Which initially sounds smart, in that facile, thinkpiecey sort of way. Always the children.ĭan Olson’s main claim is that Fortnite isn’t really a game it’s a storefront. It begins with bad jokes and Tencent Chinese scaremongering and ends by calling Fortnite “a weaponized product targeted at kids”. Typical among them was Folding Ideas’ video about Fortnite ’s ‘ manufactured discontent ’. Amidst these very real problems, a slew of less real ones infected talk of Fortnite. Or ever truly will without the unionization of game workers. Even with the game’s current slower pace, it’s not clear how much Epic’s crunch culture has itself changed. One of Fortnite ’s most compelling qualities - its fundamental embrace of change - had a clear cost. This is an industry-wide problem, but Fortnite ’s constant patching and weekly updates made it particularly grueling and unsustainable. In the spring of 2019 it also came out that Epic’s crunch culture had, unsurprisingly, created a toxic work environment in the company. And while this practice appears to have stalled, Epic has made no moves to rectify what they’ve already done. 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. Epic stole dances, particularly those of black artists, and sold them to players without crediting or compensating those artists. Then there were the more serious problems. And I have no particular feelings for Epic, outside the natural revulsion I harbor for any big company.Ĥ. I like discrete game experiences, not endless daily ones. It would not wait for my slower playstyle. Even though so much about it ran contrary to my usual preferences. It would be so easy to call it best and move on.Īnd yet Fortnite. It got me, got inside, laid me out, like so few do. Gorgeous and mysterious, made by a relatively small team. And in 2018 I played an obvious masterpiece in Subnautica. A queer visual novel created by one person, Brianna Lei. It’s nothing like my favorite game of 2017, Butterfly Soup. And some slowly, gradually, day after day, until you find yourself rearranged, somehow, though you can’t tell exactly how or when.ģ. Some without warning, that very first night. Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Criticsġ.
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