MLK and Fortnite

 Your worst enemy is the man in the mirror.

Yeah I- I saw it. I saw Rick Sanchez and the Xenomorph ascend the stairs of victory and stand there, truly absorbing Martin Luthor King's iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech, and I thought: "Truly, we are all lost." Someone call Charlie and tell her to make 7 billion reservations at the Hazbin, because we're all going to hell for letting this happen. 'Fortnite celebrates Martin Luthor King'- what where we thinking? The second anyone heard that the news should have shot right up the top of leadership so that the appropriate measures, the switching off of the world's internet, could be taken. But instead we all just sat back and let it happen, like the morbidly curious monsters we all are, as Fortnite butchered their way through a serious history lesson and turned the American civil right movement into a joke. Well done Epic Games. No seriously, way to screw up in a way few other companies even so much as put themselves in danger of; truly you guys are the burning dumpster role models.

So for those who have remained blissfully unawares up until now, Martin Luther King's big celebration teaching day dropped for Fortnite a few days ago, nearly half a year after the annually scheduled Martin Luther King Day. (Maybe if they waited until 2022, it would have given the team time to reflect and realise how stupid of an idea this was) Obviously, even the only moderately cynical could see this was yet another step on Epic's road to total proliferation of the Fortnite brand. If they could get the public to regard Fortnite as a platform, not just for entertainment but for serious events of historical significance, then they could use that as a springboard to further mainstream appeal and maybe even finally turning Fortnite into a virtual social media platform, like they want. It's a move towards what people are labelling 'the Metaverse'; a combination of social interaction platform and simulated living space which takes up so much of your daily interaction that you almost never need to leave it. (So the Oasis from Ready Player One, basically.)

The problem should be fairly clear; Fortnite just isn't that universal enough to touch everyone and everything; it's a video game for goodness sake! Fortnite is about shooting things, first zombies, but more famously each other until literally no one else is alive; no matter what sort of event you hold in that world, that background will hover over everything. Epic have been trying, very hard, to try and change Fortnite into something more, and they've made greater strides than I think they have any right to, but they aren't there just yet. Do I mean to imply that with time Fortnite could become the one-stop shop for everything? I- really don't know. Maybe. I've mentioned it elsewhere recently, but we're already getting popular artists hosting concerts on Fortnite, director(s) hosting big movie premiers, an American presidential candidate made a custom map to campaign in Fortnite, and there's the big crossover they did with the biggest entertainment franchise of the past 10 years, Marvel. So they've got entertainment twisted around their little finger right now. Yet as recent events have shown, that doesn't mean they've got everything in the bag.

The first big problem was the idea itself existing, the next was how to do it respectfully in the knowledge that all the world would be watching. The event would simply play out as a tour across a virtual museum that would display all the key accomplishments of the civil rights movement, which players would explore together before ending with watching a broadcast of the 'I have a dream' speech whilst standing in a virtual version of the place where it happened. On paper it sounds fine. Respectful almost. But 'on paper' never translates 1:1, as anyone should have known from the get-go. Putting people in this situation was just begging them to find ways of screwing everything up, and so Epic were fighting against the unquenchable human thirst to just be terrible for the sake of being terrible. They weren't going to win!

To start with they needed to axe emotes, given the fact that previous events of music festivals were often fraught with disruptive emotes such as throwing tomatoes. (That would be a bad look) And so they disabled a few emotes. Then they disabled practically all emotes after discovering that pretty much every animatic they'd ever designed was a bad look for this supposedly serious event. All apart from the 8 designed for the event, which the team left accessible through the emote wheel. Unfortunately, that left a really rather simple exploit open where people could overwrite the contents of the Emote wheel and do whatever they wanted anyway. (But it's the thought that counts, right?) Even more hilariously (in a deeply dark way) Epic had made a deal with DC to implement some superhero themed emotes a while back, and the terms of the deal mean that they couldn't be deactivated. A big shame, considering Catwoman's emote was literally just the player summoning and cracking a black whip, complete with sound effects. (You can't make this stuff up.)

Of course, then there's just the general fact that all of this feels icky. I'm not sure about you, but I don't feel the 'goodwill' and 'desire to teach' emanating from Fortnite as they cover this event; I sense more just the rubbing of hands by Epic execs convinced that this one was going to be idea to score them all the good press points. The exact opposite happened, however, because of course it did; what where they thinking? Now Fortnite has provided it's own fuel to the fire of why their Metaverse idea is bad; because when you try to be everything, tonal dissonance ensues. And that's not even to mention the fact that this was a transparent attempt to commodify Martin Luthor King's legacy in order to springboard themselves higher, and in doing Epic really shone a light on the rather messy split between the owners of MLK's estate, his children. So they also managed to expose more ways in which greed has ruined and corrupted the wider world. Wow, Epic actually ruined my day as well. (They are prolific!)

Now I'm going to surprise no one by saying; I ain't no big fan of this whole "Metaverse" idea. At it's heart the very thing represents a monopoly and those are bad for creativity, but the idea is just so all-consuming that those who pursue it just lose all their personality and heart along the way. Take this PR disaster, which would be enough to make any company with an ounce of humility still left in it's rafters stop to reflect on how stupid their recent path has been. A backlash like this should have been the last we heard of Fortnite in the newspace for at least a month, whilst the team work on how to be better and ensure they're not stepping on any rakes going forward. But not Fortnite, no, they're too big to slow down! And immediately following this they stepped into another controversy with their 'Imposter mode' announcement; a rip-off of Among Us (a game made by an indie studio) with nothing added to the formula and even a map that is functionally identical to the base Among Us Spaceship. (I'm not sure if Epic is just shameless or clueless at this point.)

The term 'too big to fail' is an interesting one. It implies a point at which you're so horrendously huge that even the worst blunder of all time can't stop your hulking victories for that's simply the wake of your step, whilst simultaneously invoking the image of a venture so bloated, with so many people counting on you, that you simply cannot fail, the consequence would be too dire. Total invulnerability and utter vulnerability, married to the same side of the coin. It Epic want Fortnite to be their unstoppable titan, they need to acknowledge that nothing comes with impunity and everything falls. I plain don't think they had an inkling of the infrastructure to establish themselves like they want to, and they'll need to totally devote themselves as a company to Fortnite, if they want to avoid clear embarrassments like this in the future. Either that, or settle with just being the world's most popular video game pastime. But why settle for most of the world, when you can choke to death trying to swallow all of it?