Fortnite isn't just a game

Less than five months ago, someone on Twitter asked Tim Sweney, founder of the video game company behind Fortnite , if in his opinion Fortnite was "a video game or a platform", that is, a different entity, with far greater ambitions and prospects.
A minute after the question, Sweney's answer came :

« Fortnite is a game. But please, ask me the same question in 12 months "

Even without waiting another seven months, there is various evidence to say already now that Fortnite  is much more than a game. Considering that the players  registered in Fortnite are more than 350 million (100 million more than in March 2019) and since only in April they spent over three billion hours playing it , this could also be of interest to those who usually do not care of video games.

The Fortnite game - whose name derives from the words "fortnight", "fort", "knight" and "night" - has existed since summer 2017, it can be played on any type of device and console. Although it provides several modes, the most famous one is called Battle Royale and requires that up to 100 players clash in all against all modes (but also in pairs or teams) on a common ground that gets smaller and smaller, until it remains a single winner.

Fortnite was not the first game to bring together a hundred players "on a common ground that is getting smaller and smaller" (indeed, it had started from a whole other idea ) and was successful because it knew how to ride the right wave (that the "all against all" mode, or better still " battle royale "), adding particularly lively game dynamics and a colorful and cheerful aesthetic.

Fortnite is a playful game , with cartoon-looking characters, without blood or truculent things. To start playing, it only takes a few minutes (it's free, even if it includes the possibility of making purchases inside the game) and one of the most cited reasons for its success was its ability to always change. The Battle Royale mode has in fact had chapters and seasons and as each has changed, small or big innovations have always arrived: new weapons, new settings, new rules but also only new possibilities to change the appearance of the avatars you play with. You may have read about that time when a virtual black hole sucked the whole world of Fortnite.

In addition to the game, you may also have read in the last few days that the US rapper Travis Scott (followed on Instagram by 28 million users ) has made a concert inside Fortnite . Something that usually doesn't happen in video games.

Fortnite built its fortune on the success of the "all against all" game mode, but with the passage of time there was a risk that that mode would end up limiting Fortnite's ambitions . It is true that a game that every time restarts with 100 new players and ends with a single winner is likely to bore less than other games. But it is equally true that, in the end, albeit with all the appropriate updates, the game has always remained the same. And in general the most successful video games are those that are radically renewed or that (think of football) can avoid doing it because they rely on something that regardless of the video game is updated year after year, automatically making old what c was before.

With just one game left, Fortnite risked going out of style. There was a need to make the game part of something bigger, capable of transforming players into spectators, users and customers; able to entice them to enter, return or remain in the virtual reality of the game for things other than the game itself.

Concerts, rockets and black holesTravis Scott's concert, which was held in late April, was followed - in the game - by over 12 million players. In reality there were many concerts, because the players / spectators could follow him at most 50 for each "stage", and because there were replicas. Without getting lost in the details, it can be said that several tens of millions of people have watched it , inside or outside Fortnite , transforming a virtual concert into an event that has been much talked about even in the real world.

Leaving aside the remarkable prospects that it has for the music market , Travis Scott's concert was the most told and most effective example of something that has more and more to do with Fortnite : the desire to build events within the world of game, which even go beyond the very concept of playing . In addition to Travis Scott, Fortnite hosted a Diplo performance - "Imagine explaining this to someone who lives in 2010," he commented - and, several months ago, one of DJ Marshmello ( 30 million followers). And on May 9 there will be in Fortnite a mini music festival, featuring the performances of Dillon Francis, Steve Aoki and deadmau5.

But it's not just about concerts. In the past Epic Games, the company that created and controls Fortnite , organized the virtual launch of a rocket into the game, a sort of struggle between a "mech" and a "kaiju" (a robot and a monster, in a simplification which will offend many) or the projection of a Star Wars scene introduced by JJ Abrams. Not to mention, again, that black hole that millions of users have been staring at for hours.

A social network

It had long been understood that Fortnite could be - and perhaps already was - more than a game. For example, a meeting point between people not necessarily interested in shooting each other online. Already at the end of 2018, The Verge wrote that Fortnite had been "the most important social network of the year". It was also evident, however, that Fortnite was above all a game: users maybe went there to spend time and interact with other people, but the main purpose was to play. 

In the case of the launch of the virtual rocket, there were, for example, those who complained that they could not look at it calmly, because its avatar had been killed by other avatars interested in the victory rather than the unusual event. It was still difficult to find ways and spaces for other interactions than the game. All the Fortnite concerts , however, had unarmed and peaceful spectators , who while listening and watching the performances could move but not shoot each other. There was no competition, there was nobody who lost and nobody who won.

A platform

All the extra-playful events of Fortnite have so far been precisely this: events, limited and out of the ordinary possibilities of attending, in a not so active way, something unusual. The mini music festival with Dillon Francis, Steve Aoki and deadmau5, on the other hand, is part of something much more ambitious. It can be considered an event organized for the launch of Royal Party, which the Fortnite website describes as follows:

In this new experimental and constantly evolving space there are a sea of ​​things to do and places to explore. For example: tackle an aerial obstacle course at the Skydiving fissure, take part in Pescesecco boat races, and run to the Piazza to grab objects like the new paint-shooter.

In the Royal Party there are no weapons or materials: we just have fun! Without stress. Pure relaxation. Let's have fun!

In other words, if Battaglia Reale is where those who want to shoot others go, Party Reale is the mode (but also a real "space", different and separate from that of Battaglia Reale) in which those who want to relax go, without two clearly predominant things in Fortnite : the weapons with which to shoot themselves and the materials to be used to take advantage of others. There are races and challenges, but a boat race in Pescesecco is obviously different from a challenge against everyone with weapons of all kinds.

Those who choose the Royal Party mode ( already active for a few days) can walk, socialize, change their appearance and buy things (including toy weapons, which however do not allow you to kill others). The places of Party Reale are not many for now, but the prospects are very remarkable: you could make a cinema in which to show films (Epic Games has recently made agreements to show Quibi content on the platform ), you could organize football tournaments or volleyball, or - with due differences - you could create all the things that existed in a reality like Second Life or still exist in a video game like The Sims .

Together with Battaglia Reale, Party Reale is part of the rest of Fortnite : whoever does one thing can do the other. But they are also two distinct realities: now autonomous things can happen on the one hand, while those who want, on the other, will be able to continue playing all against all. "Epic Games," wrote Joe Tidy on the BBC , "wants Fortnite to become a multi-function space that can potentially accommodate hundreds of millions of users who just want to cheat time with friends."

A metaverse?

Fortnite isn't just a video game, it's not just a social network, and maybe it's not just a platform right now. Play in the biggest league of those who want us to occupy our free time online: already at the beginning of 2019 the Netflix boss wrote  that his company was competing with Fortnite , rather than with HBO (the great American cable channel that produced some of the most popular TV series in recent years, starting with Game of Thrones ).

The coronavirus and related restrictions have in many cases increased that time and shown how many things can be done online, even just in a video game: in this regard, we have been talking about days of meetings, weddings and "real" ceremonies done inside the simple video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons .

But we can go even further. There are those who believe that Fortnite is in fact an excellent position to try to anticipate what could be the internet of the future; or according to other versions something that could - in decades, not the day after tomorrow - take the place of the internet. Fortnite , wrote The Verge , "is the closest thing, among those that exist now, to the concept of metaverse".

Metaverso  is a word invented in the early nineties by Neal Stephenson, author of the science fiction novel  Snow crash , to indicate, as Treccani writes , "a three-dimensional space within which individuals can move, share and interact through personalized avatars". Without going into too much detail, the metaverse is a context vaguely similar to the reality of the book (and film) Ready Player One or, to be much more pessimistic, than Matrix . A context that, writes The Verge , "can accommodate all forms of popular culture in a universe shared and inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. The definition of Washington Post instead is this :

«A shared virtual space, always online and active. It will have its economy, its jobs, its stores and its media to consume. It is, according to many, something inevitable, and in Silicon Valley some are obsessed with this idea. "

Fortnite  is not yet a metaverse, and indeed it is still very far from it. A few months ago Matthew Ball, an expert analyst very attentive to what happens in the "world of video games", dedicated a long and detailed article to the metaverse, in which he wrote : " Fortnite is not the metaverse, but at the moment nothing is more close to the metaverse concept of how Fortnite is ».