Tell me about Fortnite. Playing Fortnite in general… I just love it because I get to play it with my friend… a lot over break. It doesn’t matter what game mode you play. It’s a fun time for the whole family and friends.

Fortnite was definitely life… my life… I’d say about like seven years ago. You know, you go home from school and you just hop on the sticks. You’re there for about five hours. You go put some food in your body, and then you go back to Fortnite. And it was a fun time. I wasn’t the best player. I couldn’t crank the 90s like the superstars… but definitely got the kills on the board, got the troops riled up. It was an honor recently I got to play with a special group of guys called SEAL Team 6. It was an absolute honor. I played along with them and we actually got a victory royale, which means you win the game. They’re hardworking guys. They’re good looking guys. They’re my idols. They’re quite an inspiration in the Fortnite world.

Once upon a time, Fortnite was a pretty large part of my life. It started fading away as you got older. What made it fade away? Other activities within your life. You go outside and you touch grass. You get the grades up. You can’t play Fortnite too long… I’d say right now, Fortnite isn’t a big piece of my life but it has a special place.

My favorite part of Fortnite would have to be the prime nights in seventh grade, going home from school and getting on the game with your friends and dying a bunch of times, losing, winning… I wasn’t good solo at all, but I had so much fun. You know, it was playing the game… just getting the grinding, getting those pick axes, getting out Renegade Raider, you know how it is. Yeah, that was that was peak Fortnite for me. Thank you.

The first day I played Fortnite was in a seventh grade. I hopped on in season two of the game and then I’m still playing Fortnite six years later. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the game for the past six years. My first skin was a SEAL Team 6 sergeant that I stole my dad’s credit card for and bought the skin. I’ve been grinding rank the past few days… and it’s been going pretty great. We’ve been thinking of taking part in a tournament… hopefully winning the tournament, making a lot of money, launching our Fortnite careers. Obviously, the game faded away like for a lot of people. It faded away for me too because of school and college, but I hopped back on the game when the OG map came back last month. So I’ve been on the game every day, been playing Fortnite every day. The game means a lot to me… If you know, you know.

FPS (First-Person Shooter) vs. TPS (Third-Person Shooter)? When you speak of battle royales, you think of Fortnite, you think of building, you think of third person. You don’t think of first person… I feel like that’s like kind of the antithesis of the whole entity… I wouldn’t say that Fortnite should be known as a first person shooter, but there is a mode. It’s not like Battle Royale, but there is definitely a mode for it.

What’s the advantage of third person? The advantage of third person is you can see more of your surroundings and like enemies around you, and it’s like easier to build. It’s easier to aim, and typically in first persons, there’s like recoil…, but in Fortnite there is really like no recoil or anything like that. So I think there’s definitely a bigger advantage to third person. I don’t like first person shooters in genera, and I think third person definitely has more advantages and disadvantages and is better than first persons.

What are V-Bucks? V-Bucks is a virtual currency. You buy V-Bucks with real money… you can buy skins, you can buy the battle pass. You can also buy SAVE THE WORLD. Fortnite actually just got in trouble for like scamming a ton of kids and they had to settle a massive like 70 million dollars or something like that. So a lot of people are getting their money back because a lot of the times when people bought V-Bucks, it would be misleading or it would be misconstrued or something like that of that nature. It’s definitely a very iconic in-game currency.

What’s the difference between Epic Games and Fortnite? Well, Epic Games is an actual company and Fortnite is the video game. Epic Games does a great job at controlling the platform as a whole. I would say it is a pretty good control. I mean, they have a lot of controversies within the game… I think Epic does have a solid and firm grasp on Fortnite as a whole.

What if it got transferred to another company? Would that ruin the sense of Fortnite? I think that Fortnite would be a little bit chopped if it was transferred to another company, but I think the game in its truest form would be okay. I think a lot of people would still play it, but Epic Games is such a massive company that it wouldn’t make sense for them to get rid of it.

So tell me about Fortnite history, what’s the difference between Fortnite now and the original? I could probably write like a 38 page paper on the history of Fortnite, you know. Season one comes out: OG Fortnite, 2017. We’ll give him a little flashback: 2017, the OG map first map comes out. The big shock from this is there’s no Tilted Towers. Titled towers has kind of been a hot spot of all places.

Fast forward, and Tilted Towers shows up and it kind of turns into the hot drop, like everybody drops there. It’s about like hundred people in a game, I guarantee you 43 dropped at Tilted Towers at least. That was at least the average.

Big change in the history was Dusty Depot, three little buildings in the middle of the map, great loop, by the way. A big meteorite came and hit it. It was crazy. It was one of the craziest events I think I’ve ever seen in my life with my own two eyes.

I would say that the game has changed a lot. They went to like a winter side of the map, a desert side, more water in the game… It used to be less interactive, less movement. Now it’s like you can swim, you can like have different motions, you can crawl, you can jump up higher. It’s a different running animation. You always used to be able to crouch.
It’s more interactive. It’s definitely less stagnant. But it’s still the same old game… the philosophies still stay the same.

If you could go back to the original version, would it feel different or bring back memories? Yeah, it feels like way different. The original version definitely brings back more memories. I think it brings back better memories because I think the original was still better than like what they have going now. You gotta respect the game that brought you up.

How does Fortnite have a community aspect? You could send other players friend requests, and if they accept it, then they’re a friend and you could invite them to your lobby, which is where you are… where you queue up into a game. And you could play a match with them. So you could either play duos (2 people), trios (3 people), or squads (4 people). The friends aspect has definitely been improved upon.

Battle Royale is not just the main aspect. You could play a ton of different game modes now. There’s Fortnite Creative where you could play with up to 16 friends. You could even play something called Fortnite Ballistic which is like a six versus six shooter. There’s even Zero Build. You don’t have to build. It’s like other games without the building aspect.
The community has been pretty strong online, too. There’s tons of different YouTubers, tons of different streamers who play the game every day. There’s tons of different YouTubers who break down the story of the game.

Communication? There’s voice chat. You could talk with up to four people. You could talk with your squad or your duo or your trio. You can’t talk to the entire lobby in the game unless it’s Creative. Or there’s in-game text chat.

For the people you friended, is it easy to keep in contact with those people? Yeah, if they’re online, you can send them a message. You could send them a message through Epic Launcher. You can message them through in-game. Have you ever had the situation where you play with somebody and then that person quits and then you never see them again? That happens all the time. There’s like a ton of friends whom I’ve played with every single day. And then they hopped off one day, and they never hopped back on. It’s kind of sad. If you did get their Instagram or something before, then you’re fine. What would you do to get them back? If they are online, you could text them, but there’s really no way if you don’t know their Instagram or their Snapchat or anything. If you can’t contact them any other way, there’s no other way. Pray. (That’s the only thing you can do.)

Positives of Fortnite: The social connection, the bonding with friends… I always thought Fortnite was fun when I played it. It was never a game that I would play and be like “Oh, this was terrible.” For the most part, I had fun with friends. You talk to new people, I thought was a positive. ‘Cause you play with your friends’ friends as well. I met some people, bonded with some people that I had not really met in person too much through Fortnite, and then I met them in person after and had already established a good relationship with them which was a positive for sure.

Other than the social aspect, I don’t think the game itself really gives you much. I think it just gives you a platform to connect with people, and for me, it was either people I already knew or my friends’ friends so it wasn’t anything too crazy.

From a technical standpoint, playing on a game controller is good for your hand coordination and motor control. But I didn’t notice a stark difference from playing Fortnite to after, but I guess in theory, playing Fortnite made my motor control better.

Negatives of Fortnite: It could be time consuming. People play Fortnite later at night, which isn’t good for sleep schedule. Well, it is called Fort-NITE… (NIGHT?) It’s spelled a little bit differently. It’s probably not the goal.

And you know, you’re not supposed to be on screens an hour and a half before bed or an hour before bed, I think. So playing Fortnite right before bed like a lot of people do is not good for your sleep.

I think there’s better ways to connect with your friends than playing video games, but I don’t think it’s a bad way especially when the weather’s bad. If it’s a really rainy, thunderstorm day. Or if you’re snowed in and you don’t want to go play in the snow, then I think video game is not a bad way to maintain some social connection. During a time like Covid, where it’s unsafe to visit, and I know Fortnite definitely did really well over Covid.

Screens have their negative effects and I think spending a lot of time is addictive. I think that has been proven that video games are addictive.

Whether they cause violent tendencies… Fortnite is a game where you shoot and kill other players, so I don’t know how that affects people.

Fortnite has this culture around it with streamers too that is targeted towards youth and this young audience who should be doing something other than playing video games or watching other people play video games. And they’re watching full grown adults playing video games, which could expose them to things that perhaps they shouldn’t be exposed to.

You definitely see a change in the youth that play video games to youth that never play video games.

Other than that, I think the time aspect is really a major one. It’s not something you do that is productive. It does not produce anything necessarily. You can grow your social bonds by being productive and what you choose to do with your friends, like playing sports with your friends. If you go out and play soccer with your friends, that is exercise. That is what I would consider productive, more productive than playing Fortnite.

Is there anything more general that reminds you of Fortnite? I have my creatine powder which is blue raspberry flavored. I gave some to a friend today, and he put it in a glass, and he made a joke that it looked like slurp juice which is a thing in Fortnite, a blue colored liquid. Maybe blue colored liquids like that, people like to say, look like Fortnite shield potions.

I don’t really think about Fortnite too often. I do see on social media when they are bringing back the original map and everyone gets excited for that because everyone likes the original map. I wouldn’t say that there’s too much that reminds me of Fortnite other than Fortnite-related things, games that are similar to Fortnite like Apex Legends, which is basically Fortnite with no building. You drop out of the sky. The zone shrinks. You get pushed closer and closer. Gotta be the last man standing. There’s a Call of Duty version that’s similar.

I like to think that Fortnite doesn’t influence me too much, especially now that I’m not playing at all.

Well, that’s all the stories I’ve collected so far. It seems like a big world of possibilities, just like the one I see right now. Stay tuned for the tracing.