,
10 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Just submitted for review an article on "Understanding the Appeal and Success of Fortnite: Temporality, Paratexts and Gaming Capital (not ‘Addiction’)" w/ @janemavoa @kylejmoore & luke gaspard, based our study into the digital play of 24 9-14 yr olds. V. excited about it! (1/10)
We wanted to provide an account of why Fortnite was popular with kids that didn’t fall into the “dopamine hits” and “addiction” media panic. Obviously its impossible to pinpoint exactly why Fortnite has been SO successful, but three things really stood out to us … (2/10)
Firstly, playing-Fortnite and watching-Fortnite are just so deeply interwoven there isn’t any point in talking about them separately! Fortnite is a phenomenon of YouTube culture, and how important YouTube is in understanding children’s (and adults, TBH) play (3/10)
Secondly, and its frustrating how little this tracks in popular media, Fortnite is super social. Not just as an online game played together but as something in which heaps of social activities at home and at school are organised around (e.g., Dances!!) (4/10)
This ties into our third point though, which is how Fortnite was a vehicle for gaming capital and the performance of identity … kids are very attuned to what the different skins & emotes represented about the player and their in-game skill (5/10)
Ofc. this is key to Fortnite’s financial success; the monetization of gaming capital! e.g., do you know about ‘default skin bullying’ where people in (the free) default skins are bullied? youtube.com/results?search… our participants sure did! (6/10)
Integrated with this, Fortnite’s seasons and constantly changing gameworld is v. important. Key for kids to be able to demonstrate Fortnite expertise out of the game, and when they can’t demonstrate expertise in-game because of skill/time/money constraints (7/10)
These constant changes also add a powerful temporal quality to play and the surrounding paratexts. New challenges & in-world events drive traffic to YouTube, incentivising creators to make more content about the game, keeping kids engaged when they might otherwise move on (8/10)
Tough to write up into 8,000 words (including references! had to remove so many) but hopefully folks find this a good overview & explanation of the Fortnite ‘phenomenon’, and a contribution to studies of children’s digital play (9/10)
Now working on finalizing a paper on how the kids in our study used the term ‘addiction’ synonymously with fun; and how they negotiated the “addiction” media panic around Fortnite and digital games. (10/10) #gamestudies
