A Game Like Heroin: On Escapism, TwitchCon, and Kicking the ‘Fortnite’ Habit
1.
I couldn’t tell you what time it was when I got the call from The Bosco—the San Francisco based photo service I freelanced for that mainly covered tech events scattered around the city—but I could tell you what I was doing. I was playing video games, specifically Fortnite on Playstation 4, a competitive, cross-platform battle royale game created by Epic Games with more than 250 million players and counting.
This is not an honorable story, merely a common one.
I don’t even know how I saw The Bosco’s call. Out of self-preservation, I’d left my phone face down to prevent me from instinctively doing math on how much sleep I wouldn’t be getting. I didn’t want that information, that guilt. I couldn’t do anything with it. It would only make me stop gaming. And that—late at night and lacking any desire to better myself spiritually, physically, or intellectually—was out of the question. Fortnite was all I had. What was I going to do? Read a book? No, I needed to kill. I needed to win. I needed Victory Royale.
The lights in my living room were dimmed to replicate the conditions of a cave, which heightened the sharpness and overall saturation of the digital desert, forest, and farms on which I was battling. As I worked the paddles of my PS4 controller, dodging, shooting, ducking, and weaving, I reveled in the movements of the miniature me on the 65-inch HDTV 4K TV. The character (or “skin”) I’d chosen was your typical caricature of an ancient Viking: gut juice smeared across his face; hatchet dangling from his side; braided golden yellow beard; addiction to my lineage?
