Fortnite (video game)

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Fortnite

Genre	Battle royale,Survival, Sandbox
Gamming Style	Third person
Platform	Playstation 3, XBox 360, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android
Release Date	2017-Present
Developer	Epic Games
Publisher	Epic Games
Website	Fortnite by Epic Games

Fortnite is a battle royal type online multiplayer video game developed and published by Epic Games. Published by 2017, the game featured the battle royale and survival (save the world) modes, while the creative mode was released in 2018. Once published, Fortnite became one of the most successful free-to-play games in the history. As of 2021, Fortnite had totally 350 million users, and it generated 5.4 billion dollars of revenue in the year of 2018 alone. The game is available on multiple PC, console and mobile operating systems, including Windows, PS4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Android. However, the game remains on old version on App Store of MacOS and IOS because of the dispute of “unapproved paying mechanism” with Apple.

Gameplay

The three modes in Fortnite offer distinctive gameplay experiences to players, while maintaining some similar essential elements.

Battle Royale

Fortnite’s battle royale mode features a mixture of sandbox-style game and the conventional battle royale elements. Players can choose to play with themselves or form a duo or quad group with others. Once enter the game, players will be on a cargo plane, which carries 100 people, and can choose to airdrop to anywhere in the map. The goal for each team is to survive and eliminate all other teams until they become the last men standing. To do this, players can collect weapons and equipment inside the buildings to strengthen their power, and they can even destroy various of structures to collect woods, steels and bricks, which is useful for building fortifications.

To facilitate competitions between players, storms are generated per several minutes, encircling a safe area on a random location on the map. For each storm the safe zone is progressively encroached by the storm, and since players lose health in the storm, they need to plan wisely to reach safe zone. Vehicles can be beneficial if players are far from the safe zone. In addition, supply boxes, which contains extremely powerful weapons and equipment, are occasionally dropped somewhere random in the safe zone. Players can pick up the supply with the risk of being ambushed, or they can play safe and ignore the supply box.

Survival

The survival mode is essentially a PvE story mode that shares similar game mechanics with the classic battle royale mode. Players can choose to play alone or with at most 3 other players. In the campaigns, most of the human beings suddenly disappeared, and the rest of them constructed a lot of “storm shield” to protect the people inside from the attack of husk, a zombie-like monster dropped by the storm. The player acts as the administrator of one of such storm shields, and the player’s task is to make through a series of adventure and gather resources so that the storm shield can be expanded.

Creative

In the creative mode, the player can build structures on his own island and customize the rules. Other players are able to join the server and play the game on the island, which can hold up to 16 players. The creative mode was initially published with a lot of bugs, but Epic Games quickly fixed them and later introduced prefab system, which greatly facilitated building things on the island.

Ethical issues

Underage Gambling

Like many other games, Fortnite had some in-game mechanics that were equivalent to gambling. One of them is the loot box mechanism. Players can choose to spend real money to buy a random reward that may contain rare, exclusive or powerful weapons and characters, or may just having some regular items. For example, in the survival mode the players can use the “V-Buck” in-game currency to by “quirky llama” loot boxes that offer random rewards to them. The V-Bucks can be either purchased using real money or gained in the game, which is much slower. Since Fortnite was ranked “Teen” by ESRB, the young players in age of above 13 can play the game and can potentially use their parents’ credit card to spend excessive money. The loot box system had caused a lot of public criticisms and lawsuits. In 2019, the parent of a young player in California sued the llama loot box as “unfair and deceptive to consumers”. In Canada, a law firm prepared a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games for a pair of parents who claimed that “the creators ‘knowingly’ made the game as addictive as drugs such as cocaine”. In response to a range of criticisms and lawsuits, Epic Games removed the llama looting box and compensated players who brought the looting boxes with 1000 V-Bucks or credits.

Besides the looting box mechanism, the wager matches had also become controversial. The streamer or professional players organized mini-tournaments, in which they played against each other or the stream viewers and win money from the losing side. Since a lot of streaming audiences are teenagers, it was possible that they were addictive to that and spend a lot of money. Moreover, the wager holders may conspire to “cheat against other players or viewers and share the prize once they win the tournament”. In response of that, Epic Games made efforts to ban the wager matches in the Fortnite gaming community. For instance, the famous streamer and profession player “Clix” was warned by Epic Games to stop playing wager matches because he was found “indulged in a wager match with an 11-year-old”.

Addiction

While the intriguing gameplay of Fortnite usually fascinates the players and provide them with happiness, it also leads to a lot of game addictions. As a result, Fortnite was often criticized by the public to the extent that some people even think that Fortnite is “as addictive as heroin”. In 2019, a Spanish teenager was hospitalized because of his severe addiction to Fortnite. He played the game for up to 20 hours a day and sometimes go to bed at 5 am. According to the psychiatrist Matias Real-Lopez, the teenager indulged in the game more and more and “stopped caring for personal hygiene and lost contact with friends” after he lost a family member. After observing the teenager and talking with him, the doctor made the diagnosis that his addiction “became similar to addiction to heroin, cocaine and other chemical substances”. In UK, a girl was put into a rehabilitation center because of her excessive addiction to Fortnite. According to her parent, she “secretly got up in the night and played until dawn”, and she “hit her father in face” when she was caught playing at midnight.

Cyberbullying & Harassment

In such a game that hosts millions of players, cyberbullying is extremely widespread. According to the US government, cyberbullying is “is bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets”. In the case of Fortnite, the particular gameplay mechanisms can potentially facilitate the bullying behaviors. That the skins are vastly different in rarity and price, with some of them even exclusive to V-Bucks, can lead to players comparing each other and humiliate those who do not have a good skin. In the gaming community, the players’ skin rarity has been “associated with being good or bad”, and when the players were eliminated, they were sometimes taunted by their opponent using emotes and inappropriate words.

However, the bullying in Fortnite sometimes happen with no reason. In a video publish by Youtuber “Joogie”, he entered the playground mode with 3 randomly-matched teammates, in which one of them is a 10-year-old girl, and the other two are fanboys of Joogie. As the game progressed, the two boys kept teamkilling the girl, looting her dropped equipment and throwing some very bad words to her. After the girls said “I will quit the game because they keep killing me”, Joogie decided to stand out, team with her and fight back against the two boys. Joogie said, “I don’t mind meeting fans in the playground and I’m usually friendly to them, however, these guys were just griefing this girl so I decided to team up with her and help her fight back.” The video has received over 22 million views, and the comments mostly support the Joogie’s response against the cyberbullying.

What’s more, the actions of harassment and humiliations extended to the real life. In a US middle school, the prevalence of Fortnite had made the in-game skins and clothes “become a status symbol”. Anyone who did not have good skin can be humiliated as “default” and isolated among the classmates, and it even went to the point that children believe “sophisticated costume says something about your in-game ability”, and a child “begged his parents for money to buy a skin because no one would play with him” since he only had basic skins. Another child said to his parent that “I need this skin because of my lack of self-esteem and confidence”. In addition, the “default” had also become “generic insult both in and out of the classroom”, according to the English teacher Paul Towler.

Plagiarizing Among Us

In August 2021 Epic Games released a temporary “imposter” mode in Fortnite. In this mode, 10 players are assigned to play together, with 2 of them act as imposter and the remaining people are agents. Imposters know the identity of all other players, while the agents only know their own identity. The imposters’ mission is to kill all agents covertly without being seen, while the agents need to find who is the imposters. Players can come together and discuss each one’s identity and then vote out anyone who is believed to be imposter. In the same day, Gary Porter, the programmer of Among Us, published a tweet that compared the map between the “imposter” mode and Among Us, and pointed out the surprising similarities between them. Porter sarcastically added “they flipped Electrical and Medbay and connected Security to Cafeteria”. Twitter user Stephen Parker commented on this issue and said Epic Games is not “adding mechanics/gameplay that is similar to other games” in a right way. As a response to the vast public dismay, Epic Games finally gave credit to InnerSloth, the creator company of Among Us, by stating that the “imposter” mode was inspired by Among Us in the patch note of update v18.20.

This is not the only copying issue related to Fortnite. In May 2018, PUBG Corp, the company that made the famous game PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG), submitted a lawsuit to South Korea court to determine “whether Epic Games copied its intellectual property”. However, PUBG Corp dropped the lawsuit in June without explanations. Some people attribute the withdrawal to the potential weakness of the lawsuit claim: Fortnite “does not use similar graphics or audio assets” and “its cartoon look contrasting with the latter’s [PUBG] realistic, militarised visuals”.