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Fortnite Was 2018's Most Important Social Network (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Epic Games managed to produce a hit, sure, but the genius of it is how it's rewritten the idea of what hanging out online can be. Fortnite is a game, but it's also a global living room for millions of people, and a kind of codex for where culture has gone this year -- it's a cultural omnibus that's absorbed everything from Blocboy JB's shoot dance to John Wick. It got Ted Danson to learn how to floss. This thing is here to stay, as a new kind of social network.
Fortnite has achieved such a massive scale partially because of those network effects -- if all of your friends are hanging out there, you will be too. The game is both free to play and available on every device -- consoles, computers, even phones. That's created a kind of lingua franca, a base level of understanding among a large group of people about the experience of playing the game. And even though it's hugely popular, the experience of playing is extremely specific -- not so many people outside your peer group are going to know what you mean if you reference a "chug jug" in casual conversation. There's an in group thing going on here.
Fortnite has achieved such a massive scale partially because of those network effects -- if all of your friends are hanging out there, you will be too. The game is both free to play and available on every device -- consoles, computers, even phones. That's created a kind of lingua franca, a base level of understanding among a large group of people about the experience of playing the game. And even though it's hugely popular, the experience of playing is extremely specific -- not so many people outside your peer group are going to know what you mean if you reference a "chug jug" in casual conversation. There's an in group thing going on here.
They'll be gone in a few months and you'll all be drooling over the next meme platform, hard pass. This article is a joke. Find real content or die trying.
I'm old enough to have been playing online games for almost 20 years.
My experience is that half of the fun from an online game comes from the game itself, and the other half from the people you play with. What the article describes, I have experienced it with other games. For me, 5 years ago it was Minecraft, 7 years ago it was D&D Online, 10 years ago it was Day of Defeat Source, 12 years ago it was World of Warcraft, 16 years ago it was Diablo 2, 18 years ago it was the original Counter Strike. Fun games on their own right, but many days I would just play to hang out with people. Of those, Day of Defeat Source was the game in which I had the most fun, the community was small but fantastic.
Anyway, enough for the old time rant. Let the kids (and the adults) enjoy Fortnite. The fad will pass and in a few years few of them will still be playing it, but the memories of the good times will live on forever.