Floating above the end of the world

Yesterday, the video game Fortnite hosted a strange event, exposing a fascinating and modern act of marketing-driven storytelling in the age of the internet. They took the whole damn game offline during a Sunday, one of their busiest days, and replaced it with a black hole. They took a known thing (millions playing a game and spending money with them) and replaced it with one of the biggest question marks in entertainment history.

If you are not a gamer or teenager, Fortnite is a video game where 100 people are transported in realtime to an island, on the "Battle Bus" — a flying blue school bus suspended from a hot-air balloon. Players jump from the bus and skydive to locations on the island where they run around, collect weapons, and shoot each other. A storm, encircling the island, contracts during the game, forcing players into the same small geographic region. The last person standing wins the match.

Knowing that tells you almost nothing about the game. Its popularity has to do largely with its theming, which is cartoony, playful, colorful, and fun. You start your time on the island with a pickaxe, which you can use to break through walls, trees, vehicles, and other random items. As you do, you collect steel, brick, or wood, and you can use those materials to build structures for defensive reasons, or to reach areas you can't reach by running or jumping.

The weapons, and other goodies, are hidden in glowing gold chests that thrum an angelic chord when you get near, randomly placed llama piñatas, vending machines, and supply drops that fall from the heavens as a wooden create suspended from a weather balloon. They offer a player ever better weapons to choose from, and eliminating another player causes them to lose their loot, giving more opportunities for strengthening your gear.

Graphically, it’s bloodless — the hyper-masculine agro style of other similarly themed video games is traded for self-effacing humor and weirdness. If you play as the default skin (or, character theme), you get randomly assigned one a few default characters, who are differently gendered and skin-colored. If you’re uptight about playing as a black woman in a game, Fortnite is not the game for you.

Free to play, Epic Games, Fortnite’s publisher, makes its money (and they make a lot of it) through selling limited edition skins, upgrades, and other in-game purchases (like little dance moves called emotes, so you can literally dance on the grave of your enemy) that won’t improve your game play, but certainly allow you to kill your friends with your own limited-edition personal flair. Think of the appeal of hard to get sneakers, and you get the idea.

Looking at a very successful franchise, Epic Games knew that the passion and attention of people who love to game is fickle, and soon would move on to another shiny new thing. In order to keep the game fresh and interesting, they’ve come up with a series of updates called Seasons, where the map of the island changes, sometimes in dramatic and strange ways. Weather changes, regions become renamed, and entering them sometimes temporarily remakes your skin as you penetrate the veil of the region, say, as an old west town, or more recently, as Gotham City, replete with bat signal in the sky.

Beneath these seasons, a series of changes in the map has brought on a meta-narrative about the world and its reality. Epic Games has never come out and said what the narrative is outright, it’s up to the individual players, working together, to weave the meta-narrative from dropped scraps of information. An aggregate story emerged, through taping those scraps together into little conspiracies, with the best suggestions winning. Epic, no doubt, watches and responds, offering just enough to keep the game engaging and interesting, but not enough to be prescriptive with any of their over-story.

A glowing purple cube, called Kevin, appeared, spreading strange anti-gravitational powers. New exclusive skins, which you can earn through competing in challenges, appear — including one called the Visitor, who in an earlier season was seen programming and escaping in a rocket — an event that preceded many strange effects and changes on the island.

It’s this teasing game-within-a-game that captures the attention and interest of gamers when they’re tired of the game action itself. Some in-game puzzles — some trivial, some hinting at larger puzzles — are pursued by players who come to the island not to fight, but to play amongst the battlers, trying to avoid getting swept up in the action until the storm forces them to, and earning skins and points as they level up.

And so it has gone, with Epic Games making a series of smart decisions one after another, until last season when a too-powerful weapon (a mech suit that could hold two players working in unison) appeared, and threw the balance of the game off. People were upset, and other games, such as Overwatch, started capturing more attention.

And this was the state of the world as we came into Sunday. The Visitor is back, building another rocket — and leaving strange audio recordings around the map talking about time loops. A countdown appeared above the rocket, ending at 11am PST Sunday, October 13th.

Epic games tweeted that the end is near, but said little else. They didn’t have to advertise a thing, their players spread the word for them, the mystery too peculiar and intriguing to avoid. What ever is going to happen!?

Just before the event, Epic removed most of the player modes (in the normal game, you can go into battle solo, as part of a team, or play in a split-down-the-middle kind of game where everybody is teamed up). In lieu of them, a team fight called “The End” was the only option available. In the game, people gathered around the rocket and the warehouse structures in its vicinity, building huge scaffolding and structures to better watch what was to come. And, of course, picking each other off and re-spawning into the game.

But, then suddenly, all weapons were taken away, as was nearly every in-game option, leaving everybody standing around with their default axes. For once, players gathered and stood near each other, high in air on the built structures, watching.

The rocket launched, the first stage separating and falling to the ground, and it broke through the atmosphere and disappeared. The sky splintered. Then, moments later, the rocket reappeared from a different cosmic rift, rumbling across the map, horizontal to the ground. Then another, from a different angle, and soon a dozen, a hundred rockets came to the map, zooming overhead and hitting various locations, blowing them up. Then, they gathered around a massive meteorite, affectionately called "the meatball", which has been hovering menacingly over the map for the entire season, and crashed into the ground. The meteorite followed the many rockets, and was absorbed into the island.

The players were whisked high into the air, suspended off to the side of the island, with a birds eye-view of the entire land.

A mysterious orb, hanging out in a lake where many strange events have taken place over the seasons, created a massive force field. The meteorite, entering the atmosphere through another rift, crashed into this force field, pushing through, causing a massive implosion.

All matter sucked into the implosion, including two tomatoes and the Battle Bus, and then the players.

What the end of the event looked like.

The screen went black, and after a few moments, a blue-circled black hole appeared. A light, eerie, ethereal music played. Numbers appeared occasionally, causing people to watch closely and create more conspiracy theories. Millions of people, instead of playing a game and spending money, are staring at a screen with a blue disk. People who have spent a lot of money upgrading their avatars are upset, and feel they may lose their money. But that idea seems unlikely — this is a marketing event, not an art statement. The game will be back, and no doubt, will see a surge of new interest thanks to the stunt.

But in the meantime, Fortnite deleted all the tweets in in their Twitter account, and changed their avatar to black, only posting a live stream to the black hole. Their instagram, same, and their Trello account. They’re playing up the mystery with lack of knowledge, lack of press releases.

Logistically, overhauling the game is a massive effort. All the new code must be pushed into production, everything needs to be tested and assured. One tweet posited that they needed to upgrade all of their servers to handle the new map, and that means hours, if not days, of downtime.

So, this has been a very busy day for Epic Games staff, in contrast to the internet rumors of record numbers teenagers stumbling outside, shielding their eyes from the sun. This mystery, masking the boring, complicated, logistical pedantry of a major system upgrade and new release, is a nice magic trick. Don’t look at the broken login screen, look at the black hole and the strange numbers. Spread wonder to your fans, not frustration.

When will the service be back? It’s been down for nearly six hours as of this writing. Will there be a new map? Other upgrades? Nobody really knows, although leaked pictures hint at what’s probably to come.

This coordination and interplay, the ability to theme and market a game upgrade, is a perfect confluence of everything the internet offers best: fans chattering and spreading the word, the ability to distribute and push software changes remotely to the whole world at once, the strength of massive servers offering the same experience to millions at the same time. And, a whole lot of marketing chutzpah, born from knowing exactly who the people playing their game are, and what will engage them most intensely.

Imagine the Mall of America. 40 million visitors annually (says the internet). What if they started leaving clues around the mall, removing stores and replacing them with mirror-world experiences, changing known things for unknown?

What if they closed the doors one Sunday during peak tourist season? What if they put up mysterious signs outside, and people just gathered to watch them? How much money would they lose?

That’s what Epic Games has done. The comparison to Mall of America is bad in one sense — Fortnite has 250 million registered players, not the measly 40 million mall visitors. Mall of America generates about $2 billion annually for the state of Minnesota; Fortnite generates about $2.5 billion for Epic. Scale wise, they’re in the same ballpark, give or take $500 million.

But a retail establishment of that size closing for a day? It's economic suicide — it could never be done. It's the platform, the method, and the game itself that has allowed for this to happen in this way, at this time.

That's all because of the narrative. The sense that, when you’re done deciding what gun is your favorite and leveling up your skills so you’re not dying in the first few minutes of game 1, that there is something left to chase, something left to do, something left to think about — this is paramount to the success of the franchise.

When the internet was new, there was a lot of talk of hyperlinked stories and writing. People wanted to engage the new technology in advanced ways to tell stories, but the few experiments felt like little more than mediocre choose-your-own-adventure novels. The technology wasn’t ready, truthfully. For every reader who loves books like House of Leaves for its narrative and layout weirdness, just as many were annoyed by having to turn a heavy book sideways to get at the plot. Readers don’t want reading to be harder, they want a good story compellingly told.

Games like Fortnite are more akin to cinema than novels. They are the child of Star Wars, of Lost, of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the comics that it was drawn from). They are the perfect marriage of technology, psychology, marketing, and storytelling. They are hugely successful, and worthy of paying attention to culturally, even if you are not a fan of the games themselves.

A future is being foretold now, as a little black hole on millions of streams. Teenagers and kids will talk for the rest of their lives where they were the day Fortnite went dark after The Event they called The End. As cultural events go, this is going to join the ages.

  1. One genius thing about Fortnite: in some games, when a player eliminates you from the game, your point of view switches to a floating view right behind them, so you find yourself rooting for the person who took you out of the game. If someone eliminates them, you move to the third persons' point of view. You learn tricks this way, seeing how successful players do it, and your stake in the game doesn’t end when your play does.↩