Welcome to Planet Fortnite

It’s 6am and I’m on a beach holiday. While all around me are sleeping, I sneak downstairs, put some coffee on, and start the ritualistic process of watching two hours of Fortnite videos before the rest of the world wakes up.

For those who don’t know or understand Fortnite — which includes most of my friends, family, colleagues and assorted other loved ones — it’s a video game phenomenon, where, in ‘Battle Royale’ mode, you’re dropped on an unchanging (except season by season) island and forced to fight against 99 other random humans (in solo mode (apologies that this has already descended into nerd jargon)) whilst a storm creates ever smaller circles of liveable space on the island. If the final showdown happens in the smallest circle, a game of Fortnite will still take no more than 25 minutes. It is a punch drunk fantasia; a brief, brutal evocation of man’s inhumanity to man.

With more than 125 million current players — and a concurrent gamers peak of 3.4m back in February — Fortnite is a force to be reckoned with. That figure is higher than the global number of people playing golf and tennis combined. Not to mention the congestion of tee times should 3.4 million golfers be inclined to hit the links at the same time. But unlike golf and tennis, Fortnite isn’t an especially good game. It’s crude, silly, simple, visually unremarkable, stripped of any sense of narrative, and free from any mechanical logic. Aesthetically it is half steampunk, half anime; nauseatingly vivid, self-referential and born of no unified visual impulse. It looks, at times, like shit.

But it is free, so the opportunity to test the waters and see why professional soccer players are doing silly dances, including in the World Cup final, is easy to come by. I downloaded Fortnite on a whim after seeing too many Twitter and Instagram references that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t get a sense of what the game was from Wikipedia, other than to establish that it wouldn’t cost me a penny to get playing. And in those first few games, as I was gunned down by Korean children within the first minute, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get why the defining cultural landmark of 2018 was a tacky shoot ’em up game…