Fortnite’s Bots Turn It into a Horror Game in the Worst Sense
Fortnite’s second chapter made a powerful first impression on me. The cold open, in which I was watching what I thought was a standard welcome trailer, only to find it shifted seamlessly to gameplay when Jonesy jumped from the battle bus, was exhilarating. Sure, it may not have been the most original moment in gaming history–I was powerfully reminded of the mission in Saints Row: The Third in which you skydive from a helicopter to a penthouse below as “Power” by Kanye West plays–but the way it masked the required matchmaking to toss you unawares into the game was impressive. Pair that with my first experience of Fortnite’s new island, its vastness spread out below me, all asking to be discovered, and yeah, you’ve got something pretty memorable. That first footfall on the new island found me marveling at its picturesque beauty, loving the way the purple light of dusk can stream into a room through the window, adoring the wooden bridges I happened upon in the forest and the little cabins I saw along a lake. It felt open and inviting, more rugged and authentic than Fortnite’s previous island, yet still tinged with cartoonish magic. I was thrilled.
One day later, though, and I now feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone, the kind where the main character thinks a new place is one thing but then discovers it’s actually something else. It feels like a place askance. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first I want to tell you about why I play Fortnite.
I don’t play Fortnite to win. Sure, I like winning, but I’m not good enough for that to be my motivating factor. Last time I checked my career stats, I think I’d won roughly one out of every 75 matches I played, and I didn’t have a very good Season X, so it’s probably worse than that now. I play in part for the world of the game. Fortnite’s first island was varied, but more than that, it was prone to changing in big and small ways without warning. Sometimes I’d just go back to a place I thought I knew and find it changed. It felt alive in this way. In flux. But what made this liveliness in the landscape matter were the encounters I had with other people all over that landscape. It’s all the infinite contingencies that can occur when you happen upon someone else that make Fortnite so exciting. In the split-second interaction of your actions and theirs, there’s a kind of heat that comes from knowing that what you’re putting out into the world in that instant is colliding with what another living human being is putting out into the world.
Now, Fortnite has introduced bots. What percentage they are in each game, I don’t know. From a distance, they look just like you and me. But their behavior is…strange. I’m not scared of zombies that stumble around muttering “brains,” but a zombie that remembers being human just enough to go through the motions of life in the most rudimentary way? Fucking terrifying.
(see an encounter I had with two bots in this tweet)
Fortnite now feels like a horror story about an idyllic island where some strange phenomenon is changing large swaths of the population, turning them into husks that only vaguely recall what it is to be human. I feel like some kind of paranormal investigator, cataloging the eerie behavior of this insidious new life form. I cross the island now and I see single walls tossed up here and there, something the bots routinely do but that’s unusual for human players. Often a single wall in a structure will be destroyed, leaving a gaping hole, where most players would have just used the door. Sometimes you’re in a place where treasure chests have been looted, and you can just tell based on what’s been picked up and what hasn’t that whoever–or whatever–opened that chest wasn’t human. This haunted feeling follows me everywhere in the game now.

Usually I know a bot when I see one. When I defeat them, I see that they have names like BushCamper or LootTrooper. But even if they are often easily identifiable, their presence saps the game of the heat I mentioned earlier which is so essential to why I play the game. Now, I score an elimination and I experience a feeling of deflation. I don’t understand what the bots are meant to accomplish. Their behavior is too rudimentary to help me be better at the game in my encounters with human players. Is Fortnite just trying to stack the odds more in my favor, to serve me a victory on a silver platter? I won’t lie; even with bots, there’s some kind of chemical satisfaction some part of my brain gets from scoring four or five eliminations in a single match, something that was almost unheard of for me when all my opponents were human. But I don’t want the game to give me these hollow ego boosts and empty victories. Yes, I’m terrible at the game. I’d love to get better, but I don’t want you letting me win just so that I can feel better. Fuck you. Give me your cold indifference. Let me flounder. Let me get crushed over and over again. It’s preferable to this.
Typically, playing Fortnite comes with some built-in paranoia. Is my hiding place really so hidden? Where is the sniper shot going to come from that eliminates me before I even have a chance to react? How badly am I going to get outplayed this time? Now I find myself contending with a different kind of paranoia. What if other players think I’m a bot? My gamertag (at least when I’m playing on Xbox), Lightrunner, perhaps seems like something that whatever algorithm that’s generating the names of Fortnite’s bots might come up with. I’m sometimes an awkward, hesitant player, short-circuiting between building and attacking, getting eliminated as I stand there with my blueprints in my hand, unable to make a decision and act. How do I show other players that I’m real? How do they show me that they’re real? How do we keep the paranoia from taking over and making us mistake each other for empty husks? How do we find our fellow human beings in the swarm so that we can feel the heat that’s only found in the communion of our competition?
Notes
drdemonprince liked this pun-demon reblogged this from carolynpetit
prettyfakes said: This is a great post, and as someone who increasingly just got wrecked trying to play in Season X, I thought I would welcome the bots. And I do I think! It has allowed me to play longer and have more fun. But when it goes VERY awry (as some of your videos show), it can be creepy.
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