by Karin Malady

“If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you’re already dead! Brothers, what we do in life… echoes in eternity.” (Gladiator, 2000)

There is glory on the battlefield. Not honor, nothing so pristine. Glory emerges shining from blood and dead flesh, it’s something that rots you. Glory leaves you beaten in an alleyway, only able to say its name. Because that’s what the Gods are like, and glory is their domain. To die in its blazes and be reborn, only to die again is the gift they have given us. We are the dead arriving for the gruesome feast of their Valhalla. An arena to prove our worth to those divine symbols who haunt our world. This realm is where the young go to earn a seat with grand cultural icons who tower above them, askew. Immortality grants the blessed eternal youth – for there are no old gods, only dead. Just ask Odin, whose wounds bleed forever. Not only are they long lived, but look at the vigor of Zeus or the animated nature of Mickey Mouse! They are young in spirit as well. Eternal children who wake up to face the world with just as much energy as they had the previous day. And the name of that glorious theater of eternal war? Fortnite. They say to reach the golden lands you need a golden guide. Hermes once walked the air with shining sandals, now he does so as a bus driver. And what is the most basic offering to a god but a simple thanks?

Who is Goku but the perennial Hero God? A savior who can be resurrected by the prayers of all the world’s people and gain strength from them. While I was playing, people using this skin during Chapter 3: Season 3 would gun for capsules containing the Kamekameha and the Nimbus Cloud. Players enjoy embodying the characters they inhabit. Master Chief tosses a grenade into the house you’re hiding in and bursts through the door with a shotgun. Maybe she’s disappointed with Halo Infinite, but she still finds her groove in this game. This kind of player is aggressive, but not as aggressive as Darth Vader who will wipe you out of the final ten in a remorseless flurry. The E-11 Blaster, his lightsaber, and probably a fucking sniper rifle felt like the Lightning of Zues himself. Maybe a title like The Adversary would be fitting – but in an era as dark as this, he can only be the Sky Father. Harley Quinn players embody “girls just wanna have fun” as an aspect of The Trickster, neither skilled nor unskilled, only arriving on scene for the thrill of the match. Weirdly enough, I rarely saw Indiana Jones make it past the midpoint of a round. Our cultural symbols are alive and some wretched force animates them.

Comics have long been called ‘modern mythology’ by trying sorts, but there’s an unfortunate truth to this. When stories can be freely told and not owned – the Gods move through them. Odin was a traveler god because his story followed his people and surrounding cultures each knew him by a name of their own. In the present, through mazes of copyright and trademark, stories can be owned and thus the Gods can be owned too. Marvel and DC oppose each other like the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians. They duke it out in comic stores, the box office, and now they go head-to-head on The Island. Capitalism hollows all things. It scoops out their guts so only the image remains. But nature abhors a vacuum. So clever are the gods to find their way back in, hiding in the reflection in your eye of the TV screen aglow in your childhood memory. They still walk this earth. Never forget that.

Epic Games sells the Gods back to us as skins we can wear. Priests adorn themselves with the symbols of the god they worship to hear the words they speak clearer. When I watch players run around as Sauske Uchia or Spiderman, I can see that their voices are still finding new ways to speak. On Twitter, what people now call the profile pic was once called an avatar. Even looking at googled dictionary definitions of this word is revealing. The two definitions given are “a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth” and “an icon or figure representing a particular person in video games, internet forums, etc.” We wear the things we want to manifest into the world. To embody something bigger than us for a moment as a way of finding purpose. Something about that gives me hope. Spirits that will never be chained down by any monster. They are plants growing out of cracks in the concrete.

Everything revolves. The moon revolves around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun. The seasons revolve around the year. Life traditionally revolves around the place the heavens meet the earth. The holy mountain, the axis mundi. Once, I dreamed that a queen told me that if I climbed to the top of the world tree, she would grant me a wish. Then, right as I stood under the canopy, a military helicopter shot me down. It taught me that the foundation of reality is under control of the Empire. Fortnite itself revolves around the Zero Point. (Yes, there is a plot.)  It is so named for the center of a graph, coinciding with how level design uses coordinates to build its maps. It’s a point of contention: factions battle for control of it, existential forces seep out of it, Galactus hungers for it, and crossovers are summoned from it. It’s the binding glue of the multiverse. And it’s cracked. Gods forever warring over the fate of the world. Eternity Girl by Magdalene Visaggio features a fledgling godling herself, tiring of immortality and desperately seeking the end. A quest that takes her to the tower at the center of everything. She understands that if she wants to die, she has to take everything along with her. Her motivation is explained as such “What I am is intellectual property they keep trying to find ways to exploit, even as the creative teams guiding me conspire to push me further and further up my own ass. All in the hopes that something will finally resonate.” To echo her feelings: I’m done with the endless cycle of existential dread.

What’s interesting about writing this is the brief season I’ve played is just a snapshot. In a moment, it will be gone. The island will shift, new skins will be released, the story will move on, and the past will become a mystery to all those except the truly reverent. But to a lot Gamers, it doesn’t matter what Fortnite is. Something about it repulses them and they can’t place it. Is it exploitative? Absolutely, but only as much as any other game is. If you’re looking for a triple A game that is ethical with a studio that can host long running, energy burning servers, you’re shit out of luck. “Gamer” is a strange identifier, in part because it is so contested. Even politically aware and socially conscious gamers tend to walk into the same pitfalls. I’ve seen people who reject gatekeeping the term find ways to look down on new generations of gamers. Which there will always be, because games first and foremost exist as a toy. Instead of watching He-Man or Transformers cartoons, the medium itself now fills that space. The action figures you bashed together as a kid are now $3.99 digital skins.

Gamers demand to be taken seriously, for the form to be considered “art,” but they simultaneously want an endless parade of distractions. Theoretically, dark and gritty reboots are exactly what they are asking for. Maybe it’s too ugly for a person to see the real face of their desires. But nothing else can hold that contradiction if they just won’t let go of it. If they really wanted anything different, they could seek out weirder games by more obscure creators. Yet they don’t do that, because they celebrate the fact that it is popular culture, that doing what everyone else is doing makes you a part of that moment. Feeling connected is powerful, I won’t begrudge that. The thing about ‘being a gamer’ is that it’s a consumer identity. It’s defined by a constant cycle of needing new entertainment to fill a void that by its own nature, will never be full. You will never sit down and say “Yes, I’ve had enough games. I’ve had enough gacha characters. I’ve had enough skins.” That impulse IS The Gatekeeper itself, the thing keeping the medium from evolving in the way people dream it would. As it is now, gamers aren’t much different from the forces they struggle against.

People cry for consumers to change their attitudes all the time. A storm is closing around all of us together and the battle for the Zero Point is drawing to a close. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” There is one day going to be a winner, and if we put up a good fight, maybe it will be one we can live with. If Fortnite is anything, it is the true face of Video Games. It’s that wild and unruly dream of colorful and exciting environments Nintendo 64 and PlayStation gave you. It’s the battlefield you fought on in CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2. It’s the emoji filled chat rooms of the past. It’s going to consume everything. And if it doesn’t, it’ll shift, and you’ll be confronted with the new thing that will. And you’ll only have the Gods to fall back on. In a way, the Battle Royale embodies what life is. We struggle against our confinement as the walls close in around us. We fight each other to define ourselves and carve out our little space in the world. These small battles cascade into bigger ones. Suddenly, the final battle resolves, the loop is closed, and a new one is beginning. I’ll leave you with what Travis Touchdown tells Jacket of Hotline Miami:

“Let’s just go back to that world of blood. To fight in that endless battle. Once we grow tired of it, let’s have a beer. Let’s drink until we got no more fucks to give. Until we lose all hope. Then, if you still feel like dying, let’s meet again.”