The Worst Games of 2018

Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics

The Best Games of 2018



Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics



The Game of the Generation

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