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--- Is 32 too young to feel completely
distant from your youth? It’s the kind of age where you feel justified talking about Getting
Older; as cliché as it is, you start seeing “what the kids are into” become increasingly
and perhaps confusingly divergent from what you’re into. And yet, it’s also an age where,
when you joke about this stuff with someone older than you, as if a bit of newly discovered light
aching is somehow the harbinger of the end, and that your prime has long since faded from view,
you inevitably get the spiel of “you’re but a wee bairn! You know nothing of the ravages
of time yet! Just wait until you’re my age!” But, ya know… I can feel the aches and pains
coming on. I’ve gone from excruciatingly long periods of not being able to sleep in my teens,
to learning to work with it in my twenties—pulling countless all-nighters whenever the work needed
done, sleep schedules be damned—to more recently, where most of the time I’ve found
that my body is just saying “STOP. YOU CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.” My schedule still varies,
but I can generally get to about midnight now before my body decides it’s just time to pass
out for a bit. What a sorry state of affairs. Even sorrier, perhaps, is the idea that I like
to think of myself as pretty au fait with all things video game related. It’s my job,
after all, to dissect these things, and one thing I was pretty sure of until a few months
ago was this idea that I could at least look at any video game and get a pretty decent picture
of what was going on, even if I didn’t know the ins-and-outs of its specific mechanics.
Video game control schemes have largely become standardised over the last couple of decades—WASD
to move, right analogue stick for camera, left and right triggers to aim and shoot, all of that.
Most people within vague proximity to video games likely knows this stuff. In the same way we read
sentences by clustering words rather than having to laboriously decode every individual letter,
you don’t need to think about holding Up to run forward—likely your brain just intuitively makes
the connection between the control and the action. And yet, earlier this year I witnessed something
that left me genuinely stumped. Far from the physical pain and the need for a good
night’s sleep, this thing I saw instilled in me an existential crisis. Any ambiguity of age
32 be damned—I am now a dinosaur. I am losing touch and, one day, what I used to love will be
completely unrecognisable to me. On a recent family trip,
I watched my young nephew play a game of Fortnite. Look, I have played Fortnite before—I made a video
about it back in 2018. But I’d never been sat next to him while he played—witnessing directly the
connection between his hands on the controller and what happens on screen, from his point of view.
Now, it doesn’t take this kind of proximity to see that Fortnite is an entirely different beast
now to what it was back when I first checked it out—it seems like every day there’s a report on
a new mode or playstyle (as well as a much greater emphasis placed on items you can buy
in the ever-lucrative store) that have it at times looking like one of those janky sandbox survival
games you see on Steam, just with a level of polish that only the Biggest Game in the World can
afford to apply. Remember when this was a simple 1v100 elimination match? Well now you
fish as Bruno Mars… or I think you do? Things move so fast that between me writing this and
actually making it, it’s hard to keep up. All I know for sure is that you’re now able to bounce
around a map as Geralt of Rivia on a big hammer. And sure, all of this is a wild path for the game
to have taken, but what I’m talking about here is more than just my distant interest in Fortnite,
the ever-evolving cultural behemoth; what was more confusing than any of that was the
barebones mechanical experience of it all. That is to say, here I was, witnessing this child
playing a game mainly marketed at children and yet… somehow the action is so frenetic,
so of a different mode, that I couldn’t parse what was happening directly in front of my eyes.
For contrast, fighting games, no matter the complexity of control,
still operate on the basic principle of trying to make fist connect with face. Here,
I genuinely had no idea what I was even looking at, what the goal was, as after a brief period
of wondering what the hell my nephew was talking about as he casually wandered the map hoping that
the treasure chest would have an ice cream in it for some reason—going through the battle royale
motions of dodging the circle and occasionally picking off a speck in the distance I had no
chance of seeing—we both began to notice that the circle in question was getting pretty small. He
had found himself in the top 10, and now he had gotten a bit more serious about the whole thing.
I was still trying to figure out the barrage of new visual information shoved in since I last
picked the game up—the fact you can drive cars now (sometimes on water), the werewolves and
sharks and bots guarding discrete levels on this map, which itself is clearly no longer
uniform in its function—when all of a sudden the mood shifted as swiftly as my nephew’s tactics.
Obviously building is a key component of what makes Fortnite unique, but this was the first time
I’d become aware, that the kinds of architectural manoeuvres once associated with esports level play
had become relatively mundane; expanded upon by a young, amateur player base. I swear, in the second
that a shot was heard—the kind that would have me stopping in my tracks, gawking as I searched
for its origin, not realising the massive target I was painting on my back—I started to see these
insane structures erupting from the ground in the near-distance, as if in some magical realist
novel where the monarch ordered the planting of new living quarters and stood in watch,
awaiting the spoils of their sheet metal harvest. My nephew, quick to follow, had instantaneously
switched from gun to clipboard, entering build mode as his own structure started to emerge,
in what was clearly an attempt to create the high ground where previously there was none.
What shocked me was the speed at which this was all occurring—prompts to press… circle? I think?
Wait, what’s that about an edit? All of these were whizzing on and off the screen, as this
impossible wooden and metal stalk materialised and spiralled towards the sky, with my nephew seeming
to find the most tenuous of connections between pieces before placing the next platform down,
jumping all the while to keep up with it; all moving at such ludicrous velocity that it appeared
as if his character was levitating upwards. And no sooner had my jaw reached the floor—turning
to see my nephew’s hands near-blurred in motion yet face completely unmoved, as if all of this
was totally business-as-usual—than his ascent had halted at what looked like an arbitrary point,
so his trajectory could now move outwards towards the fray, as if he was tunnelling his way over to
his enemies—occasionally fretting over already placed items and turning them into a kind of 3x3
grid system that he would pore over as if he was speed running tic-tac-toe. No idea what this was
doing but it seemed to be getting him somewhere. Again, all of this happened near instantaneously.
And moments later, the enemy counter declined until it was just him and another guy,
apparently right next to each other; the motion sensor pinging all over the place,
suggesting that this one remaining foe was bouncing all around, trying to get a read on
my nephew hunkered down within. I think my nephew was organising his items in just the right order,
before he took the initiative and unleashed the final assault, which resulted in perhaps the
strangest sight of them all—a firefight where each person attempted to switch between rapid bursts
of fire and fortifying their rickety defences. For some reason all that came to mind was that
final gun kata battle from the gloriously daft Equilibrium, where Christian Bale
and Angus MacFadyen are simultaneously firing and sweeping the opponent’s pistol away while
staring directly into each others’ eyes. I had no idea how either player was pulling
this feat off mechanically, and yet I was vocally cheering my nephew on regardless—I’m
not kidding, it was genuinely explosive. And then, one slip up led to my nephew
gaining just enough of an upper hand that he was able to get the final shot off—his opponent fell,
and the hallowed “VICTORY ROYALE” appeared above his head. We shared a momentary cheer and
a joyous high five. I was floored at what I’d just seen. To him, it was just another match.
And of course, still reeling from trying to understand what I’d just seen, the controller
was then shoved in my hands as my nephew demanded I have a go. Almost immediately after dropping,
I got called trash for picking up one type of shotgun when, quote, “there’s a perfectly good
pump action right there!” Completely oblivious to the differences, I proceeded to play Fortnite
the way I’ve always played Fortnite and similar battle royales—badly. I hid away
for ages before being shot at, proceeding to perform my usual panicked stand-and-stare in a
futile attempt to locate my aggressor; my nephew screaming “EDIT! EDIT! BUILD! EDIT!” at me as if
I have any clue how to do any of that. I somehow made it into build mode and,
extremely slowly, went about creating a nice little hut, square by excruciatingly placed
square. Before I was able to place a fourth wall down, a guy in a John Wick skin unceremoniously
took me out, presumably flossing over my earthly possessions after I exited to the menu, left with
nothing but the humiliating gaze and piercing laughs of my nephew sitting next to me (I kid,
obviously—it was hilarious to me too). But importantly, it was in that moment
that I suddenly realised, this is exactly how my parents must have felt watching me play games like
Metal Gear Solid as a kid—where I remember often wondering how they couldn’t seem to understand
basic things like moving forward and choking out guards, let alone the idea that “wait,
so you hold L2 and use the directional buttons to scroll through to your rations, which I guess
is the healing item, which you can either equip to be used passively once you run out of health
or you can also press circle to use one right now to free up inventory space, then let go of L2 to
pick up another one before you head back into the menu to… select a cardboard box?” To return to a
previous analogy, I was fluent in a language while they were having to read each sentence
letter by letter—a contiguous flow of easily understandable action to me; a rigid, stop-start
mess of endless mechanical abstractions to them. Likewise, to go from my nephew reacting
instantaneously to a single shot being fired in the distance by forming this borderline
Escher-esque structure out of absolutely nothing, to me taking control in a futile attempt to fill
in those mechanical blanks, felt equivalent to the kind of knowledge and skill gap you might
find if you’d transported a Medieval peasant to present day, and demanded they fix your car
engine. “Please sir! I dunno where da gizmo goes!” But the thing is, as much as I joke about an
existential crisis and being completely out of touch with a medium I once knew inside and out,
there was something about this experience that was downright rejuvenating. It was fascinating
to me to think that, for a game as monolithic as Fortnite—one that to many represents the absolute
worst of cynical, money-focused, sanded-down AAA game design (and not for no reason,
mind—believe me, I’ll come onto my own concerns in that regard very shortly), there existed,
on the basic mechanical level, an experience that could leave me fundamentally shocked. When people
complain about every game looking and playing the same, I’ll think of that field of architectural
monstrosities being created, the frenzy of the action I witnessed within, even if such
pulse-pounding, tense gameplay came from the least likely of places—a kid playing Fortnite.
Where my parents back in the day understandably viewed the deluge of,
to them, incomprehensible commands with some frustration and ultimately light dismissal (a
by-product of the then-prevalent notion that games were mere toys), in my case,
presented with such mechanical unknowns, I was thrilled to know more. I began asking him question
after question about how he was achieving all of this stuff—how these strategies came about
and how he became so proficient at executing them—and he was equally thrilled to talk about
it. He seemed to enjoy the fact that, as can often feel infuriatingly rare when you’re a kid,
he was the authority on a subject and an adult was genuinely engaging with him on it on his level.
And it’s not like I was totally useless in this scenario either. It’s always been neat to have a
first hand look into how the cultural monolith of Fortnite is affecting the game’s key demographic,
in a manner you don’t often get from coverage written and read by set-in-their-ways adult
gaming enthusiasts. I’ve always been eager to compare my nephew’s experiences to similar
kinds of crazes that swept my generation back in the day, knowing just enough about how these
things work that I’m uniquely positioned to also act as caretaker—hopefully steering him
away from potential harm. Like “mate, I know you’re convinced this guy sending you friend
requests with the username “496000 NEW SKINS AVAILABLE” works for Epic Games, but ya know,
I survived the Habbo Hotel furniture scam rooms—I know a charlatan when I see one.”
This seems like a good place to state that, as lovely as it was to further bond with my nephew
over something like this, I definitely have more than my fair share of concerns about Fortnite—you
know, it’s sad to see that my nephew’s generation hasn’t been spared the same need to play the Cool
New Thing for playground cachet. It’s just that the Habbo Hotels of my day seemed so
quaint—their cheeky prods to get your parents’ permission to use their credit card paling in
comparison to this industrial titan; my nephew growing up in an age more dominated than ever
by a need to be online—where purchases are easier and more convenient than at any time
in the past—that demands you not only play but buy your way to popularity. What good is skill
if you didn’t achieve it with the Rick and Morty skin with the gold crown or whatever?
From talking to him about it, it seems to have created an anxiety that I don’t remember being
so prevalent when I was younger—it’s not just wee weirdos like I was online anymore, it’s everyone.
It really can’t be overstated for those that don’t have a frame of reference for this—for a lot of
people, to reject Fortnite as a kid these days, is in many ways to reject the most basic of social
interaction and recognition. It can be brutal. And it’s perhaps this anxiety that, a couple of
Christmases ago, led to a whole lot of confusion and shouting as my brother’s phone dinged,
alerting him to the fact his kid had just made around £200 worth of V-bucks purchases in seconds,
while they were in the room, without them knowing. Now,, it’s easy to say in situations like this
that the parents are the ones at fault, they should have paid closer attention to the console
parental controls (and of course, they aren’t blameless here) but the resulting go-around
with all sorts of vague, circular website FAQs and calls to various game and console companies
trying to pass the buck onto each other, still led to that creeping realisation setting in—that,
for a game so aggressively marketed at kids, there is vanishingly little recourse for families when
said kids make expectedly juvenile mistakes. So yeah, needless to say, I strongly dislike
a great many things about Fortnite as a cultural and industrial entity. All I know is that, putting
that individual game to one side, along with the existential dread it potentially brought up in me,
the subsequent thrill that came from realising that there are still experiences to be found
in this medium that are so novel that I don’t fully understand them yet—and that my previous
experience in games can potentially help guide my nephew more safely through the scarier aspects of
this industry—cushions the blow somewhat on that realisation of just how quickly time is marching
forward. I may be distant from my youth, I may be getting older, but my childlike wonder with this
medium clearly isn’t going anywhere. ---
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