of this would last? When did you look upon the landscape and finally see it?
Losing
33. I hid in the bathroom while everyone else killed each other. This was Tilted Towers in its prime. A city of slaughter tucked into the hills south of Loot Lake. But I didn’t quite know that yet. I was still the new girl in town.
Someone was sniping. Someone exploded. Someone built a ramp right outside my window. I kept my weak gray smg pointed at the door. How many times in my life had I used the bathroom to escape other people?
I waited for silence. Then I waited some more. Minutes of not being killed passed. I was still alive, pretty sure. But when I peeked out at the abandoned city, I immediately saw my mistake. The blue storm line was sweeping across town, swallowing cars, buildings, and then in one gulp, it had me too.
I burst from the bathroom, fell through the floor, scrambled past gun piles left by the dead. My life ticked away dink, dink but still I thought I’d be ok. I could make it out if I just went straight. So I ran. Jumped a low wall. Jumped another. Then fell down a cliff and into a river. When I emerged from the storm, I had four health to my username.
It was over, for sure, no question. But there, in a shack by the stormedge, I saw a medkit. A more religious person might think someone was watching out for them. I didn’t have time to wonder. Only to heal and move on.
The storm pushed me hard across the island. But now I was feeling kinda lucky. At Dusty Depot, I found a sniper rifle. Got cocky and took a shot at someone ahead. Clean miss. Took another. Not even close.
I skirted the stormedge towards the final circle in Retail Row, hoping no one had seen my foolishness. Ahead, I heard the familiar sound of death. But it wasn’t chaos this time. It centered around someone who’d built a nest atop Noms grocery store. I saw him easily take down two people across the parking lot. I saw others building their own towers. I snuck in the back of Noms, through the delivery door.
I looked for a place to hide, but the storm wasn’t giving me much choice. He was right above me, firing nonstop. Someone ramped up, tried to push him. Their loot rained down outside the window. Someone else launched a rocket from across town. He sniped them, one shot. I waited for the next fool to press him but suddenly it was me, just me, the last fool left, cowering in aisle 2.
He stopped shooting. I froze. A single breath might alert him to my position. He shot down a distant wall, then a tree. I could feel his frustration. Skilled players hated unpredictable defaults like me. They wanted to build towers to heaven. They wanted a fair fight. They wanted not merely to survive, but to dominate, to crush, to unequivocally win.
The final storm bell sounded and still I didn’t move. In a second we’d both be pushed out of Noms, but I couldn’t be first. I couldn’t be seen. But the storm was on me, there was no more time, I was dead, totally dead, pretty sure.
Then he jumped down into the parking lot. He dropped right into my sights, just like that. I didn’t aim, didn’t even mean to shoot. But he spooked me. That really you boss? I squeezed my weak gray smg into his back. And he died, just like anyone else.
I didn’t believe it. That couldn’t be it. But the screen said the words: Victory Royale.
I crouched there in shock. I forgot to dance.
34. This isn’t the story of my accidental win. It’s the story of his unforeseen loss, to a default who cowered in a bathroom half the game. It’s a story he never knew, and will never know. I’m sure he’s long forgotten that match. My own losses, more than two thousand by now, mostly bleed together. But sometimes I witness a loss that I still remember even two years later. Every regular Fortnite player has these unlikely stories.
35. All I did was hide and blunder and hide again. And yet every choice I made, and everyone else’s, led to this ending at Noms. Any variation could have changed it. This is but a heightened version of what plays out in every match.
It was the first time I realized some simple truths about Fortnite: the ‘best’ player does not always win. Skill alone will not save you. Everybody loses.
36. Fortnite is a game about losing. It’s the thing you do most. You try to win but you almost always lose. This is the very design of a battle royale.
Pro gamers and competitive leagues are but a narrow slice of the scene, and even they are dominated by loss. But that’s not where most players live anyway. That’s not their story. Fortnite knows this. It’s not a game for the 1 winner. It’s a game for the 99 losers.
37. And so while we’re losing, what does Fortnite do? It throws a party. We dance like dopes, we sign and spray, we emote with abandon. We dress up in our cutest, goofiest outfits and enjoy the company of virtual strangers. Marshmello’s Season 7 concert was not an aberration but a distillation of Fortnite’s dance party ethos. This isn’t hardcore murder theater or the diamond elite lounge. This is a carnival for casuals.
There are so many other activities at the Fortnite county fair besides last banana standing. You’ve got treasure hunts, whac-a-mole, Simon says, shopping cart derbies, flaming hoops for jumping, cosmic hoops for diving, a giant purple bouncy cube, that oversized keyboard from Big, a pair of completely not sinister red rotary phones for calling rival fast food joints. Even the most basic chopping motion for harvesting materials starts an aiming mini-game.
It’s not only activities within the battle royale but also variations on the rules themselves that keep the jamboree buzzing. Throughout much of 2018 and 2019 Fortnite explored whole new side modes that riffed on the basic format. One week you’ve got only shotguns and jetpacks; another it’s all low gravity sniping. Come back to try low stakes heists, king of the hill dance-offs, a little The Floor Is Lava, a marvelously destabilizing game of I Am Become Thanos. The vibe’s always playful, experimental, off-kilter. An ever-warping hall of mirrors.
Put all of this together with a Battle Pass that actually encourages exploration, that values interactions beyond headshots, that rewards you with more costumes and emotes to bring to the party, and you have a battle royale with the edge taken off. A block party that wants to make sure everybody’s having a good time while they lose. A block that doesn’t even care who wins.
38. One reason the party’s so successful: Fortnite is a platformer. Not only because you build your own platforms, but because the whole thing moves with a platformer’s logic. Fortnite believes space is more important than shooting. And not just tactical space, stripped down and focused for combat. The destructibility of almost everything makes traditional level design kinda pointless anyway. No, Fortnite wants you to attend to the muchness of space, all the possibilities and limits for an eager little avatar.
The platformer itself is a genre of bodies in space. It’s a sensuous genre, a vulnerable genre, a genre of spectacular fuckups. At its most honest, the platformer is terribly uncool. That’s why Sonic, whatever its other virtues, has never been much of a platformer. Speed is cool. Jumping just isn’t. Too much effort, too much uncertainty, too much landing. The threat of falling on your ass is built in. Platformers make us more Wile E. Coyote than Road Runner. Full of aspirations, devices, plummets into the ravine. Even the occasional cool moment must always flirt with disaster to ring true.
The centrality of dances and skins in Fortnite makes even more sense in a platforming context. They offer a bit of style and articulation, a taste of control, in an otherwise slapstick world. But once you accept where you’re at, more Pee-wee’s Playhouse than Thunderdome, the platforming antics prove a delirious riot. Fortnite just gives you so many wonderful toys. Hoverboards and plunger guns and impulse grenades and even simple balloons to alter your gravity, all coming and going with the seasons. Over time the evolving land, riddled with glyph zones and geyser vents and slipstream tunnels, only adds to the platforming possibilities. The island continually expands and contracts for you based on available locomotion. And yet the near-Nintendo level of solidity and thickness ensures that even as the flux keeps fluxing, even as you wobble and collapse, the platforming itself still holds.
Perhaps nothing was more purely delightful than the baller available during Seasons 8 and 9. This hamster sphere with retractable plunger allowed the most exuberant bounces, the least predictable swings, the wildest of arcs. It exemplified the raw pleasures of movement, the very affordances that Fortnite constantly played with. It made the island feel like a place primed for mischief. A place built for lost control.
39. Crucial to Fortnite’s festive atmosphere of loss is the tone of it all. None of the hijinks would quite land without a mood that says: relax, let down, lose a little. It’s ok. These are not tragic losses. This is a comedy, sweetheart. It’s all a bit of a lark.
Much of this comes from the sheer look of the thing. Fortnite greets your eyes like a family of irradiated Care Bears. The game is effusive, frisky, almost fluorescent. It’s loud and soft and confident, which somehow puts you at ease. It looks totally delicious, to be honest. It’s weird to remember how many called Fortnite’s look offbrand and generic in its early days, before it became simply iconic. It’s as if the Shurfine cola I used to stock at my parents’ grocery store somehow managed to overtake Coke and become, right before our eyes, the Real Thing.
It’s a testament to the suppleness of Fortnite’s visual style that it’s been able to expand over the seasons and contain such multitudes. Its flexibility allows not only for greater player expression but also for a tremendous diversity of themes and iconography. Pirate ships and kaiju fights and RV parks and sky motels, galactic interlopers and transdimensional butterflies and Father Christmas, no problem. The tagline to Season 5, “Worlds Collide”, could almost serve as a thesis statement for the first two years. You come to feel as if pliability and metamorphosis are just the natural state of things, as if dissonance isn’t even a thing.
All of this might look incoherent from the outside, but it coheres effortlessly while you’re playing. In fact, Fortnite’s hybrid soul feels exactly of this moment. Our own mashup reality moves seamlessly from meme to text to snack to stream to laundry to podcast to Switch to tweet to ad to ad to dusk. It’s everyday and it’s not weird and it all coheres in us. Part of Fortnite’s power comes from just how eerily its crossover reality mirrors, even mythologizes, how we already live.
The tone that comes through in all this is one of open arms. If Fortnite has room for cowgirls and ice kings and a slowly ripening banana man, then surely it has room for you. With any party, you have to ask: just who is invited? Who does its atmosphere speak to? Who does it say is welcome? The individual winners or the countless losers? The precious gamers or literally anyone else?
40. Who is invited to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Apex Legends? In theory, anyone. In reality, well, look at them. One a dead world, one built for deathmatches. One all postwar military realism, one a predigested sci-fi fantasy. One cruddy gritty this is the way life is man, one slick refined character variations on badassery. Both hypermasculine. Both loving their guns, their fussy attachments, their tweaked loadouts. Both focused on them wins. Who does this sound like it’s for? Who is welcome here?
After playing Fortnite, the narrowness of its battle royale competitors feels shocking. There is no party. There is no welcome. There is a self-seriousness about the whole competition that is frankly embarrassing. You can feel it in the air. No let down, no relief, no recourse but to win. And when you inevitably lose, how does that go? Let me tell you, it feels profoundly different to be killed by a dude in sunglasses and fatigues lying prone in the grass rather than someone who comes bounding over a hill wearing a tomato head.
Even to gaze upon PUBG and Apex is disheartening. These are some mighty tired videogame graphics. You see them and know exactly how to feel, exactly what to do, exactly who to be. It’s all there in the aesthetically deadening, already-explained military determinism of a metal corridor or an abandoned building. Take cover, check your corners, want to die. It makes you grateful for Epic’s messy pop hybrid, for looking at it and not knowing immediately what’s up. Fortnite is a game that isn’t much interested in manhandling or flattering you. That doesn’t mind being ungritty and uncool. That isn’t afraid to be beautiful even. That does not tunnel your world down the sights of a gun.
41. Read the ad copy: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds — A Battle Worth Winning. These games are not subtle. They constantly tell on themselves. What else is worth anything in PUBG? We know, we know.
Apex Legends is worse. Even its name gives the game away. The obnoxious gamer mindset of those two words. When it first dropped a year ago and critics swooned (finally a battle royale you can play!), I loaded it up and was immediately shown a cinematic that describes your characters as “icons of strength and power”. Zero irony. The grizzled narrator concludes: “It’s simple. They kill you, they’re better. You kill them, you’re better.”
It sounds straightforward. It sounds like common videogame wisdom. What’s there to question? What’s there to be ashamed of? We gotta get good. We gotta be best. What other choice do we have?
42. There are consequences to this wisdom, of course. In a world of winning, you develop certain expectations. Skill will be rewarded. Control will be tight. Accidents will be minimized. Balance will be maintained see. Chance will be judiciously allocated ok. My time invested will surely reap dividends. You will give me what I deserve. Life may not be fair but by god my games will be.
This is the fairness fantasy of videogames. Brother to the power fantasy. In fact the fairness fantasy often provides the justification, the cover for the power fantasy. Fairness says of power: this is yours by rights. This is as it should be. You’ve earned this. Echoes of bootstraps, natural order, meritocracy. A system of simple cause and effect, reassuring for winners, chastising for losers. A system that only a loser would ever question.
The fairness fantasy is forced to play a little differently in battle royales. Most games involve losing, but rarely are the odds stacked so blatantly against you. All the more reason to even them out a little, right? When you have 99 losers each match, the pressure is on to justify outcomes. So you reward exact shots, encourage best practices, favor being properly kitted out. You keep randomness to a minimum and the metagame consistent and our swelling uncertainty in check.
Or you can go the other way and lean into what a battle royale is all about. Fortnite is flagrantly unfair, magnificently unbalanced. It calls the fairness fantasy out. It’s not a skills-based first-person shooter or a more realistic tactical game. It’s a party platformer survival game that thrives on flux and uncertainty. One with blooming guns and bouncy toys and a building mechanic that lets you design levels on the fly. Balance is not the word for any of this. And for any game with 1 winner and 99 losers, how in the world could it ever be called fair?
43. During its first two years, Fortnite consistently introduced items and weapons and vehicles that induced hissyfits among gamers. Planes, port-a-forts, ballers, the fantastically destabilizing and loudly reviled B.R.U.T.E. mechs of Season 10. Each of these added not only greater variety to each match but also gave less winning players a chance to throw a kink into the usual works and survive a bit longer. They opened up whole new areas of space — the sky! — and offered new ways to swoop, to dodge, to upend, to be.
Fortnite denied, deliciously, the influence gamers were accustomed to, and in only one case, Season 7’s infinity blade, did Epic fully capitulate to the outcry. The game otherwise committed to a constantly changing meta that welcomed both new players and anyone willing to stay uncomfortable. With each unbalanced choice, Fortnite placed value on possibility over predictability. Instead of fairness and consistency, it aimed for vitality. That live sense that, even a year in, anything can happen.
Every time some new bit of wildness appeared, my heart leapt into the screen. I’d throw myself into each new affordance and see what assumptions unraveled. I’d hear of a new use for the baller, like hanging off the side of the island to hide, and run to try it out. I’d discover, by accident, that tossing a port-a-fort into the distance could provide a great distraction while I ran the other way. Or I’d hear a strange mechanical rumble while tucked into a windowless room, something huge, only to be obliterated seconds later by a barrage of missiles from an unseen mech. When this happened, I had to decide: do I sulk or do I laugh? Do I embrace dying horribly, dying unfairly, dying out of nowhere, or do I cry foul?
I made good choices, and yet. I found great weapons, and yet. I had the high ground, and yet. Fortnite is a game of and yet. Full of accidents and reversals and grand plans dashed, just like our world. It always comes back to this: can you accept it? Can you take the loss, even when you play ‘better’? What other choice do you have?
44. Because the pressure never goes away. Fortnite will not let us forget what it is: a party you can get kicked out of at any time. It’s not a better world. It’s certainly no violence-free dreamland or gentle piece of interactive encouragement. Everyone is most definitely not a winner here. It does not offer that escape, and it does not want to. It wants us to feel our losses, and yet still find value there.
What Fortnite does is retain the battle royale stakes and throw the party at the same time. The pressure is key. The ongoing possibility of a violent rupture puts the party on edge, prevents it from being safely set apart, makes it more ephemeral, and thus more beautiful. And the festive atmosphere and goofball antics not only make the losses easier to bear but also defocus the whole competition. The outcome is not the arbiter of a good time. It’s not hard to understand why so many players might show up for this.
Even so, I’ve never thrown a match. I love the party, but I always try to survive as long as possible, every time. I play this battle royale, and I am never free, never at rest, never fully satisfied. But its constraints feel refreshingly real to me. The constant pressure. The storm, chance, everyone else bearing down on me. “The terror of knowing what this world is about.” It doesn’t go away just because I’m playing a videogame.
Our wins and losses in games are virtual, of course, but I think our focus has been off for a very long time. Underneath something is churning, something primal is playing out. We glorify the wins and downplay the losses, and it all feels completely backwards to me. It’s like we forget ourselves, forget that we are even playing a videogame. Forget just what this difference means.
45. Videogames are about not fake wins but safe losses.
46. What is even the point of getting good? To prove something to yourself, to others, to feel like a winner? What’s the point of mastering a self-enclosed bubble of a system?
Ok, so you memorize a boss’s moveset, earn an s-rank, line up them headshots. You utterly crush your online opponents. Who cares? You put in all that effort and for what? Your videogame skills will not save you. How many hours will you spend on another pointless achievement? Who are you bragging to? Who’s even listening?
47. You don’t have to climb that mountain. You don’t have to kill that god. You don’t have to finish those rigid cowboy missions that know only one sad way forward. You don’t have to win. You just don’t. You don’t have to be the last one standing.
Last spring, after dozens of hours of worthless lessons, I reached the final boss of FromSoftware’s Sekiro. It was a grueling journey there, and in only one case — the mid-game face-off with Genichiro — did it feel like anything more than hollow exercises in shinobi posturing. I got through the first phase of the final fight, and then a new arm popped out of my foe and the Sword Saint emerged from his body and he immediately killed me. I threw myself against him for 45 minutes more, dying again and again to learn who knows what. I reached his final final phase at last and was promptly obliterated. After that death, I set my controller down.
I’m out, I thought. Out. I wasn’t angry. I was done. I hit PS: close application, options: remove disc. I put the game in its sleeve and the sleeve in its envelope. I walked directly to the mailbox around the corner and returned Sekiro to Gamefly. I shook my head on the way back. What a waste. I watched the endings on youtube when I got home. What a complete and utter waste.
The details of that last fight have evaporated, along with every other lesson Sekiro wanted to teach me. But I still remember that walk back from the mailbox. The late day sun in my eyes and the long lonely shadows on the sidewalk. The feeling of evaporation all around me, of a fist unclenching within. And what was it clenched for? I like tension and release. I like to uncoil. I endured most bosses in early Souls because of everything else those games had to offer. But how many more bosses must I beat? How many more times must I win? I’m not even tired. I’m bored. I’m suspicious. I no longer trust these single videogame stories. There are so many other tales to tell than the one of our eventual victory.
48. What about games that keep rolling along despite your failures, that actually make you live with them? Games like Pyre or Desert Golfing or 80 Days? What about games that imprison and oppress you, where escape feels like no sort of victory, such as Problem Attic? What about games that end with a funeral and a song? Where loss is endemic and unavoidable, as in Kentucky Route Zero? What about old arcade games in which failure is inevitable and death the only end? Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong?
And what about all the players who never even beat a mid-game boss, let alone the last one? Who play a while without mastering anything? Reports are common of how few players actually finish games. Are the experiences of a majority of players not worthwhile? Do they not count until they’ve won enough? Does only winning retroactively justify playing videogames?
Not winning is completely normal in life, is in fact the norm, but in games somehow becomes invalid, suspect, less than. And not just within individual games but across genres. See the common gamer criticism of walking simulators and visual novels and anything that’s not explicitly winnable as, thus, not a game. These not-games are an affront to the very tenets of their world. How are they to prove their superior skills, their magnificent minds, their worth? How are they to prove they’re better?
I think part of the problem is a deeply broken notion of escapism. If your idea of videogames is an escape from a losing reality into a winnable one, from rampant uncertainty to achievable mastery, then the winning begins to feel natural. Inextricably bound to the roots of the medium. Winning becomes the very air you breathe every day. Invisible, enveloping, sustaining. Why escape into anything less?
But there is another kind of escapism. An escape not into a better world but into another world. A secondary world. One that provides not flattery but relief. More skewed than embellished. An illusion instead of a delusion. A world that goes sideways, not up and up and up. That does not traffic in fantasy but in alterity. Art has been providing such escapes for all of human history. Worlds of otherwise. Games are a part of this too.
And lord do we need these other worlds. Because most of the time things go wrong. We lose again and again and still have so much left to lose. Games don’t need to shield us from this or make every loss recoverable, every struggle overcomeable. They can help us process and feel through what is too overwhelming here in our primary world (i.e. everything) without turning us into realm-conquering, winning-haunted monomaniacs. It is a gift, these chances to be wrong and lose without ridicule or consequence. Why are these safe losses not enough?
49. It’s not that I don’t know the pleasures of competition. It’s not that I never try to win. It’s not even that I don’t think headshots feel good. They do. It’s that the goodness of that feeling isn’t anything. It’s that chasing that feeling leads nowhere. It’s that winning is a dead end. I can’t tell the stories of my ‘fair’, ‘earned’, ‘decisive’ victory royales in Fortnite because I don’t remember them. Why would I? The thrill of winning is one of the least interesting feelings you can have while playing a videogame.
It’s actually worse than that. A winning mentality is a trap. Once you step into it, it reveals its true nature. It is an endless hunger, insufficient in itself, one that constantly demands more winning, that in fact suffers nothing less. It knows ‘better’ is always up for grabs, never at rest, and it disdains those who cannot keep up. The failures, the losers. Winning looks ever forward because being a person who has won, in the past, is never enough. Winning is present or imminent or nothing at all. Which paradoxically means that it’s a mindset stuck in the past. Because winning is not seeking some new feeling. Winning is an attempt to recapture itself, that feeling you once had. To resurrect and hold onto it forever. To make that past eternally present.
Which is to say: winning plus time is a formula for misery. Because winning is ultimately an attempt to defeat time. And of course, of course, time always wins.
50. This is an open secret. It’s not just a personal addiction, it’s a worldview. It’s a whole culture steeped in winning. It’s what the games say and it’s what the players do and it’s how we all talk and it’s what we all deny. Because personally, individually, we know better, sure sure. We’re players, not gamers. And yet over time the fake wins and hollow mastery get deeper inside us, come to feel so warm and familiar, become so pervasive that they don’t need defending. We don’t even call it a winning fantasy, encompassing both power and fairness fantasies, actually their ultimate end. We just call it videogames.
You might think critics would be resistant to the winning fantasy, that they would bring a certain insight and doubt to bear on gaming’s open secret. But then you listen to them. It’s a special kind of humiliation to hear intelligent adult critics brag about their videogame wins on a podcast. Videogame badassery is embarrassing enough. But to be proud of it, after middle school? In more reflective moments, these critics will self-deprecate and poke at their victories. They’re self-aware alright, as if that will save them. As if admission somehow absolves them. The secret is open after all. What they will not admit is the one thing that would implicate them in the winning fantasy: that critics are gamers too.
Videogame critics just love to win, they’re here for the empowerment, and they’re self-servingly upbeat about it all. They play games to feel better about themselves, and they say this out loud, no interpretation required. Many are overachieving perfectionists, full of unmet ambition and fascinated by mastery, which only makes their gamer needs worse. And critics know their audience well. They know what’s expected of them, and they do not resist. Why question the winning culture they accepted into their own hearts long ago? Again and again they tell us: we’re here for it.
But critics aren’t here for our losing, or their own. They love to talk about inclusivity, but how far does that really go? Does it include the doubters and losers too, or those facets of themselves? Does inclusivity seek to meet players where they’re at, out there in the manifold world of losing, or to bring them into the narrow gamer fold of winning? To help players explore alternatives, or to help them get good?
It’s not a hard question. Players don’t need to get better at videogames. Videogames need to get better at people. Better at the 99 losers who are just trying to play and survive. Who don’t need fake wins or immature posturing or promises of timelessness. When we say that videogames need to grow up, it’s not about making them more serious or realistic or grimly adult. It’s about bringing them into time. Out of that atemporal adolescent mindset of winning. Back into the human world of loss.
51. It’s wild that it’s Fortnite that so effectively challenges the winning mindset of gaming. In a battle royale, the winner takes all, right? And yet Fortnite pushes back from within this mindset. It shows that a high-stakes competition can serve as not just another kind of winning fantasy, but instead as a fulcrum, a structure and focus around which other experiences can be had. Aesthetic experiences, comic experiences, existential experiences, experiences of world and connection and surprise. Maybe you even ‘improve’ at survival in the process, but you see that it can happen without perfectionism or pride. Winning isn’t the end, and losing is no threat. In fact you can just let the losses happen. It’s ok, the game says in a hundred friendly ways. There are no tragedies here.
To really get Fortnite, you have to let go of winning. You have to get over it, and yourself, and many game critics could not. But can the rest of us learn to love losing? Losing in videogames really has so much to offer. Not lessons or admonishments but openings for vulnerability, for exposure. Winning defends against doubt, but losing can let uncertainty in, allow it a space to dwell. Losing is a form of being wrong, and being wrong is a vital chance for transformation. Unlike being right, which is so often an intellectual and moral disaster, being wrong can come as a relief, offering a kind of clarity. And in the clearing of our wrongness and loss, we are more free to imagine things otherwise. We are opened to possibilities rather than fixed on a single desired outcome. We do not know the way forward, we do not know, and this is the beginning of hope. Nothing is inevitable, not even how we play videogames.
Our value does not depend on our winning. Our worth is not contingent upon our success. It’s easy to forget. Winning doesn’t want us to remember alternatives to itself. Other ways of being. But losing is more diverse and more beautiful and plain wiser than winning. And in a time of vast uncertainty and collapsing narrative and looming loss outside the screen, I want to remember this.
52. What happens when you finally win a match of Fortnite? You are alone. Everyone else is gone. If you dance, you dance on your own. You look up at the stormwall and realize you’ve fallen into a deep well. The world has narrowed to a dime. Winning has stranded you, the last avatar on earth. What will you do now? You have only a few seconds left. Before the gods of Fortnite mercifully whisk you away as well.
This sounds like the bad ending, the dark future, but it’s what was promised all along. You got what you wanted. You won. But is it really what you wanted? Do we even know what we want?
What would it mean, instead, to claim losing as the heart of videogames? To say: losing is where games live. Because it’s where we live too.
Winning isolates but in loss we are bound. Bound to the world. Bound to contingency. Bound to each other.
But can we share our loss? Can we change?
Or is it too late?
Radical Contingency
53. In the summer of 1998, I saw Saving Private Ryan with my little brother. We arrived last minute and had to sit front row, far right. The opening assault on the beaches of Normandy was thus almost incomprehensible. Everything askew, everything a blur. We were too close and at the wrong angle. But we saw the boys dying clear enough. Their deaths were both immediate and distant, overwhelming and unreal.
My brother and I glanced at each other after the battle, appalled. We could not believe what we’d just seen. The most basic things decided everything. Position, angle, timing. Who lives and who dies. It was chance, bald chance. Without reason. Without mercy.
54. Later, thinking about both the battle and the safety of a screen, I said to my brother, “Maybe one day we’ll have a videogame like that.”
I wasn’t predicting Call of Duty. I wasn’t imagining Halo’s Silent Cartographer that we would love just a few years later. I wasn’t even thinking about GoldenEye or Final Fantasy Tactics that we’d been playing that winter. I was envisioning a simulated model of a massive battle where each role was filled by an actual person. It would be run over and over again, not to examine military strategy, not to gauge some overall ‘result’, but so that the individual participants might feel out all the ways their brief lives might go. To feel chance happen, really feel it. How things depend.
55. If this, then what? Not one big choice but countless tiny ones, all interacting with each other. Cascading consequences, playing out in a world.
I didn’t yet have the word back in 1998, but I was thinking of contingency. This thinking didn’t come naturally to me. I was still an essentialist at heart, though one who’d recently lost their metaphysical certainty. And I didn’t think much about war. I’d always found anything military vaguely repulsive. But I was the same age as those boys lying on the beach, their legs blown off, calling for their mothers. The givenness of the world no longer felt so given.
I didn’t know what to do with these thoughts. I‘d grown up in the choking atmosphere of ‘everything happens for a reason’, and I still knew its comforts. Lord, I do not understand. I do not comprehend Your ways. But in You I will abide. I know everything will be ok. Eventually. Somehow.
Yet I was afraid of fooling myself now. What if everything was not ok? What if the reason behind things was bad? Or worse, not even there? What if things just happened? On what could I depend?
56. Contingency did not comfort. So I tried not to dwell on it. Days and years passed. I came and went. I forgot, then remembered, then forgot again. But I couldn’t return to the reassuring world I knew before. It was gone, someone else’s dream, and it would not come back.
All the while, I kept playing videogames. Winning, heroics, even fun seemed to matter less than before. Instead, I found myself seeking something else. Not shelter from contingency, not a dependable fantasy, not some promised ok, but a way to think about contingency askew. Outside, things kept happening, irreversible things, and my mind would trace possibilities, horrific possibilities, until I could no longer bear it and had to turn away. But the screen was safe to look at. I could hold its crooked gaze and think about contingency and not even flinch.
There was a reason my thoughts went to games after Saving Private Ryan. Films, books, and other traditional narrative media could not address what I had in mind, no matter how much I loved them. They could tell stories about contingency, but they could not enact it. Contingency structures the implicit logic of most stories, but we can only observe it in traditional media. We empathize, feel it powerfully, but always vicariously. The contingency does not run through us.
But I wanted to feel contingency refracted in me, in my present. And games seemed to offer something like real-time, a present tense that films and books lacked. Non-interactive media could borrow from the time of my experience and make everything feel alive, but the happening was always elsewhere, at another time. It wasn’t actually live. And though I could delight in the real-time of live arts — theatre, music, sports — their contingency was not mine either. Not unless I was playing too. No, I wanted something else, a way to explore a contingency that flowed from me.
57. Contingency is the most basic thing in videogames. The constant if/then, the feedback loop, the particular interactions we casually say define the medium. It’s so fundamental that it’s almost invisible. We often use the word ‘choice’ to point towards it, but the big, flashy, deliberate choices that receive the most attention — save a little sister or drain her — are but a tiny part of the contingency flowing from a player, through a game. They are far outnumbered by the continual, mostly unconscious, micro-choices that make up regular ‘gameplay’. Button presses, muscle memory, timing, they give us the double jumps and missed shots and rare 2D holes-in-one. The contingency flows in and out of our hands and eyes and the nerve maze in-between.
Just as toys externalize thought, give form to ideas and desires, make characters and stories graspable, more fully at hand, videogames externalize the contingency flowing from us, make it visible, something to play with. We are less little gods to stuffed animals and Transformers and more rowdy co-conspirators with ourselves, or at least a version of ourselves. It is such a pleasure to fire up the virtual contingency engine of a videogame, bind ourselves to a vulnerable little puppet, nudge her along, see what happens. It’s everyday now, this transaction, no big deal. We constantly forget how wild and magical it really is.
58. We forget, in part, because of how profoundly limited contingency is in actual games. Chance is not deeply felt. Consequences barely cascade. We are the fuel for this contingency engine, but it keeps sputtering, stalling out. We are siphoned into a gas can and placed on a shelf. What gaming flow we do experience is the flow of forgetting, not the flow of happening. It is the river Lethe we sail upon, not the river of life.
Our brief gaming lives simply do not play out in multiple ways that matter. We win or we lose. We get one or two or three endings. We arrive at single prescribed conclusions ‘our way’, which generally amounts to what flair we pinned to our avatar. The vast ‘possibility space’ of videogames turns out to be a sham. It’s a space the size of a pencil box. So little is possible in the end. So little actually depends.
I struggle to find games that carry a consequence beyond the needs of a moment. That unfold a chain of being without an implicit determinism, without blatant reassurance. That deny control and instead offer a chance to feel real surprise and loss. I think of Spelunky, cascading disaster with such pith and verve, perhaps the most successful in a genre that aims to channel contingency, the roguelike. I think of Desert Golfing and its ascetic continuity, 80 Days and its embrace of FOMO, Nier: Automata and its allowance for ends both unlikely and final, even Candy Crush Soda Saga and its highly structured levels of chance and consequence. I’m thankful for how they explore contingency, but I always long for something more.
59. It’s not disqualifying, this lack of express contingency in most games. But it does speak to how rare one of the defining features of videogames actually is. Some of the recent games I’ve disliked most have tried to fake it. Red Dead Redemption 2 with its one-way missions and static, staged world. Or have reduced it to masturbatory chaos and violent stupidity, as in Far Cry 5. Or else they’ve reinscribed the very limitations of popular games, chanceless and compliant, and called it progress. Control with its superficial weirdness and regressive core. Life Is Strange 2 with its secretly conservative morality play.
But even looking at my own favorites from the past couple years, very few could be said to channel contingency in a significant way. Tetris Effect traffics in it, and Tetris 99 even more so, but these are all-too-familiar conduits. Their ultimate goal is not to feel out consequence but to put everything in its right place, to erase what came before, to achieve that rarest of feelings: all clear. Death Stranding and Subnautica, especially in its late game, go further. They tie their focus on storage, transport, material logistics to vast landscapes of resistance and demand the most exquisite attention from the player. Death Stranding even brings the asynchronous choices of other porters to bear on your many treks. They’re games in which a minor planning mistake might strand you in the deep or a single misstep on a tiny stone might throw you off-balance and send you avalanching down a mountain.
Perhaps even more contingent is Heaven’s Vault. It doubles down on the subtle, easily-overlooked contingencies with Ciri that determined The Witcher 3’s ending and makes a whole game of them. You regularly make choices without realizing they’re choices, you miss things, important things, you misunderstand constantly and dwell in uncertainty, and the game just rolls on. There is a great flattening of importance at play here, an equality of objects in space that contingency knows all too well. Heaven’s Vault is an entire game of ambiguity and interpretation, of learning to reread both the archaeological past and the unfolding present, that recognizes just how obscured and unpredictable contingency really is.
Still, while Heaven’s Vault is a captivating breakthrough for narrative contingency and Death Stranding enthralls with its original landscape contingency, neither quite enacts the radical contingency that games are capable of. Both are missing something that distinguishes videogames from other media. The live, the flow, the through. The thing we call time. Not simulated time, not game time, but the time we rightly call real.
60. Real-time is everyday and intimate and very hard to grasp. To understand its role in the radical contingency of Fortnite, I think a recent counterexample might help. A game came out last year that, like Fortnite, also gave you a twenty-odd minute life, that deliberately repeated itself, that was full of mystery and death. It was not the most popular game in the world, but it was heralded by critics and beloved by many who played it. That game was Outer Wilds.
Outer Wilds is a beautifully crafted interactive orrery. Its tiny bespoke planets circle a sun that explodes after 22 minutes. You can die beforehand or wait for the fire to take you, but the end will come no matter what you do. You’re of course also stuck in a time loop during these final minutes, and so you watch the world end again and again. This seems like a rare opportunity to see all the ways 22 minutes can play out, all the ways your little life might go before the death of the sun.
Except that Outer Wilds is also a clockwork world. Which is to say: it plays out the same way every time. Its solar system is an elaborate limited-solution puzzle box, and the only thing that changes is your understanding of how it works. It is in this way both solipsistic and hopeless. Not only can you affect nothing, nothing else can affect anything either. Its world is thus not simply dying — it’s already dead.
You play in the already-over world of Outer Wilds and a coldness creeps in. No amount of campfires or wistful songs can warm a space so emotionally inert. The game speaks to an engineering mindset resigned to deterministic inevitability and tries to provide a kind of comfort in the flat melancholy of its mechanism. But the more you play, the less it all means. Repetition reduces rather than expands its world. You learn, you solve, you are wrong then you are right, and the mystery of an entire solar system diminishes. It’s all just-for-you, this single-minded puzzle world. The only time it really comes alive is when your rickety ship overshoots or crashlands or is carried away by the tides. When something unexpected happens. When intention is accidentally refused its expected end.
A clockwork world is the exact opposite of a contingent world. It is the rejection of possibility, the submission to certainty. And yet it’s completely common in games. Outer Wilds is just one of the purest, most deliberately crafted examples of a mentality that runs through so much of gaming. Videogames are filled with clockwork comforts, whether you play as a cog, a god, a kink, or a hero of time. Some can still be wonderful, but the limits are clear. There are only fixed roles to play and systemic destinies to fulfill.
Because in a clockwork world, time is not real. Time is but a function of the mechanism. Time does not run through you. Time is just the gears in motion.
61. But the world is not a mechanism.
62. I’ve never really understood the appeal of clockwork worlds. Clockwork is a conspiracy theory about time. It’s a conservative reassertion of a status quo, another subjectivity veiled as objectivity. It’s an absolver of responsibility, like all determinisms.
But real-time is radical. It is fluid, local, the open property of a subject. It is the very experience of contingency, and it is yours. It cannot be calibrated or mastered. It does not fuck with clocks. The world it generates is not a mechanism but a mystery.
In Fortnite, this real-time radical contingency is the main thing you encounter each match. More than the landscape, more than the losing, it is the live unfolding moment that you feel every time. All the if/thens fizzing in your brain. The real-time runs right through you, and you it. Here I am, it says, you say. It’s all so simple and elusive.
The battle royale supplies the structure and you provide the brief life. 22 minutes, give or take. The length of a sitcom minus the ads, if you’re lucky. Sometimes just the span of a commercial break. Seen from afar, it’s yet another round of Fortnite. But up close, what does this radically contingent life really feel like?
63. It feels like this:
What is happening? I’m waking up. I’m on a bus. I’m in the sky. The entire world is beneath me. I never tire of this prelude. I love to survey everything from a distance. Something is about to happen, but it’s not happening yet.
Except that it is. Fireworks are already pouring out the back, streaming like so much exhaust from the party bus, and those fireworks are people. While I’m still calculating and projecting and so carefully deciding where to land, they’re jumping. They’re activating their contingencies, ones that will interface with my own down below.
This is my first feeling: of being late, behind, of waking too slowly to the world. I never leave the bus first. The world starts without me. Though even this isn’t quite true. By waiting, by not jumping, I’ve set my own contingency in motion as well. I’m already part of what’s happening, even if I like to imagine I’m not.
Before I jump, I thank the bus driver. It’s my only constant amidst all the variables and delusions.
What is happening? I’m falling. I’m diving. I’m gliding with my red dragon umbrella. Floating gently into consequence, into island time. Where I’m dropping has already been decided: far from the bus path, far from people, close to some familiar landing. It’s so very quiet here under my umbrella. I fix my gaze straight ahead, Orpheus-like, and only at the last moment do I turn to make sure I haven’t been followed.
What is happening? I’m landing. Actually landing. But the touchdown itself feels like a collapse. Is my catgirl dead or alive in this island box? It feels like it can be known, though it can’t. It feels like it’s already happened, though it hasn’t. This is just the first of many collapses to feel.
I bolt for the nearest weapon, and two factors determine what happens next. First: do I know this landing? Is it the Ice King’s dungeon, the pagoda office, the jungle basecamp, the villain lair, the adobe village, the firewatch tower, or my house out past Wailing Woods? If yes, then I can run my treasure routes, stock up on favorites, switch out last minute based on guesswork and mood. If no, then I will scamper around like a lost dog and hope no one finds me.
More crucially: am I alone? If yes, then I stretch out, fill up the space, take its borders for my own. If no, then I shrink into myself, seek cover, act always in relation to the other’s last known location. I do not hunt them, but I need to know where they are at all times so I don’t slip into a false feeling of security. Let down in a place that’s not mine.
Already so many contingencies flow from this familiarity and solitude, or their lack.
What is happening? I’m leaving. When you land at the island’s edge, it’s rare that you can stay. The storm usually begins moving in just as I exhaust my landing. So I check the map for its bearing, consider my history with the routes ahead, remember the bus’s path across the sky and how others likely scattered. Then I choose the loneliest route available, the path of least contingency.
Each match enacts a winnowing of contingencies, from overwhelming to almost thinkable to final face-off before the storm. From 99 down to 1. My own landing is but a momentary clearing in the fog. If I’m to live beyond it, I’m gonna have to cut a path through the world of others.
64. What is happening? I’m walking. Through the woods/hills, among the desert/glacier ridges and valleys. I’m keeping my visibility low. I’m making good time. This really isn’t so bad. Half the other players are already gone by now, and the land is fresh and bright. I particularly like the way what’s that?
What is happening? I’m crouching. I’m taking cover by a trunk/rock/car, in a shed/bush/ditch to be safe. I keep waking to little contingencies. Intimations of. My death might be unlikely at this point, but I can’t stay here in the open. I’m too vulnerable when still.
What is happening? I’m running. Do I veer right/rightish/leftish/left? Do I keep heading straight and for how long? What about now/now/now/now? Something’s coming. Something’s always coming. Here’s a hoverboard/shopping cart/aeroplane/hamster ball. Here’s a vent/rift/glyph zone/wind tunnel. I’m tracing a line through the world, contingency vibrating all around me. I’m leaving so many possibilities behind. How does time slip so seamlessly from all in the world to never enough?
What is happening? I’m chasing someone. No, she’s chasing me. Why do I keep waking up like Leonard in Memento? Remembering the past too deeply and the present too dimly. My mind keeps stuttering, splintering, unresolving. Is Fortnite making me more unstuck in time, or refracting the unstuckness already in my life?
What is happening? I’m dead/dead/alive/almost dead/dead/surviving/healing/ALIVE!/dead/alive no dead.
What is happening? I’m hiding. I need a minute. To quiet the echoes of each encounter. Writing is not the best medium for channeling contingency.
What is happening? I’m waiting. I can’t pause Fortnite, so this is all I have. Find a corner, press my back into it, try to slow down time. This is a stopgap, a time cheat, a useful illusion. I’m watching for others, looking for an opening to find yet another corner, and it occurs to me that I’m finally in this. I’m past the beginning, which is either setup or nonstarter. Now I’m in the long middle. Now I have plans, hopes, something to lose. Now I’d rather avoid real-time, its live unfolding moment. Now I am afraid.
What is happening? I’m creeping. Treading lightly. Trying to survive another storm phase. The fantasy of control has fallen away now. As if it was ever just me and my choices determining my life. As if everyone else was somehow fixed, and I was the decider. Fortnite pushes back hard against such solipsism. Not only because it has real live people like many other games, but because of its structure, its funneling towards this end, its embrace of chance and flux along the way. Because of all our forced confrontations with the contingency of others.
What is happening? I’m breathing. I’m breathing. My life has been fluctuating for a good 15 minutes, but there’s still little clarity as to why I have (not) survived. There are just too many factors in the midgame, too many uncertainties. The world still too wide for my knowing.
65. What is happening? I’m plotting. Now I see the endgame. Now I see my chance. Only 10 people remain. I’m leaning forward, upping the volume, tunneling my vision to the eye of the storm.
I get here about half the time because of the lonely roads I travel. This is where I really feel the squeeze. The diffuse contingency of the midgame sharpens in the final circles. It all becomes concentrated, visible, and my mind rings with more discrete choices. I feel the present more intensely now. I no longer resist.
What is happening? I’m dodging. Am I alive? I am. But am I? No I am. Already I have to adjust my schemes. My lonesome brothers and sisters, fellow shirkers, are arriving late to the party too. They’re hanging back at the stormedge like me, while the bold claim their ground and build their towers.
Nothing personal, friends, but you’re messing with my plans. If we trip over each other too loudly, we lose our main advantages. Silence, invisibility. We need to be the contingency the builders never even knew was there, until it’s too late.
What is happening? I’m slipping. Into alcoves, gaps, any blindspot. Spaces where the rigid floors and walls don’t quite meet the rolling landscape. Places I’m not expected to be. I’m practicing stillness like a neon monk. In the cracks of the world, I’m trying to quiet my own contingency until the final bell sounds.
I look at these sprawling forts and admire how they’ve activated this space. Building has never been incidental to the radical contingency of Fortnite, and you don’t have to practice it to feel how it warps your field of motion. Every minute difference in the space between us matters in the end. I find myself thankful for the work of these builders, even as I conspire to tear it down.
What is happening? I’m shifting. Something is changing in these final minutes. Lightning forks from my spine. My head starts to dissolve. Someone presses ‘record’ on my nerve net. I can feel something fearsome taking hold of me, something determined to be a who, not a whom, in the end. Something that suddenly wants to win.
What is happening? I’m acting. It all comes down to this. Radical contingency gives special attention to the moment, to readiness. And this is when it happens.
My usual strategy during encounters is to act a little worse than I am. To run away like a newbie and then go hard when they round the corner too carelessly, thinking I’m an easy kill. I wore default skins far longer than necessary for this very reason. Underestimation serves me well during the midgame. I don’t need others to think I’m good. I just need to survive.
But here at the end, that rarely works. There’s no time for such tricks. I have to step out and reveal myself at just the right moment. Maximum surprise and uncertainty, since I’m no builder. Best if I can first act within their own tower without them knowing. Be the call coming from inside the house.
What is happening? Nothing. I won. I made the solipsism fantasy true. The world of contingency is over. Nothing more can happen.
Except no, this is a memory. I didn’t actually make it. I was killed. I evaporated. I disappeared from the world. I happened once, and now I’m no longer happening.
What is happening? I’m replaying. Though only in my mind. There’s no way to actually replay a match. But I’m still fixed on what just happened. Every player knows this feeling when they make it to the final minutes. Your mind seizes on every detail, every little choice, every seeming pivot. It feels out all the consequences rippling back and forth. From the now-known end, you reinterpret what happened, dismember and re-member the chain of events. You marvel at how easily it could have gone another way.
Your whole body vibrates with the aftershocks of contingency, but you can reach no firm conclusions about what happened, or why. Only that it did. You can never really be sure because each match only happens once. Just as everything only happens once. You can play out no alternatives with the same starting conditions because the starting conditions were people. And people only happen once as well.
The world is always too wide. It’s not just the midgame. Even at the end, when everything feels most knowable, it’s not. Because a world of radical contingency is also a world of radical doubt.
66. Maybe it’s better to think of Fortnite as less a possibility space and more a probability space. Though one where the odds are never clear and indeterminacy reigns over all. You can use the game’s built-in video replay to get a clearer picture of what happened in a given match, but it cannot present alternatives. It’s just an artifact now. The dice cannot be rerolled.
Still, this doesn’t stop me from feeling out the probabilities when playing another match. This sort of natural math is terribly pleasurable. The tissue of odds and geometries and functions that my mind reckons with in the background as I try to survive, it’s electric. I’m not making precise calculations exactly, and I’m certainly not solving anything, and yet it’s math I can really feel through my avatar. A quietly relentless estimation of the island’s spacetime and everyone in it buzzing in the back of my brain.
67. Also lit up: my storytelling brain. Radical contingency turns out to be the most amazing story generator. Left or right, now or now, I silently narrate what’s happening, a real-time sportscast play-by-play, with no foreknowledge of how it will turn out. It’s the constant choices, Ms. Pac-Man in her maze, not any explicitly branching storylines that send the shivers through me. My interest, my pleasure is sustained by an erotics of storytelling coupled with an erotics of real-time. That oldest question teased anew: but what will happen next?
There’s a welcome flattening at play here. No right or wrong, only consequences. No big or small because every choice matters. The simple truth that so much depends on so little. While videogame luminaries struggle to develop their ‘narrative legos’, Fortnite improvises a radical kind of storytelling without even aiming to. It seems that a journey from one place to another in a radically contingent world of survival is all we need to tell vital new stories.
68. I’ve loved many places in Fortnite, but none more than the edge of the storm. This is where each match’s story finds its visible limit. The narrative border is literal here, and as it shrinks, contingency becomes not only more thinkable but more feelable too. It’s thrilling, this literalism. Narrative made physical, its edges, its motions, its narrowing over time. I run from it, I plan around it, I flirt with it, knowing that miscalculation might leave me out of its bounds. The risk is high: to be left in the storm is to be left out of the story. And dying in the storm is a very different kind of death. It’s a lonelier death. A death outside the frame. Offstage. Without witness.
Still, I have to risk it. If I’ve developed any strategy in Fortnite beyond avoiding people, it involves the storm. It’s not just calculating its speed so as not to get swallowed, but doing it in such a way that I’m always near its edge, always the last one in the circle. This way I keep the walls of the world directly behind me and limit contingency to what’s ahead. Such that the storm truly has my back. By hugging the narrative limit, always hovering at the margins, I can avoid being the center of the story. At least until I have no other choice.
But it’s not just a strategy. I’ve been drawn to the storm since my earliest days of Fortnite. I was immediately mesmerized by how it whipped the grass and trees just outside the border, how a simple line could divide the world so dramatically. Am I in or out of the storm, am I outside or inside the world? Sometimes I would divide myself from my avatar, have her cling to the safe side while I swung the camera out into the tempest. I just wanted to feel the difference. My heart was a stormskirter, a straddler, not a stormchaser but the stormchased. The edge of the storm, it felt like home.
Even now I think the storm is Fortnite’s most resonant image. I gaze upon its restless tumult, its purple rage, and see contingency in its final form. Entropy. Things falling apart. The chaos realm. I see Lear on the heath, the world of calm, of seeming order, turned upside down. I feel the truth of catastrophe. Distilled. Non-negotiable. The constant motion of the world made visible. The lie of stasis revealed. Contingency, the wind that never stops blowing.
And there on its edge I linger, hoping to soak up a little of its crisis. God I want to feel it, steal it, drink it up. The storm is the ultimate happening of this little videogame world, upon which all the other happenings depend. And I too want to happen. Not just there on the island, but here in this room. Where the winds of change have died down. Have lulled in fact for years.
69. Which is to say: I was feeling dead and wanted to feel alive. Most games felt dead and Fortnite felt alive. Playing it, for a while, I felt alive.
70. My favorite games are those that make me feel most alive. Like a storm, they descend upon my life and ignite the air around me. They thwart the usual videogame fantasies of control, power, fairness, transparency, solvability, mastery. A storm is something to feel, to soak in, not something to master. Mastery is a delusion, a false assurance, a dead end. My favorite games instead make me doubt. Doubt myself, doubt the world, doubt the very nature of what I know and how I know it. And this doubt, it makes me feel alive.
I feel this even more with age. My doubt deepens as the radicalness of contingency reveals itself each day. Turns out contingency wears many faces. Suddenly, weather seems more interesting. Traffic too. I understand better the appeal of gambling, of prayers for luck. I sicken at the power of futures markets and those who worship them. I observe how certain friends like to ‘call it’, whether a movie plot or an election result. What comfort they take in feeling right, as if they have a handle on how things work. I see the woulda-coulda obsessions that take hold of others and make them miserable. I feel virality anew, both online and in our current pandemic. I reel at my own past choices, how unlikely and crucial and unchangeable. And I wonder at everything I did not choose, that had nothing to do with choice, that yet led me here.
An implicit knowledge of contingency just seems to come with the years. We see how things go. How they happen, or don’t. It’s not that we explicitly think about contingency all the time, and yet it informs our plans, our fears, how we live anyway. It’s like we know and we don’t know. We know that the world is in constant flux, and we don’t know. We know that everything only happens once, and we don’t know. More often than not, we don’t want to know.
71. The problem is this: our life is contingent and yet we only have one. We never get to actually see any alternatives. We can imagine them, tell stories, play games that let us explore multiple lives. But the one-time-ness of everything is still hard to take. Ok, so I accept that death is final. That nothing repeats. That contingency is the truth of time. Great. Now what? Where does that leave me?
These questions have been especially pressing for me as I’ve entered my forties. I was depressed during much of my twenties, and my present has felt similar, if less acute and more inescapable. But have the last few years really been depression? Or have they just been midlife in a room, without enough to mitigate or distract? Was I actually glimpsing contingency when I was younger, whereas at midlife I just feel the gaze of time all over me? I’m not sure about the difference anymore.
I know that I’m particularly terrified of accidents now. I’ve always been careful, meticulous, a control-freak. But the years haven’t given me a lot of reason to relent. In late 2001, my 15-year-old cousin died in a profoundly random parade accident. Fourteen years later, a torch tipped over in my uncle’s barn and started a chain reaction that ended with his death. I’ve accumulated ‘regular’ death stories with age, have called the natural-seeming ones hard or less hard, ‘good’ deaths or ‘bad’. But these visibly contingent deaths shape my life in a different way than grief or loss. They hunt me down in the present, make the nightmare of contingency felt all around me, lurking there in broad daylight yet always invisible. I haven’t even lost those closest to me yet. I should be grateful, really. But mostly I just live in fear of the phone call.
Even the good contingencies in my life disturb me. When I trace all the factors that led me halfway around the world so that my path would cross Ellen’s, I tremble. My entire life was completely altered by the smallest things. A failed application, an email query, a lateness. I likely wouldn’t be a game critic, or have written my graphic novel, or even be writing this essay had a friend not given me a PS3 in the summer of 2011 and I then played Demon’s Souls. The lack of necessity, everywhere, is overwhelming. My very existence depends upon the vagaries of one spring night in Kentucky.
None of this is unusual. Everyone can reach back through the years and try to feel out how they came to be. But what’s the point? Why feel contingency at all? Good or bad or neither, nothing can be altered in the past. And nothing can be fully known in the present such that we could arrange, exactly, the future we want. With contingency I can wonder or I can shudder, but it doesn’t really change anything.
72. But this whole mindset is wrong. Feeling contingency is not about control. It’s not about getting what you want. This is the same poisonous game thinking of optimization and winning. Our notions of alternate histories and multiple worlds can’t actually fathom the radicalness of contingency. We can only imagine minor variations, tracked along limited vectors. Timelines, not fields of constant motion, ripples out and in, an ever-shifting web in which we are all caught. But we don’t need perfect knowledge or mastery to act in this web. We never have. Most of us don’t master anything, certainly not our own lives. And so what? Our lives remain no less valuable.
So why then ask the questions? Why feel contingency at all? Because it admits our power and limits both. Because it’s a chance for change. Because it scares us. Because it’s true. Contingency is both the source of our loss and the grounds for our hope. Put your hand out right now and feel it happening. That vibration. Let your hand ask: why this world? Contingency allows us to ask this question again and again, to truly imagine otherwise. And with this otherwise come a whole host of radical possibilities. Radical openness and vulnerability. Radical wrongness without shame. Radical empathy and connection with every fellow creature in this contingent world. Even just the radical feeling in itself. Feeling is always being asked to justify itself, to prove its worth. But that’s like asking the wind to justify itself. The wind is a gift. And so is this feeling.
Really, the question should be: why not feel contingency? Because the dangers in not feeling it are so much worse. So many resist, especially with age. The threat is too much, the fear too overwhelming. Radical contingency ruins their conspiracy theories, mocks their designs, proves their control the ultimate fantasy. The uncertainty left in its wake, it’s the last thing they want. The past feels safer. They covet its reasons, its explanations, its seeming stasis. It’s just so fucking hard to change.
I say ‘they’, but I feel the struggle too, all the time. I vacillate between fear and hope. I cling to my illusions. And yet the longer I dwell in this feeling of radical contingency, the more it feels like liberation. Instead of a fatalistic determinism, it says that nothing is inevitable, nothing is permanent, it can all be changed. If not the whole world, not right away, then at least my life. I am not comforted by this, I am provoked. I am called to see my life and act.
73. I can’t think of another game that’s made me feel time and contingency like this. Most games barely resonate with my life offscreen. The really bad ones make it worse. But the best return me to a world that’s suddenly strange and new. Our world. I feel not time lost or time killed but time renewed.
This is part of the appeal of all battle royales. Their structure creates a chain of consequence in a shrinking field towards a singular end that makes contingency echo in our bones. Fortnite has simply done it best. Whereas PUBG has been held back by its military shooter roots and Apex by its refinements and gameisms, Fortnite has gone all in on this nascent genre. It has evolved a live space where things actually happen. It has fully embraced unpredictability and loss. And its contingency has proven the most graspable, the most thinkable, the most feelable, and with its manifold embrace of flux and change, the most radical too.
Crucially, much of this was an accident. Fortnite was not originally built to be a battle royale, but with time this lack of intention has proven a tremendous strength. Its unplanned openness and flexibility helped make it feel uniquely vital and alive during its first two years. The game was designed, obviously, but the battle royale mode was not beholden to some original master plan. Instead: Fortnite happened. The contingency in the game echoed the contingency of the game.
It could have gone another way. And I wonder what the future of videogame contingency will be like. Other battle royales have not pursued Fortnite’s radical vision, and the other modern genre that regularly channels contingency, the roguelike, produces more safe, sensible, winnable variations each year. Every new genre seems to get colonized by gamer logic before long. Will it take another once-a-generation accident like Fortnite before the question of contingency is even raised again? Probably not even then.
I’m afraid Fortnite speaks to the present more than the future. It is revolutionary but still so limited. Games have always been about contingency, alternatives, loss, and yet a future game of radical contingency, one preferably without guns, a game that could truly realize an art of accidents, well, it’s hard to imagine. Most of us don’t even try. I think future players will look back at the early 21st century and marvel at how little we asked of videogames. How could repetitive shooting and clockwork puzzle logic have defined so many of our experiences? Why were we so resigned to what was, as if that’s all that could ever be?
74. I’m tired of asking such questions. It’s exhausting to believe in videogames and be proven wrong every year. Games can be such powerful existential tools, yet we leave them in the shed to dull and rust. The contingencies of gaming consistently collapse into the most familiar end-states. I’ve seen no real change in this over the past decade.
And still, I write. I look for another ending. Writing too is so painfully contingent. Full of constant choices, consequences, cascading recursions. Forced to contend with my moods, my daily anxieties. It’s never a straight line, despite the final artifact. For over a year, this essay has seemed to exist in a kind of quantum state, and I’ve been dying for some sort of resolution, a one-way-ness, a pastness, some plain relief. I’ve fantasized so often that I can somehow write myself back into being. Back into time. Even though I never really left. Waiting has consequences too. This essay would have gone very differently had I finished it a year ago as planned.
What a strange time to be writing a live essay like this. Back at its beginning, Bernie Sanders was the likely presidential nominee, and I was cautiously hopeful. The Democratic Party had not yet fully coordinated against him and propped up a centrist shambles of a man instead. The coronavirus was something that Elle and I talked about mostly in relation to her parents’ safety in China and her own disappearing spring jobs. I was still in a room, but many in the rest of the world were not.
And now, the contingencies of this spring are overwhelming, undeniable. Covid-19 has given us another terrifying model of radical contingency. We imagine its chain reactions stretching back to some patient zero, a movie montage of contact and transport. We visualize clouds of fluorescent droplets at the grocery, blacklight fingerprints on cereal shelves and frozen food doors. We feel the presence of death all around us. Position, angle, timing. Chance, bald chance.
And then at home, contingency’s lack. We must keep our if/thens to a minimum, flatten the curve of our consequence. We are encouraged only to watch. Whatever’s streaming on Netflix, or in the world. We are stuck with whatever contingencies bound us before the lockdown. Fine for some, impossible for most. And meanwhile, the always-essential work of others has become more visible, yet still out of reach. When someone out there dies, the world is deformed. As usual, we look away. Numbers go up. Death is always distant until it’s not.
And it keeps going. We try to talk about the crisis, seems it’s all we talk about, and yet we have so little to say. Here, in the middle of it, while it’s still going on, we have no perspective. We can’t see the end, only radically contingent possibilities. Which ending did you get, the forum asks. Remember the dark timeline we entered in 2016? Haha I’ll take 2019 back at this point. Turns out real-time is a nightmare. I need a change, god I need a change, there’s no real pause anyway, time keeps going, it never ever stops, except when it does, for you, or for me, but until then the minutes and hours and days are maddening, are madness, and they always were, and they always were. I will just write these words during the day and play Final Fantasy VII Remake at night and wait for the end.
75. The problem is ongoingness. Life just keeps happening. Contingency constitutes the world, and we’re always in the middle of it. Stuck in an overwhelming present tense. And the present is so hard to argue with. How can I know anything, say anything when reality keeps updating? How can I live when I don’t know what’s coming? When I don’t know how it ends?
For a long time I felt this problem in Fortnite too. Each match had an end state, but Fortnite itself went on. Its world lived in time, like me, and I found this both exhilarating and oppressive. Anything I could say seemed to become immediately outdated, un-reference-able. Wailing Woods? That was just a memory now, or a relic to glimpse in a stream archive. The fabric of Fortnite’s spacetime was built from this ongoingness, and like any live thing, it was intimidating. Especially for someone trying to capture it in writing, which is not ongoing but ever-ending.
Season after season, as I thrilled to the changes, as I admired the game’s restless spirit, I kept wondering: how long can this last? Part of me wanted to see it go on changing forever, in defiance of everything I knew about videogames. And another part of me was seeking an offramp, a release. With every game, I eventually look for a place to rest. Somewhere to lay down my burdens, every quest and treasure and undiscovered secret, and say: that’s enough. I’m good.
But then, without even asking, Fortnite did it for me. In October of 2019, the black hole event took the game offline for two days. It was called ‘The End’, though no one above a certain age really believed that. It was clear that Epic only meant it as a broad reboot, as well as a tremendous publicity stunt. But in the accidental spirit of Fortnite, the game managed to tell the truth anyway, without even meaning to.
‘The End’ proved exactly right. The Fortnite I’ve been writing about no longer exists. The game of the generation can no longer be played. That Fortnite is gone.
Not Coming Back
76. There were warning signs. This time last year, as I prepared to finish this essay, Season 9 took Fortnite into ‘the future’. To many this was just the latest theme. Now we had hoverboards, wind-powered mass transit, Neo Tilted Towers. But in the continuity of the island, it worried me. Where could Fortnite go from here? It felt like the end of the island’s history. After the future, what else could happen?
As the season wore on, my sense of an ending lingered. I felt the contingencies narrowing. There were only so many ways this could play out. I’d been amazed that Fortnite has remained so adventurous and experimental for so long, all while being the biggest game in the world. But it couldn’t stay on top forever. And I feared that a poisonous need for longevity and relevance was lurking just offshore, ready to take control.
Season 9 ended in a crowd-pleasing kaiju/mecha fight, complete with safe platforms and jetpacks for optimal viewing. It was a spectacle alright, but a familiar one, like any other clash of titans I’d seen on film. I missed my more limited viewpoint. All those glimpses pieced together under pressure. A view that was partial but mine. And unlike earlier Fortnite events, this time I never asked: what is happening? Because I knew exactly what was happening at every turn. I knew how colossi threw down. I just had to wait for them to finish. Shortly after the fight, promos for the next season asked players to “Think Back” and teased the return of Dusty Depot, the first location we’d ever lost. The unabashed nostalgia made me shudder.
When I arrived the first morning of Season 10, there it was, the original island event, hovering in the sky over a resurrected Dusty Depot. The meteor that had landed unseen between Seasons 3 and 4 was frozen in that moment just before impact, just before it cratered the center of the map and thrust the island into time. It was a sight to behold, no doubt. But it also signaled, in its stasis, the end of time in Fortnite. This was not Season 10 but Season X, and the crucial variable of time was about to be brought to heel.
77. Meanwhile, the rest of the island was clearly losing its mind. The landscape became pockmarked with bubbles of seasons past. Each little dome had its own ruleset: no building in Old West Tilted Town, no fighting during Taco Time in the now-undrowned Greasy Grove, please do disguise yourself as an everyday object in the desert/swamp hybrid of Moisty Palms. It was islands within islands. Islands all the way down.
Seen from the battle bus, the fabric of reality appeared to be more holes than cloth. All the seams were showing and time was completely out of joint, corralled into these pocket worlds that remixed, destabilized, recurred. It was as if the loops of individual matches had melded with the memories of landscape and infected the logos of the entire island. On good days, this felt like an appropriate ending. A looping comedy turned tragedy turned absurdity. Island history eating itself. A final descent into nostalgic senility.
But on bad days, it looked like something else. Because no matter how I interpreted this trajectory as the way of all videogames, a sly acknowledgement of the dead ends of gamer logic, this was clearly not the end of Fortnite. And everybody knew it. The entire timey-wimey remix of Season X felt indulgent. The nostalgia was forced, predigested, something closer to fan service. I could feel the entire game looking at me as never before. Less an independent place doing its own thing and more a game space eager to please, primed to draw me into some undefined complicity.
I trudged through the weeks, late summer slipping into fall, but couldn’t shake my suspicions. Sure, the homages to the Back to the Future trilogy felt thematically appropriate. But turning Tilted Towers, the former heart of the island, into Gotham City for Batman’s 80th anniversary? What did Batman have to do with the end of Fortnite?
On the last day of Season X, the meteor that had started it all finally landed. Again. But this time it landed somewhere else, thanks to the efforts of ‘The Visitor’ and his transdimensional counterparts. The meteor’s new target was the mysterious glowing ‘Zero Point’ unearthed during the kaiju fight. To keep it from expanding and destroying reality, a cataclysmic reboot was deemed necessary. Contingency was out of control. Games could not handle time. The accident of Fortnite could not go on happening forever.
It was time to get back on course. It was time to get back to the reality of videogames.
78. For two days Fortnite was nothing but a hole in the screen. I left my tv on the entire time, even while I slept. I didn’t know what came next. I was hoping I’d misread the signs.
I wanted the island to be taken from me. I wanted it never to return. I wanted to miss it. And I wanted Fortnite to change, again, into something we’d never seen before. Something strange and vital and new.
But in my heart, it felt too late for that.
So I sat with the hole. Ate with it. Slept with it. Shared its real-time. I wanted to live with the hole left by Fortnite just a little while longer.
79. When Fortnite came back, something was plainly off. I couldn’t quite place it at first. Many of my fellow players just seemed lost. Not lost in the new landscape but lost in their own bodies. They walked in circles, struggled with doors, got trapped in rooms, took shots in the most stilted, polite fashion. No no after you ma’am. If I met them before they found a weapon, they would back away slowly, eyes on me the whole time, like some Dark Souls creature who’d reached the limits of their territory. They felt like capgras imposters, or something fresh from the pet sematary. They just weren’t right.
Almost immediately I won. Then I won again. By the end of the first day I’d won 3 of my 9 matches. I checked my stats to compare against my usual win ratio. Three percent, not thirty-three. What is happening? I asked. Except not in the good way. This was no accident. This felt like design.
Then I remembered: there’d been talk of bots being added to Fortnite back before the black hole. Sure enough, my last opponent had run in tight circles through an open field, firing wildly, like no player I’d ever faced. This poor bot, his aggression maxed out because of his accidental survival till the final circle, had found madness at the limits of his simulation. I suddenly recalled the weird single walls I’d seen thrown up across the landscape, the odd solitary holes cut through houses, the generic WordWordNumber usernames revealed in death. I could feel my mind scouring the island for more evidence of these pod people. How many real players had I actually faced? Once bot AI improved, how would I know the difference?
There was no pleasure in these wins. There was no trust in this world. How could I know what was real? How could I believe any of it? I walked away from the screen, circled the couch, wanted to cry. I felt lost myself, like a low-level bot whose AI couldn’t handle the world. Who couldn’t even escape a simple room.
80. It wasn’t just the fake people. It was something about the new naturalism of the island too. The graphics were now more lush, the locales less modular, the water a feature. It was also far less weird. The highlands and lowlands, the dockyards and factories, the seaside attractions, it all made sense. The new island’s logic was more thought-out, a cohesive domesticated ruggedness, not a patchwork of biomes. No one would call it ‘realistic’, but by Fortnite standards, this was a kind of realism. What a strange contrast it made: a more realistic natural island with secret zombies, instead of a weirdo hybrid zone where everyone was real.
So much about it was uncanny yet familiar rather than delightfully strange. The space of the original island was constantly undercut with mystery, but this new one felt already-explained from day one. And many of the other changes were similarly legible. Call it videogame realism. There was now weapon customization to better tweak your loadout. Fixed chest spawn points to further reduce randomness. A tighter set of items and weapons to focus on skill. Constant dings and medals to give that sugar hit of ‘progress’. Even Kevin the cosmic cube, original icon of Fortnite’s weird metaphysics, was now a nuclear-ish power plant called Kevolution Energy. Singular Kevin had gone from mystery to industry without missing a beat.
And then the obvious hit me: oh, this is a sequel. Of course it is. You could call this Fortnite ‘new’, you could say it had ‘changed’, but it was all dictated by sequel logic. Prettier, better, more videogame. Fairer for the experts, more inviting to newcomers. Instead of embracing losing, it would make everyone a winner. Because a sequel wants to please. A sequel wants to grow. Sequels are not accidents, no no, and sequel logic does not fuck with chance. It needs something more reliable to ward off the natural mortality of videogames. So a sequel looks at you. A sequel always looks at you. What do you want? What do you require? How can we keep this relationship going forever?
For many, Chapter 2 was proof of Fortnite’s vitality, its longevity, its capacity for reinvention and continued relevance. But not for me. Chapter 2 was only proof that Fortnite was, sadly, a videogame. It was not a living thing. It was no longer haunted by time. It was now undead, like most game sequels. Familiar and rotting, driven by an insatiable logic, hungry for more players, more eyes, for a fuller immortality.
A zombie is a bad sequel to a person. And I too felt undead the more I played. For weeks I shambled forward, through hollow victories and hollow losses both, hoping I was wrong. But I couldn’t deny it. The haunting was over. Only hunger remained.
81. What has happened in the half year since Fortnite was reborn? Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening. Time no longer really passes there. Every time I check in I’m shocked by the lack of change. Evocative micro-changes have been minimized, and the rare ones that do occur revolve around tired military encampments and rival agencies. An oil spill from an offshore rig is about as exciting as it gets. More realism, less that feels real. More videogame ‘depth’, less living breadth. The new island is just profoundly static now, like any other videogame space.
In the same 7 months the year prior, Kevin exploded and initiated the butterfly event, a glacier crashed into the southwestern quarter of the map, a volcano took over the northeast and eventually exploded, which cracked the glacier and destroyed Titled Towers, and then the entire island fast-forwarded into ‘the future’. And those were just the highlights. But during this identical stretch of Chapter 2? A single season changeover ushered in a busy new interface and a few conspicuously designed bases on the outskirts full of henchmen, bosses, and specialty items. In other words: videogame content. Meanwhile, there have been no major island events at all.
Sure, there was a corny Star Wars light show to promote the execrable Rise of Skywalker and a wild but lonely Astronomical concert featuring a towering Travis Scott. But no one seriously asked what is happening because we all know what a concert is, what a promo is, even if a few of the virtual details are new. Crucially, these events only happened on the island, not to it. The island itself has no story so far. It’s less a place now and more a stage. A backdrop, not a landscape. It’s a setting for others, not for itself. And who are the others? Celebrities of the metaverse, of course. Influencers, brands, beloved IPs. Denizens of The Platform. Turns out the Bat-Signal over Tilted was just the sign of the times.
Casual observers may think Fortnite has always been like this. It has not. Epic’s metaverse ambitions have long been known, but the original island was independent up until Season X and always maintained its own unique identity amidst the crossovers. The Avengers appeared only in a limited-time side mode, not as a part of the island narrative. The Thanos who showed up in this mode was not the universe-halver of the comics or movies but the big bad of nerdom. Our nerdom. There was a felt sense of equality when these worlds first collided. We were all just visitors to the island, players and Thanos alike. None of us quite knew what it was yet. The rifts may have loosely justified the mashups, but there was always a clear separation that made the original island feel like a distinct place with its own history, its own life beyond us. And beyond Disney too.
But now with Chapter 2, Deadpool is hanging out in your home base. Stormtroopers have crashed onto the island proper. Palpatine is speaking from the movie. The diegetic blurring could maybe be interesting if the new island had its own identity, if its blankness didn’t feel so purposeful. Chapter 2’s blank slate, its ‘new world’ is a familiar fantasy of emptiness, of place without history. And these fantasies always serve something else. Without a life or logic of its own, the island is easily subordinated to the logic of videogames, of fandom, of capital. At worst, it simply becomes ad space. Or rather, ad place. A timeless world where marketing is the only thing that happens.
82. And so Fortnite goes on. The battle royale more gamey, the metaverse more grim. Some of the elements I loved are still there, and I suppose something besides ads could still happen. There’s always another season. But I won’t be waiting around for it. I do wonder what new players are feeling these days, those who came onboard with Chapter 2, for whom the original island is itself a kind of legend. What locations have you come to love? What’s the party like now? Does the contingency make you feel alive too?
If Fortnite continues on this course, there will no doubt be those who relish its downfall. Some who never even played will claim: “I called it! I told you it sucked! Hrm hrm hrm.” From the beginning they disliked its popularity, they mocked its young players, they treated it as a punchline, as everything wrong with gaming, even as it blazed trails past all their own favorites. For some reason, games people continually have opinions about games they’ve never played. Games about which they should have, stop me now, no opinion at all. Games culture is plagued with Statlers and Waldorfs, heckling from their safe balconies, their timelines filled with all their little comments. Some of them even think they’re game critics.
But the truth about Fortnite for these people is much simpler: you missed it. You never experienced the game of the generation, and now you never will. It really is gone. You had to show up, repeatedly, while it was actually happening, but you didn’t. Epic could bring back the original island, cycle through the seasons, call it Fortnite Classic, and that still wouldn’t be it. Because the essential element of the experience, time, will never be the same. Your time, other players’ time, our shared time, they’re all different now. You cannot experience the game alone, and you cannot experience the game alongside everyone anymore either. That equality of the present tense is over. What is happening? can no longer be asked in good faith. Because there is no more happening, only what happened. Happening is a one time thing. There are no replays, no do-overs. For those who missed it, it’s simply too late.
83. As time passes, I feel my own understanding slipping away from me. I’ll play a round and think: what did I ever see in you? Or I’ll go the other way and ache with some vague loss. For weeks after the black hole, after I had wished the island gone forever, I would panic and think: no no wait I made a huge mistake. As if my wishing had anything to do with it. I would see an old loading screen and suddenly miss, not Wailing Woods, not my villain lair, but some unremarkable stretch of grass between two hills. Places I thought meant nothing to me. Places I could never go again.
It’s hard to know how to mourn a videogame. Games culture doesn’t much allow for it. With loss it prefers anger. Even though anger is always incomplete. It’s no substitute for sorrow. Neither is nostalgia, that other version of anger. Most often gaming opts for preemptive acceptance to ward off all bad feelings and keep its world turning. It’s the poptimist’s creed. Don’t let the darkness in. Always remember: games are great! You’ll find another one in no time. Get back out there, chief.
But I want to feel this loss. I want to feel it. Fortnite was so vibrant and alive for a while there. I would look around each day and think: it’s all real. It’s all really happening. Time is really passing. I can see it in the landscape. And the landscape is really there. It doesn’t disappear when I turn around. This world doesn’t depend on me. And neither does anyone else. Everyone is real. Everyone is real. And they’re over there, right now, on another part of the island, which also exists, building and dancing and dying. We’re all here together and the storm it is near and our time it is real. Our time it was real and it’s not coming back.
84. Because nothing ever comes back.
85. Because time is the truth.
86.
87. I don’t know when it all began to change. Was it my cousin Les dying in our hometown parade? Was it the earthquake in Sichuan I survived with my students, when so many others did not? Was it nothing in particular, just the accumulation of days in my twenties and thirties? Was it something much earlier that took decades to feel?
88. The change isn’t over. I lapse, I remember, I have good days and bad, I fear the dark at night like never before. Time is the most basic thing, the most obvious thing, and yet it’s also the hardest to accept. There are so many ways to deny it. I feel like I’ve tried them all over the years.
I think there is a familiar word for our denial of time. A common word that announces its opposition directly, that speaks its delusion out loud. And that word is conservatism. Conservatism is not just resistance to change or adherence to tradition or a set of reactionary political views. It’s a kind of pathological comfort-seeking. It longs for the past. It believes in again. Conservatism is a fundamental and ongoing denial of the reality of time.
With this denial often comes a whole host of related denials. The denial of contingency, which is the unfolding of time. The denial of others, who live with us in time. The denial of death, which ends our experience of time. At base, conservatism is a complete denial of reality. It constantly seeks to eliminate doubt and reinforce its denial. To make its denial of reality reality itself.
89. In other words: conservatism is a euphemism for cowardice.
90. When I think about videogames, their conservatism overwhelms me. This isn’t particularly controversial. If we think of gamergate, common industry practices, regular fan uproars, the nostalgia, the enthusiast press, the vague culture of it all, the word conservative fits. Even the word gamer conjures images of someone who wants to control contingencies, who prefers comforting fantasies over discordant realities, who is obsessed with power and winning, who denies the reality of time. Gamer can seem sometimes like just a synonym for conservative.
But this is not what I mean. Sure, it’s true enough. It also comforts those of us who play games yet consider ourselves outside their conservatism. Even though we’re not. Conservatism is a confidence game, perhaps the greatest con of all, and its primary mark is the self. It traffics in denial, and denial does not exactly admit itself. That’s kind of its thing. But I wonder if we can admit that we can’t play games and participate in their culture without engaging their conservatism. That maybe we even enjoy some of the things we offload onto gamers. That actually, denial feels good. At least for a while.
I’m thinking of the inherent conservatism of sequels we enjoy, both the numbered and the countless unnamed. How their incremental logic rules the industry, and our expectations. How their promise of better depends on their promise of sameness. I’m thinking of the conservative repetition at the heart of most games. How easily things come back, can be redone. How the phantom of perfectibility haunts players. How this repetition towards perfection encourages a mechanistic view of time, contingent only upon our efforts. I’m thinking of our conservative genre love. How we justify familiar trappings as warm blankets. How little is ever deeply challenging or weird. How games have become perhaps the central pillar of the comfort media empire, of which we are loyal citizens.
I’m thinking of how we accept all this. How it becomes just the way things are. How we project the more egregious aspects onto gamers, while we play no differently. I’m thinking about how we sell ourselves on this. How we are constantly in justification mode, of our time, our tastes, our habits. How we continually need to prove our innocence, our goodness even. How we scamper from one game to the next, one comfort to another, as if stopping to look around might break the illusion and throw us back into time. I’m thinking about why we play videogames.
I wonder what we think we’ve escaped from. I wonder what we think we’ve escaped to. What haven from time even exists? I’m thinking of James Baldwin’s words in his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name. “And yet, I could not escape the knowledge, though God knows I tried, that if I was still in need of havens, my journey had been for nothing. Havens are high-priced. The price extracted of the haven-dweller is that he contrive to delude himself into believing that he has found a haven.”
91. As a game critic, I thought it was my responsibility to openly resist this conservatism. I thought it was other game critics’ responsibility too. I still do. And yet I’m not sure what that looks like anymore. For a decade now I’ve watched critics fail at anything resembling resistance. Most haven’t even tried.
Perhaps the biggest reason is that nearly all game critics are themselves conservative. Even those who are politically progressive. These critics can imagine radically different politics, a radically different world, but not radically different games. Their expressed game values are comfortably centrist, incremental, positive, professional. They may be leftist in theory, but they function more like the Democratic Party of Videogames. They occasionally sound like they’re resisting, but their work doesn’t bear it out. I often think: if this is your idea of resistance, I would hate to see your idea of complicity.
I don’t know what’s in critics’ hearts. I only know their work. It’s just hard not to notice how conservative it is. The casual advocacy of escapism, the well actually defenses of the status quo, the implicit shilling of it all. The underlying quest for agreement in particular. We’ve seen more diverse perspectives in games criticism the past decade, but how much diversity of thought has come with it? How often does any critic really challenge their audience, or other critics, or gaming’s base assumptions? What game site has any serious reputation for bracing, discomforting criticism?
I always thought criticism should be dramatic, that it should go places, be a real adventure in itself. I thought it should risk enough to possibly fail. But games criticism doesn’t even fail interestingly. Because it doesn’t really risk anything. It is safe, dependable, emotionally predictable, intellectually inert. And I get it. I know that games culture, the internet, the very economics of criticism provide no environment for real risks. Any game critic faces tremendous systemic obstacles beyond the personal struggle criticism already requires. I don’t know a way around this. I hate what it’s done to our very notion of criticism, of what is possible. And I dislike the way many critics have adapted. But I recognize that this is another form of survival. And I wish we could be more open about our failures, both collective and personal.
Because games criticism is completely decimated as I write this, even compared to a year ago. I haven’t seen the scene this gutted and diminished in the ten years I’ve been following it, especially in writing. Games criticism has never been good, even before gamergate, but its present state is still disheartening. What’s worse, there appears to be little hunger for anything more. I honestly wonder if there ever was. What use does our conservative gaming heart have for criticism anyway?
92. This question won’t be answered by current game critics. We have already failed. We can no longer envision the radical alternatives required for any real, thriving criticism. Our capacity to imagine otherwise has withered. We look around and say: this is videogames. It’s always been like this. And it always will be.
The lie of conservatism loves to repeat such lines. But time keeps passing. And generations keep changing. A new generation of game critics will emerge someday, and I hope they can succeed where we failed. I wonder what they will make of all the dumb things we believed about videogames. All the lies we told ourselves. All the cons we perpetuated in broad daylight.
Much may still be the same, of course. There’s no guarantee that another generation will do any better. But the chance will be theirs. The struggle too. The game of any generation is the game of time. The game of change. I hope they’ll play it well. I hope they will at least believe that a better criticism is possible.
93. I say we have failed and I mean it. I’ve failed too, not just in my work but in my present belief about games criticism. I could say I still believe in it, but I don’t. That I can still imagine otherwise, but I can’t. Not really. Not right now. I wish I could, but my heart’s not there. I don’t know how any criticism could effectively resist gaming’s present conservatism.
I just don’t see an audience for it. And the one in my head, even as I write this, poisons my thinking. I’ve exposed myself to far too much of games culture this past decade, and it has filled my mind with ghosts. Not only of gamers, but of accommodationists and apologists and regular commenters too. I’ve unwisely given them space in my head and thus felt the window for a more truthful games discourse slowly move off planet. Years of exposure to a videogame audience warps your very sense of what’s sayable, arguable, even thinkable. I can hardly imagine a different conversation anymore.
Meanwhile, I’ve felt my sadness and anger slip at times into disgust and contempt. Which is ruinous. I still find myself shouting over the noise in my head. Pushing back against the expectation that I affect casualness or perform relatability. Resentful that those most likely to understand what I’m talking about are the least likely to want to hear it. It’s all rather ridiculous. It makes me feel a little crazy. I want to argue forcefully and forcefully admit doubt. To explore my beliefs and my uncertainty both. But the audience I imagine for games criticism craves something else, and my own weariness often just rails in response.
What has happened these past few years? Sometimes it all feels like a mistake. I need to exorcize these gaming phantoms at the very least. I suppose I could try to resurrect some belief in the possibilities of games criticism, though that doesn’t feel very likely right now. I think it’s just time to move on.
94. For a year I’ve tried to figure out how to keep writing about games in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t let go easily. Recently I’ve even played a few games that have made me reconsider. The all-time great Disco Elysium. The breath-taking Paper Beast. Out for Delivery, a fantastic documentary game following Beijing food couriers on the first day of Wuhan’s lockdown. The Longing, a mesmerizing 400 day game about waiting that I just started this week. Even Final Fantasy VII Remake, which turned out to be a subversive melodrama rather than an unjustified retread. I was thrilled at how it wanted to interrogate its own past, resist the conservatism of fans and fate, explore its own contingencies and imagine otherwise.
As I was taking out the garbage the other night, I thought: damn I wanna write about these games. Something about videogames makes you want to share the experience with others. To process them out loud and try to make sense of them. Perhaps because you don’t fully understand them. We get so used to their ways, they become so normal to our game-tamed brains, and yet our understanding still feels pale. I wonder if we desire to bring games outside ourselves precisely to see their strangeness anew. To say: this virtual thing happened to me and I don’t totally get it. I had all these feelings. I had an experience!
But then, beside the recycling bins, I remembered. I remembered how it goes. I remembered everything that comes with games writing, the deal you must strike. These games may inspire me now, but the bad ones will come soon enough. And when they do, my criticism will not be wanted. I remembered the audience, both the one I’ve actually encountered over the years and the one poisoning my mind now. How few people are invigorated by difference. How many are committed to some version of objectivity, whether they acknowledge it or not. I remembered the hangers-on still defending the gamescrit fort, and I remembered that I’m tired of criticizing them.
I remembered the conservatism. I understand this conservatism because I’m from it. It’s still in me. I’ve had to leave so many conservative places in my life: my hometown, church, university, state, country. To keep the conservatism from taking me over and ruining me. I stood there in the parking lot and remembered the con of videogames. This most of all. How dishonesty is a precondition for writing about games. How there is simply no taste for the truth. Eventually you lie so regularly that you believe your own lies. You don’t know the difference anymore. And you don’t want to know.
I remembered Fortnite too. I’m still disappointed by what happened with it. But even more, I’m grateful for the time we had together. Fortnite changed me. It mended my gaming heart and then broke it again. If Demon’s Souls was my way into gaming this past decade, Fortnite was my way out. It too has marked me, wounded me, created a before and after. And there’s no going back. Letting go of Fortnite has unexpectedly helped me let go of games writing as well. I resisted for so long. But Fortnite said: it’s ok. Everything changes. You can change too.
95. Fortnite accidentally told the truth. At first about time and change. Eventually about videogames. It showed what games could be, and finally what they are. Of course it didn’t mean to. Games rarely ever mean to tell the truth. Games are where we go to safely lie. They are a haven from the truth. I think about this most. What happens to us when we lie so regularly? When we convince ourselves we’ve actually found a haven?
I’m so hungry for the truth these days. Starving for it, really. For a truly radical honesty. Especially with myself. God it feels good to tell the truth, even when that truth is awful. There’s something so liberating about just saying it out loud, living in its presence. Like your inside and outside, for a moment, aren’t at each other’s throats. Without telling the truth, nothing can be truly reckoned with. Lies produce more lies, but truth is generative as well. It is here that we have a crucial responsibility to each other: to tell the truth so that others can tell the truth too.
I think often of Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”. Near the end she writes: “When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers.”
96. Here’s a true story:
Night was falling on the last days of Fortnite.
It was the final evening of Season 9, ‘The Future’, and I was dreading the promised nostalgia of the next season. As I dove towards my favorite westside landing spot, the hollow mountain villain lair, I took one last look at the island. What could possibly come after the future?
I started my usual route, just as I had hundreds of times before. First the mountain peak, which hadn’t spawned its usual treasure chest. Then a lower outcropping. Again, no dice. Then a precarious edge where I was finally in luck. Small shields and a sniper rifle. I dropped down to the broken garage doors to head inside. But when I came around the corner, I realized I wasn’t alone.
A girl dressed as a cactus, with a pickaxe made of balloons, was already inside. I saw her and she saw me and we both stopped cold. Who would make the first move? My sniper rifle was useless at this range. A half-second passed. Then she started to cry.
I stood up from my couch. I had never seen someone cry in a match before. What could I do? How could I reply? I wanted to go to her but would she trust me not to attack? Here we were, two strangers, and our options were so limited. I tried to remember any friendly emotes I’d earned. I was suddenly so nervous. I could not think.
Then she stopped crying. She didn’t raise a weapon. She didn’t even flinch. She just started to dance.
Orange Justice.
I could not believe it. What is happening? I thought for the thousandth time. I was so happy I wanted to cry. But I definitely didn’t have a tears of joy emote. So I did the first dance I could think of, the Laid Back Shuffle.
Throughout Season 9, players could collect optional fortbyte computer chips hidden across the map to uncover a secret image. A new chip was revealed each day, 100 in total, and here on the last day I had 99. I’d basically given up on my missing fortbyte weeks earlier because it involved dancing with a partner to raise a disco ball. This disco ball in the villain lair. God I was slow. The cactus girl was spontaneously helping me with something I could not do on my own.
I’d like to say we danced all night. I think it was actually about 10 seconds. I still could not believe it, even as it was happening. This was the site of the rocket launch, the very first live event. And here we were dancing together.
And then it was over. The ball reached the top, confetti exploded, and the fortbyte appeared. The cactus girl immediately ran away. She didn’t even need it! She had helped me for no other reason but to help me.
I took a separate exit, not wanting to spook her and ruin our moment together, and made my own way down the mountain. I suddenly knew this would be my last match of the season. I ran to the newly unearthed Zero Point, which I’d never seen up-close. Then I took a final ride south in a wind tunnel, barely staying ahead of the storm. I miscalculated its speed, though, and ended up dying near Polar Peak, just a few steps from the stormedge. I never saw the cactus girl again.
The game immediately snapped me to a random player nearby, since no one had killed me. I’d always loved this feature. The forward look of losing, watching the contingencies play out beyond you, this great chain of being. How it put you in the weird position of rooting for your killer in order to justify your own loss. Without a killer, though, I had no real investment in my new viewpoint. At least until I saw her.
She was wearing my favorite default skin. It didn’t take me long to realize that she wasn’t the most experienced player. The way she crept ahead so carefully, desperate not to be seen. The way she checked her corners again and again. The way she clung to nooks and only moved when she absolutely had to.
Here she was in the top ten and I could feel her nerves, her excitement. So skittish and cute. I knew those movements intimately. This was me just a year before. And still sometimes now.
Of course, she didn’t make it.
I thought of my cactus girl and I thought of this default and I thought lord what affection we can have for virtual strangers. If this is the end for me, then what a perfect end to Fortnite.
I couldn’t help but go back and rewatch the match afterwards, though. Especially the beginning with the cactus girl. I wanted to experience our handful of seconds together just one more time. Did it really happen as I remembered? Was it all real?
It was. And as I poked around with the camera, I discovered two other things. First, when I met the cactus girl, she was armed. With a shotgun, no less. She had chosen not to use it.
Second, while I never saw her again, she certainly saw me.
As I left the villain lair and came down the mountain, she fell in behind me and followed for a while. She’d found a good range weapon but never took a shot.
The storm was coming, but she didn’t rush. She just watched me from a distance.
This cactus girl, who I will never see again, let me go.
Her name was InYoFace15243.
97. For a long time I’ve wondered: why this memory? Why has it stayed with me? Why did I immediately document this match afterwards and none of the thousands of others?
It’s not only that it was a rare act of aid and mercy in the middle of a battle royale. Or that it happened on the last night before Fortnite turned a corner for me. Or that it was a kind of good ending I missed out on by continuing to play. My encounter with InYoFace15243 did not make me believe in people anew or restore some lost faith in humanity. Yet the whole incident vibrated with a piece of truth. This stranger had accidentally made clear something I’d denied myself for years. And this thing was vulnerability.
Vulnerability. It stung. It released something. It calmed me. Finally. It’s not just that she helped me. It’s that I let myself be helped. That my guard was down enough in Fortnite, my need for control sufficiently relaxed, that I could be vulnerable with her. That I could even find out later that when my back was to her, she didn’t hurt me. She did not shoot. She actually let me go. This cactus girl. I just don’t let people help me that often. I like to help others, but I always need to stay in control. You can depend on me, but please don’t ask me to depend on you. Was this what I’d been chasing in games for so long? An opportunity to show my needs, my vulnerability? To lose control and be treated with kindness? To finally let go?
It’s no wonder I’m so often disappointed in games. It feels pretty foolish to look for vulnerability in a videogame. I don’t just want some positive self-care game or a cheery tenderness fantasy. I want the possibility of tenderness in a world that is otherwise. One of the reasons I loved Death Stranding was that amidst all its brilliance and ridiculousness, it was ultimately an openhearted game. In its narrative but also in the ways it let you help others through its fractured world. I still foolishly believe in videogames’ ability to help us explore other ways of being, other selves we might still become. Even Fortnite let me feel out, through its skins, all the girls I might be. I don’t think we really understand all the raw feelings that come with this. I still feel such profound tenderness for my avatars. For all my puppets, all my little selves. It could be me there. It actually is me there.
I know that when you don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable, for years, something closes inside you. Here in this room I can be tender, but that rarely extends beyond the door. I cry so often, but it’s always with a screen, not a person. I have resisted the southern masculinity of my childhood my entire life, and yet I venture out less and less to express my alternatives. The truth is that I feel such grief and rage for the world but too little of the vulnerability and tenderness needed to answer them, to complete those feelings and act with clarity. And now that the moment of readiness has come, I find myself unready.
98. But readiness does not matter. We are never ready for what lies ahead. It comes unbidden and will not be denied. It doesn’t care whether we’re ready.
At this very moment protests across America are confronting the brutal reality of White supremacy and the police state. Everywhere they are met by conservative forces who deny the systemic anti-Black racism at the heart of the United States. Who deny reality itself and refuse to understand why we must say, over and over, that Black Lives Matter. And they are not alone in their denial. Tomorrow marks the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an event whose very reality is still denied by the conservative forces in power there. Its solution to protest, utter annihilation, is one that many Americans would like to implement now, if they could. And just three weeks ago, the 12th anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake passed, an event that few outside China even know about. Thousands of children died in their schools due to corrupt building practices, and still there has been no justice. Or even acknowledgment. It too has been denied.
There is no end to such evils. Or to our denial. Even when the chance for change feels imminent, when we can feel all the contingencies so intensely, when right now overwhelms us, there is a temptation to retreat. To the past, to stasis, to the fantasy of readiness. All conservative responses. To deny change is to deny time, its possibilities, its terror and hope, its very reality. And what are we left with then? Conservatism ruins everything it touches. Especially what it tries to conserve.
I ask myself: how can I change and how can I be a part of change in the world? For me, it can’t be either/or. If I am different, the world is different. And when the world changes, I change too. But into what? I know that things can also change for the worse. I’ve seen it firsthand with my own failures and retreats and denials. And I’ve seen it every day of the Trump administration. Even so, I must press on. I must tell my truth, and then I must improve my truth. Honesty is only the beginning. What I need is a fuller truth. One that combines the truth of anger and grief with the truth of action, the truth of vulnerability and tenderness with the truth of justice. And I do not get to change once and then wash my hands of time. I have to keep changing. And keep creating the conditions for change around me. I must ask every day: what is happening? And then really listen to the answers. Because tomorrow is not the end, not some final battle. It is but another chance for the work of change.
This last part is particularly hard for me. Because what I am finally seeking is a new relationship to time. It’s what this whole essay has been about. For a control-freak perfectionist procrastinator like myself, this is no small thing. I’ve always sought to control time and contingency. I’m a former gamemaster who used to roleplay without dice, so resistant was I to chance. I’m still the fool who yearns for radical change and then struggles to walk out the front door. In the airless room of myself, I can pretend that the world is not passing away every moment, every single moment, never to return. Even though it is.
It’s obvious that I have to leave this room. Face my vulnerability and unreadiness and act anyway. Because what’s the alternative? Stay here forever? Slowly collapse in on myself? My fellow feeling with the world cannot fall further behind. How else can I confront conservatism and inequality in the world, all their evils, both in my writing and outside of it? Everything feels pivotal right now, every little thing that happens. But this is always the case. The moment is upon us but the questions remain the same: how will we live? What will we do?
99. The circle is final. The storm is here. Time made visible. Time written in air.
Can you feel our contingency? Flowing out and closing in. It’s not too late. What will you do in the days ahead? How will you be?
I wish you strength in the struggle. I wish you luck with time. Take care out there, my sisters and brothers.
~ Published daily between January 30th and June 4th, 2020
1-52: Jan 30th to March 21st
53-75: April 5th to 27th
76-99: May 12th to June 4th