An anonymous reader shares a report: Epic Games managed to produce a hit, sure, but the genius of it is how it’s rewritten the idea of what hanging out online can be. Fortnite is a game, but it’s also a global living room for millions of people, and a kind of codex for where culture has gone this year — it’s a cultural omnibus that’s absorbed everything from Blocboy JB’s shoot dance to John Wick. It got Ted Danson to learn how to floss. This thing is here to stay, as a new kind of social network.
Fortnite has achieved such a massive scale partially because of those network effects — if all of your friends are hanging out there, you will be too. The game is both free to play and available on every device — consoles, computers, even phones. That’s created a kind of lingua franca, a base level of understanding among a large group of people about the experience of playing the game. And even though it’s hugely popular, the experience of playing is extremely specific — not so many people outside your peer group are going to know what you mean if you reference a “chug jug” in casual conversation. There’s an in group thing going on here.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot