Essays
Fortnite: Rebooting the “American Dream”
May 2025
Let me begin by painting you a picture: Messi and Katara are crouched in the Mos Eisley
Cantina, when out of nowhere Master Chief leaps down from the rooftop wielding a Sith
lightsaber, electrifying the duo with Darth Sidious’ trained powers. But within seconds, a second
duo of Sabrina Carpenter and Goku swoop in from an X-Wing and finish Master Chief off, crip
walking on his loot pile and hitting the robot before flying away on jetpacks. It may sound
absurd, but this is Fortnite right now. As I sit here writing this in May of 2025, the game is on its
3rd Season of its 6th Chapter—a chapter where the map is designed with a pleasant Japanese
aesthetic, and a season where every item is drawn from the Star Wars universe. I am compelled
to write about Fortnite not just due to its popularity or my time spent playing (which at this point
I am scared to check), but for its beautiful, and in my eyes, premier presentation of the current
state of the world in digital form. Fortnite stands as not just a game, but a profound kaleidoscope
of culture, identity, and nostalgia, where there is surreal beauty in the fusion of world characters,
brands, and cultures. Fortnite has far evolved from its origin as a cartoony take on the battle
royale, now existing as a full-blown cultural stage, with the way we play, choose avatars, and
emote telling us more about who we are today than our social media profiles. However, there are
those who, like my friends, often stick to Fortnite OG, the map and items that bring them back to
their first #1 Victory Royales and pre-COVID life. While there is value there, the new Fortnite—
the one where you can fly like Iron Man in the skies or transform into a massive Godzilla—is
where the game truly embodies the bizarre world it was born in. Through Fortnite's chaotic
fusion of cultures and brands, expressive emotes, fluid characters, and absurdly diverse cast all competing for the top spot, the battle royal game functions as a cultural mirror that both reflects
and critiques the idealized “American Dream.”
Fortnite’s style is a fever dream of cultural convergence, something like the virtual Times
Square of branded content. It is a digital marketing factory Andy Warhol would be proud of,
where anime icons, NFL players, K-pop stars, Greek gods, and original Epic Games creations are
pumped out for all to play as, but only if you fork over 1500 V-Bucks in return. These cosmetics
offer no performance benefits, yet a plain Red Knight skin can signal you as a clear ‘sweat’ in the
lobby, carving invisible hierarchies into the community. Your selected character “skin” goes
beyond cosmetics; it is a declaration of taste, nostalgia, humor, and power. The game’s mashup
of content is aggressive and unapologetic, it’s a meme-world that thrives on our consumerist
demand for more, generating over $5.3 billion a year for Epic Games. At the end of the day,
Fortnite is a wildly profitable entertainment machine, and like all companies, Epic Games is
economically driven.
However, the fact that Bad Bunny can wield a Dramyin (Himalayan lute) while emoting
to Call Me Maybe is not just ridiculous—it’s the point. Fortnite absorbs culture then spits it back
out to create a hyper-saturated and eclectic universe where our global mythologies can dance,
dab, or perform Kamehamehas in synchronized unity. Fortnite sells access to absurd freedoms—
and while that’s messy and market-driven, there’s an undeniable cultural openness and beauty in
the extensive cosmetic items the game offers.
The emotes, especially, have become a language of their own, part celebration, part
trolling. You down a player, and you immediately hit the Griddy, maybe spam the “Take the L”
dance, or just stand there slow clapping. This ritual of post-kill trolling has become integral to
the game—not necessarily cruel, but performative and poetic in its pettiness. In the same way comment sections and social media feeds are full of trolls looking to profit or get quick laugh out
of someone else’s misfortune, Fortnite is the same. Only Fortnite never takes it too far, keeping it
PG and always family friendly at its core, perhaps setting an example for the world to learn from.
In this universe, every match, like every day, is a performance—one built on contradiction,
absurdity, and fluid, coded communication.
This aesthetic of mashup and contradiction places Fortnite in the lineage of other chaotic,
culture-layered media that embrace genre-bending as their signature. Shows like Smiling Friends
and The Amazing World of Gumball embrace wildly inconsistent animation styles and jarring
tonal shifts, crafting universes that are elastic, absurd, and darkly funny—visual cousins to
Fortnite’s postmodern island. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate offers a clear gameplay ancestor:
another brawl arena where global IPs face off with no narrative coherence and no questions
asked. Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All At Once brings this logic into film through its
multiverse chaos, genre fluidity, and meme-fluent tone mirroring the experience of playing
Fortnite at its most frenzied.
Even in the visual art world, artists like Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz engage with
this same strategy. Their paintings collapse classical technique with cartoon abstraction and
social satire, refusing stable identity or singular style. Eisenman’s Another Green World crams
together a cast of emotionally exaggerated and stylistically disjointed figures across a dense,
vibrant interior space. Schutz’s Presentation packs grotesque figures together like sardines to get
a look at the mutilated body in the foreground. These static compositions are chaotic but
intentional, with figures layered over one another, perspectives warped, and meaning flickering
between comedy and collapse. This kind of visual overload mirrors the experience of dropping
into a Fortnite match: a flood of characters, gestures, and clashing aesthetics, all vying for attention within a tightly bounded space. Like Fortnite, these works, no matter the medium, ask
us to navigate a world where references don’t just coexist, they collide in absurd simultaneity.
Soaring in popularity over the past years, works like these are not clean but honest, showing us
that people yearn for creative and sincere reflections of the world we live in.
Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode, or in my guilty preference Zero-Build, captures something
intimate and strange about how we move through the contemporary world. You can drop in solo
as John Wick, haunted by past deaths, testing your skill and strategy alone. You can run duos
with a life-long friend or partner, perhaps as Lebron James and Optimus Prime sharing risk and
glory in equal measure. Or you can join a trio or squad, forming a temporary team with strangers
or friends, dropping in as squads full of characters like Hatsune Miku, KAWS, Princess
Bubblegum, and Snoop Dogg. Maybe one day you want to be a feminine character like Ariana
Grande, and the next day a masculine character like Solid Snake, maybe you want to ditch the
human body altogether and be the Xenomorph Alien for a little, Fortnite allows you to do that.
Identity is not essentialized but performed through skin, emote, and dance. Fortnite offers a
mainstream, playful platform for the kind of bodily mutability that young people have long been
exploring and here becomes casual through the games one-of-a-kind character model. Fortnite’s
fluidity—of identity, of genre, of scale—mirrors the culture that raised us. It is the gamified and
idealized version of the “American Dream” which I define as the ideal that anyone, regardless of
identity or background, is deserving of the chance to achieve success through hard work and
determination.
Like the “American Dream,” it does not matter the character or size of the team, the
objective is the same: win at all costs or “reboot” upon failure. The battle royale format isn’t just
a gameplay mechanic; it’s a cultural metaphor that resonates deeply with how we live, work, and think in America, especially in 2025. In every match, 100 players drop in. Only one wins. Battle
royales, and in turn Fortnite, reflect a “winner takes all” culture where only the “strongest”
survive. But, unlike grittier titles like Warzone and PUBG, Fortnite wraps this format in vivid
colors and surreal cartoon violence, taking away all blood leaving only a little robot to scan you
away as you run out of health. This PG approach to a battle royal competition has allowed it to
grow into the household name it is today, subtly inviting players ages 13+ (but really of all ages)
into the high-stakes and complicated world of the 21st century. Fortnite says that the world may
be chaotic and competitive—but you can be Meowscles or Travis Scott and have fun as you
build your way to the top.
Now at this point you’re probably thinking, sure Fortnite is absurd and addictive, but why does
this matter? Why is this dude rambling on about Fortnite like it’s the skeleton key to unlocking
life secrets?
Well, I believe Fortnite isn’t just a game; it’s a lens, exposing the contradictions,
inequalities, and absurdities of the “American Dream” with surprising clarity. In the real world,
our diverse crew of characters are not “dropped off the bus” on equal terms like in Fortnite. This
level playing field is drastically different from reality where systematic inequalities set people
back before they even begin. In today’s America, these inequalities are being expanded upon
even further, and it is evident that a select class is being given priority over the needs of the
overall nation and world. Since taking office in 2017 and now again in 2025, Trump has
continually supported policies favoring the wealthy, ignited racial, religious, and global tensions,
and now has begun to slash budgets benefiting low-to-medium income individuals while dismantling DEI initiatives set in place to avoid discriminatory and unjust practices. He’s
basically allowing five people to drop in every game with full resources, full shields, and all gold
weapons and then only giving them more perks as the game goes on, leaving everyone else to
fend for themselves. It would inevitably be a lot easier for those five to win, right? Luckily that’s
not how Fortnite works. It shouldn’t be how life works either. In Fortnite, inequalities dissolve as
you drop, and you are free to be whatever version of yourself you so choose. Competition is still
promoted but fair competition with all people allowed a chance at victory. Even upon failure you
are cycled back into a new opportunity for success and with a new cast of supporting characters
to help you get there. For me this situates Fortnite as a virtual model for my idealized “American
Dream”, a digital utopia: diverse, absurd, competitive, joyful, and crucially—equal.
It's clear people are drawn to Fortnite for a reason. Even though the game is over 7 years
old at this point, it accounted for 9.3% of all playtime across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC in 2024,
retaining the top spot as the most played game of the year. Fortnite has shown year after year that
it is the apex of the battle royales genre and arguably the most culturally resonant video game of
our time. As of writing this, there are over 110 million registered Fortnite players in the U.S., and
more than 650 million globally. That’s a third of the country and nearly a tenth of the world. If
each of us can take a lesson from Fortnite—not just to value competition, but to celebrate fluidity
and diversity, push for fairness, and allow everyone an honest shot—we might still redirect the
world from the tragic path it’s on. Even if it’s run by profit, Fortnite’s world offers a glimpse of
what’s possible when equality is baked into the rules. If Sabrina Carpenter and Goku can work
together for a victory royale, maybe the rest of us can imagine a world where that kind of joyful,
chaotic inclusivity isn't confined to the screen. So, let’s build that world, real and digital, with
just policy, colorful paintings, and the kind of competitive playfulness where you can still do some good old trolling. Fortnite reminds us that a better world is still possible, and that the
“American Dream” might just be due for a reboot.