You wake up on an island with 99 other people. Some are well dressed, others look like Halloween, all have this look of focus and apprehension. You try not to think too hard about how they got there because, best case scenario, they will all be dead within 30 minutes. You all load onto a floating bus and take off.

Within 5 seconds of landing the first 10 are dead. It probably wasn’t their fault. 2 of them hit a lag spike and missed the island, the rest of them were too late to the first chest.

Another 30 seconds later and you get the “50 players remain” alert. You are approaching your first chest and, right before you spring out to grab it, another player darts from behind a tree, opens the chest, and finds an orange SMG just in time to explode into a fine red mist. Turns out another player with a shotgun was watching the chest. That’s fine, he has 10 health left and, while he’s sifting through the stuff of the player who just got Jackson Pollock’d, you club him and get the motherlode.

By now, there are 30 players left and the storm has shrank twice. Not one death described above came from a lack of any skill. There have been no fair duels or marshaling of armies. Maybe 3 of the 70 people even saw their killer, they were just unlucky.

Once you’re dead, the match continues until there’s one person left and everyone else watches on, jealously wondering how that person with a tomato for a head, swinging around a pizza slicer got that good.

This is fun in a video game but imagine basing your economy around this. When I load onto that bus, I know I’m not going to win and that’s fine, but that’s not how real life works.

We are taught from a young age that everyone is special and wondrous in our own way. As soon as our heads are full to capacity with hope, we get loaded onto the bus and dropped onto Fortnite Island for the first time. This is usually around when we try out for band or a sports team, sometimes when applying to college, etc.

After our fortieth or so run through the meat grinder, we have achieved a state of aphasia. We’ve given up on our dreams and are just going through the motions. In the game I described above, half of the players had died by the 40 second mark and almost all of them are in this apathetic group. They will get as high a score as possible and when they lose? Who cares, they weren’t going to win anyway.

Marxists call this sensation Alienation. Like these Fortnite players, workers have come to the realization that their 60 hours a week has had zero impact on the system they uphold. Some will turn wrathful and determined to tear down everyone who manages to find that golden SMG. Others will grow complacent and blatantly ignore the handful of opportunities they get to improve their score. The handful that make it to the top 10 will become momentary celebrities and find any reason to explain their success, chalking it up to talent, wisdom, or gumption. Maybe 1 of those hundred will spot the pattern: Fortnite, like capitalism, has nothing to do with and doesn’t care about your effort. If you win at either it is purely a factor of luck.

Art mirrors life, life mirrors art, and the explosion in popularity experienced by the the Battle Royale genre must be interpreted as such. Millenials are frustrated and alienated, and Fortnite gives them the joy and relief that only comes when you realize someone else gets it.