Capitalizing on the Craze of Fortnite: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding How Gamers Construct Communities of Practice

Abstract

This article conceptualizes a framework for understanding the discourse and literacy practices generated by players of the video game, Fortnite. As a teacher educator interested in studying how multiliteracies cultivated in social settings can be leveraged toward academic success, my two objectives for this theoretical article are to examine how Fortnite players operate within their digital community and to explore what relationships may be established between the game’s social literacy contexts and formal literacy learning. In light of Fortnite’s connections to reading comprehension, discourse systems, and social learning environments, recommendations are made for future research, including considerations of school-based implementation.

Keywords

language literacy teaching classroom curriculum educational studies

Introduction

By coining the term, “multiliteracies” in 1996 to account for the rapidly changing contexts of literacy sparked by advances in technologies along with shifts in cultural structures, the New London Group (NLG) theorized education for what has become a globalized, digitized society. In its break from traditional notions of literacy as isolated, print-based activities, NLG induced a new discipline within literacy research, New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Baker, 2010). As Kist (2005) attests, NLS offers a framework to understand how the Internet and communication technologies alter the nature of our literacy practices, which are inseparable from the social settings, ideologies, and contexts in which they are enacted. Approaching instances of language, literacy, and culture as phenomena evolving and enmeshing alongside technology helps researchers track important issues such as the changing nature of knowledge and pedagogy and the deictic state of our educational practices, which are continually reshaped by digital media (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2009).

Video games represent an important component of NLS because their interactive platforms promise multiple forms of meaning-making; many encourage creation over consumption, positioning players to use digital literacies honed within social contexts that can impact their academic achievement in classroom environments, where the boundaries between formalized teaching and learning and social practices with media are increasingly blurred (Marlatt, 2018; Gee, 2007). As NLS call upon researchers to expand their methodologies toward an interdisciplinary nexus of technology and education, while challenging practitioners to offer multimodal curriculum and instruction, video games afford opportunities to capitalize on the time and energy students devote to developing knowledge and skills both in and out of school (Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress, 2003; Mills, 2010; Siegel, 2012). This theoretical analysis purposes to understand how Fortnite players may operate as literate members of a digital community and is driven by the following two questions: (a) How might Fortnite players employ discourse and literacy practices as part of their community of practice? (b) What connections, if any, can be made between Fortnite’s social contexts and formal literacy learning in schools?

Fortnite: A Multicultural, Globalized Phenomenon

Since its launch in September, 2017, by Epic Games, Fortnite has erupted in global popularity and was recently coronated in The Atlantic as the world’s most popular video game (Sloan, 2018). Amassing over 125 million users in its first 9 months alone, the game is currently in its fifth season, and almost singlehandedly spearheading a burgeoning live-streaming video game industry (Flanagan, 2018). Fortnite is a synchronous, third-person military operations game, in which gamers are dropped via parachute onto a hostile landscape along with 99 other players, all of whom are armed initially with only a pickaxe. Once players land on the terrain, they use their tool to construct shelters, gather materials, and collect weapons with which they set out individually or in teams to be the last ones standing (Parker, 2018). Its estimated number of downloads has now surpassed 60 million, and Forbes has tracked over 3 million concurrent users on several occasions (Tassi, 2018). Basic versions of Fortnite are free and available for play on Mac, PC, PS4, Xbox, and mobile devices.

Game critics have offered numerous analyses of Fortnite’s staggering popularity. According to Chan (2018), part of Fortnite’s draw is its tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish approach to the aesthetics of violence perpetrated by its users. While other shooting games such as Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Halo are known for gratuitous portrayals of kidnapping, murder, and gang activity, Fortnite is much more playful in its tone and imagery. In contrast to many of its peer games, Fortnite has been noted for its use of general audience humor, quirky characters and situations, and strategy processes instead of offensive material such as racist images or misogynistic storylines (Palmeri & Pendleton, 2018). Its friendly accessibility makes it appealing to broader audiences beyond gaming communities and taps into a plethora of populations and regions. Played by millions of adolescents, Fortnite users span dozens of countries, gender spectrums, and multiple adolescent age groups unlike any game that has preceded it (Parkin, 2018).

Fortnite’s regenerative qualities and endurance have also garnered critical attention. Bandlamudi (2018) attests to the game’s staying power, suggesting that Fortnite is uniquely positioned to continue its reign as the top gaming platform due its constant updates and series of surprising features, which present fresh opportunities for players to reinvent their gaming experiences. Feldman (2018) calls Fortnite an “endlessly playable cartoon” that is “here to stay because it’s modeled not as a series with annual installments, but as a persistent online world that’s always under construction” (para. 4). In his description of Fortnite’s unprecedented grip on the hearts and minds of both casual gamers and its most devoted enthusiasts, Paumgarten (2018) asserts, “that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before” (para. 4). Fortnite’s universality among adolescents across the world is well-documented, and its massive following continues to increase.

Fortnite has generated an esport populace comprised not just of gamers and social media aficionados but also general audience members who tune in to view the expanding number of leagues, divisions, and gaming modes available within the platform (Robitzski, 2018). Players can stream entire sessions and accompanying audio feeds on live content portals such as Twitch. Fortnite content can also be found on Youtube, where millions of gaming streams have been uploaded since the game’s inception (Seiner, 2018). According to PC Games News, as of March, 2018, Fortnite was the top-selling i-Phone app in 13 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States (Maag, 2018). Fortnite has caused and maintained a stir unlike few video games and as with any cultural phenomenon that captures the attention of adolescents, learning institutions are directly impacted, and school leaders are often forced to respond swiftly.

Fortnite and Schools: An Inauspicious Introduction

Schools were feeling the effects of Fortnite on a global scale long before the launch of the i-Phone app, with students shuffling into classrooms sluggish and exhausted from long nights of playing (Schwartz, 2018). Most students surveyed in Sweden acknowledged playing the game for at least 2 hours nearly every evening (Maag, 2018), and teachers in Wales reported students as young as 10 playing well into the next morning on a nightly basis (Lewis, 2018). Once Fortnite became available on mobile devices, students immediately brought the game into schools, and stakeholders in multiple countries see the game as an invasion that threatens the fabric of the learning environment (Schwartz, 2018). Millions of students are now playing Fortnite during school hours—during designated smartphone times such as lunch and recess, and on the sly throughout instructional periods (Hernandez, 2018). In addition to depleted focus and energy in learners, Fortnite seems to have impacted the infrastructure of schools in other ways, with users hoarding Wi-Fi signals and complicating online learning management systems (Schwartz, 2018).

While the instantaneous, prolonged craze of Fortnite caught many critics by surprise, the reactions demonstrated by school leaders toward students’ preoccupation with the game has been perhaps more predictable. According to Maag (2018), schools across the globe have exhibited numerous examples of policy changes driven by the Fortnite fervor: a primary school in Britain sent out automated text messages encouraging parents to ban the game in their homes; a middle school in the United States reversed its cell phone policy and now confiscates devices on sight; and some schools have implemented automatic suspensions and other punitive measures. Steps have also been taken to preserve healthy school cultures, as numerous primary schools in Australia have issued official newsletters describing the potential for bullying to occur between gamers both on and off of school grounds (Zhou, 2018).

Assessing a Wide Open Digital Playground

Although many schools have reacted to Fortnite by instituting prohibitive measures designed to eliminate the game from classrooms, these efforts have largely been unsuccessful due to the prevalence of devices exacerbated by institutions’ inescapable reliance on technological infrastructure (Lewis, 2018). Madden, Lenhart, Duggan, Cortesi, and Gasser (2013) remind us that 95% of U.S. teenagers are avid Internet users, and 75% of high-school students use a tablet or smartphone in classrooms. Herald (2015) adds that public schools in the United States make devices available for at least 20% of the student population. Despite an abundance of technological resources, along with a growing body of research surrounding technology’s contributions to learner-centered classrooms, teachers are still struggling to transform their practices (Purcell, Heaps, Buchanan, & Friedrich, 2013). As a result, adolescents’ digital operations at school often lack the collaboration and creativity demonstrated outside of school, which contributes to fewer opportunities for learners to co-construct personalized understandings through the production of original, multimodal content (Howell, Kaminski, & Hunt-Barron, 2016).

Zero tolerance policies disseminated by school administration may be contributing to teachers’ inability to provide rich, authentic learning opportunities with digital platforms because classroom operations tend to lack the multimodal, interactive meaning-making adolescents perform in their daily lives. By failing to consider the co-existence of adolescent learning, media, texts, and technology, schools do a disservice to their students, whose learning experiences benefit from the integration of sociocultural contexts to enhance academic knowledge and skills (Marlatt, 2018; Baker, 2010). While video games such as Fortnite present challenges to educational environments, we also recognize that the classroom integration of gaming principles results in measurable learning and increased engagement (Gee, 2007; Howard-Jones, Jay, Mason, & Jones, 2016). Prohibitive measures have perhaps most notably resulted in a significant research gap; specifically, empirical examples of potential benefits of using Fortnite in the classroom. Without a framework for school-based implementation, the world’s most prominent adolescent community of practice and its numerous opportunities for education research, have been ignored.

Context

As an English language arts and literacy teacher educator at a large university in the Southwestern United States, I am interested in studying how digital literacies such as video game practices cultivated within social contexts can be leveraged toward academic success in formal education spaces. Recently, I attended a Fortnite Battle Royale on our campus, which was open to the public and sponsored by our university’s esports association. For nearly 12 hours on a Saturday, I conducted informal observations of gameplay and digital literacy practices, watching and listening as 25 college students competed for prizes in a standing-room-only computer lab. Although these methods did not approach the rigor of an empirical study, I was able to pursue understandings related to my two primary questions: (a) How might Fortnite gamers operate within a digital community of practice? and (b) What intersections, if any, are visible between the game’s social literacy practices and academic achievement in school settings? In the following section, I conceptualize Fortnite as a community of practice with opportunities for research on literacy learning within social contexts, while highlighting direct and indirect connections to academic spaces.

The Fortnite Community of Practice: Conceptualizing a Research Framework

Wenger (1998) defines communities of practice as groups of people working in pursuit of a common passion who are committed to regular interaction that will result in learning how to more effectively perform functions associated with that passion. Successful communities of practice construct opportunities to learn skills and construct understanding through sustained, collaborative participation often involving discussion, peer feedback, and knowledge sharing (Burns, Howard, & Kimmel, 2016). In Fortnite’s synchronous, multi-player format, gamers interact through constant collaborative meaning-making and communication. Rather than operating as individuals in isolated structures, participation in Fortnite implies active communal membership in the game’s ever-expanding, global neighborhood. Fortnite practices involve myriad operations beyond merely playing the game and include observing game play of expert colleagues, team-building exercises, coaching modules, and perpetuating its expanding societal presence by talking about the game in multiple settings (Palmeri & Pendleton, 2018).

Fortnite’s community of practice embodies Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of learning as a social endeavor, a process facilitated by individuals interacting within the zone proximal development, where newcomers to the community cultivate contextualized meaning-making and problem-solving under the guidance of more experienced participants. Through diverse ranges of experience and competence, Fortnite players co-construct knowledge in an open exchange of digital literacies, what Lave and Wenger (1991) call, “shared cultural practices that reflect their collective learning” (p. 29). With the help of experienced gamers, novice players are continually assimilating themselves to the norms of the Fortnite universe, a process of peripheral participation that associates apprentices and mentors into common communicative operations (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Learning in Fortnite exhibits two key components that help define communities of practice: discourse and literacy practices.

Fortnite’s Layers of Vocabulary and Discourse

Individuals operating within communities of practice are united in part by ideologies they create through language, a specialized vocabulary and systematic maneuvering that Gee (1989) argues, demonstrate correct “ways of being in the world” (p. 6). Gamers effectively become part of the Fortnite community by learning how to talk about game elements with team members, narrate action on the screen, and compose content in pursuit of prosperity. These actions are dictated largely by the words a gamer uses to think, speak, act like, and be recognized as a Fortnite player. In addition to maintaining a sprawling arsenal of various technical weaponry and defense mechanisms, some of which can cause targeted rivals to break into involuntary dance moves or ignite holiday-themed ballistics such as colorful Easter eggs and spontaneous Halloween costumes, Fortnite players execute a unique and complicated dictionary.

Scripted terms within the game such as “port-a-fort” and “game packs” are integral to basic navigation. Players regularly select specific “skins” to wear in particular environments and access “harvesting tools” to obtain needed materials. Hidden “supply drops” are random repositories scattered throughout the landscape that players train themselves to recognize so as to attain “epic” or “legendary” powers. Even more elusive and valuable are the rare treasure chests filled with traps, ammunition, and other supplies known as “llama loots.” “Battle passes” are also sought after and unlock new Fortnite modes as players gain experience and competence. The game even features its own global marketplaces, where goods can be purchased from the “Item Shop” using a specialized currency called, “V-Bucks.”

In line with other communities of practice, Fortnite players also use jargon terms to communicate during missions such as “hootenanny” and “rebirthing.” Gamers command a fluid glossary that expands along with their skill levels, a process of incremental mastery that closely resembles classroom learning. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, Gee (2007) compares the role of vocabulary usage in academic achievement to the terminology featured in quality video games, which grant players access to “explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can be best understood and used in practice” (p. 48). Language maneuvering in Fortnite unlocks learning opportunities where gamers instantaneously convey meaning toward successful progress.

Vocabulary competency is central to participation in the Fortnite community in the same manner that it is correlated with academic success in literacy learning settings because it signifies reading comprehension, subject matter mastery, and applications of disciplinary concepts in field-based scenarios (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2007). Successful navigation of both classroom materials and Fortnite maps depend upon the building blocks of vocabulary, which offer learners a cumulative pathway toward membership, wherein a progressive immersion in language on a regular basis contributes to the ongoing development of competencies (Ouellette, 2006). Whether honing topic sentences to drive forward a thesis in a writing class or “prepping the mod for rebirth” in Fortnite, the literacy process is one of vocabulary and praxis. Learners use vocabulary to sharpen their abilities and articulate meaning in increasing numbers of situations as the complexities with which they are equipped to negotiate new contexts also increases (Spencer & Guillaume, 2006).

Situated vocabulary command involves far more than a definitional knowledge of terminology. To truly belong to the Fortnite community and operate within its digitally situated communication system, players must earn their position within the game’s discourse. Discourse membership within the Fortnite universe requires users to translate the words they use into effective decisions embodied by moves on the screen, which are visible to other gamers. As Dodge (2018) posited in her examination of the discourse achieved by players of the card game, Magic: The Gathering, proper navigation and negotiation of the game’s infrastructure is achieved only by those who demonstrate, “a nuanced understanding of how the words are situated in the game and how these situated meanings drive physical actions and strategic game play” (p. 175). As with any literacy-learning experience, the cultivation of discourse within Fortnite is socially situated and requires the comprehension and application of numerous, interconnected texts and operations (Gee, 2012).

Broadly defined, discourse participation includes not only the uttered communication of speakers but also the contexts, tools, and identities that shape spoken interaction (Gee, 2005). Through a series of conscious and subconscious metacognitive processes involving application of background knowledge, contextual clues, predictive analysis, and more, Fortnite users improve their gameplay by navigating complex texts at increasingly faster levels (Duke & Pearson, 2009). Players aspire to acquire mastery of these processes at degrees which will result in the consummation of a gaming ideology, which Fairclough (2001) attests, defines the rules of engagement, sets parameters of community membership, and manufactures consent among individuals. Meaningful discourse operations in Fortnite involving language and application are visible in the numerous literacy practices enacted by gamers.

The Complex Literacy Practices of Fortnite

Under the NLS paradigm, literacy practices encompass the multiple maneuvers that groups of interacting individuals enact through and around texts, simultaneously considering academic operations such as reading, writing, and speaking in conjunction with social activities; all the while, expanding previous notions of what artifact (digital or print) constitutes a text or what action demonstrates literacy (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). A central objective for practitioners and researchers asserting theoretical alignment with NLS principles is the leveraging of socially constructed literacy practices toward academic achievement. Gamers regularly engage with authentic meaning-making and literacy learning outside of academia; thus, the literacy practices demanded by school-based curriculum and instruction should correspond with how students produce knowledge in social contexts or at least represent similar operations (Kaufhold, 2017).

Fortnite contains a number of different modes that offer players a wide range of objectives. “Battle Royale,” likely the game’s most popular feature, pits 100 gamers together who descend on gliders from a floating bus onto an island where players can work individually, in duos, or squads of four to eliminate enemies. The goal in battle modes is to discover and use various grenade launchers, flame throwers, and gun weaponry marked by gray, green, purple, and gold color rarities. While in the process of scoring points based on number of kills, evading and setting traps for adversaries, and even uncovering cryptic vending machines that dispense rare goods, players actionize literacy practices that demonstrate active learning within militarized sequences that are perhaps not conducive to classroom learning.

Other Fortnite modes, however, may be better suited for schools, resembling age and grade-level appropriateness of other well-known games such as Minecraft (Marlatt, 2018). “Playground” mode, for instance, contains no shooting and presents players with the challenge of building their own worlds from scratch through a series of constructive processes including blueprint designs and monument crafting. Gamers can engage playground realms individually or in teams of up to four players who work together to procure supplies, build ramps, and construct shelters for survival. Fortnite’s globalized digital community allows acquaintances and complete strangers alike to design action plans and accomplish tasks at will. “Save the World,” “Campaign,” and “Soaring 50s” are just a few other examples of forums that emphasize less violence in favor of collaborative problem-solving, project-based situations, team-building exercises, and more.

Fortnite players engage in a shared digital world known as the game’s “map,” a multimodal, live text that demands immediate reading and reaction via complex literacy practices. Gamers form a “party” in which individuals descend onto an island and scheme to defeat one another within and alongside individual areas such as “Pleasant Park,” “New Desert,” “Paradise Palms,” “Lazy Links,” and elsewhere. Geographically, Fortnite requires players to readily reinvent survival tactics as the island is constantly updating with new landscapes such as radioactive lakes and adding new obstacles like interdimensional portals. Players’ success is measured equally by “levels” which indicate total sums of gaming experience and “tiers” that track the feats accomplished including points scored and skins unlocked.

As Fortnite players improve their tier standing through skills development, they decipher new narratives for themselves by authoring authentic expressions of their personality, which further instills their participation in the community of practice along with their identity as rising experts in the game. For instance, successful level ascension can afford players the ability to use their V-Bucks to create personalized skins, exclusive dance routines, or characterized movements such as eating popcorn, reading books, or shooting basketballs through hoops. These accomplishments indicate Fortnite mastery, and since they are stored on player’s public profiles, they are available for anyone to view. Fortnite’s constructions of self-illustrations underline a key characteristic of learning within video games that demonstrate identity development through textual interaction (Gee, 2007).

In addition to the elaborate, synchronous world that gamers inhabit, each individual screen is populated around the outer edges with a number of textual features that require constant reading and responses from players, all of which support their moves within the shared world depicted in the center of the screen. In the screen’s top-middle, a compass indicates cardinal directions as well as global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of a player’s exact location. Graphics in the lower-right corner tally the kinds and numbers of supplies players have on hand including weapons, shields, and construction materials. Gamers’ personal health statistics are displayed in a data bank in the bottom-middle, and in the bottom-left corner, a monitor provides a “kill feed” with up-to-the-second reports on which players are still active in the session. Finally, in the top-left, providing a link to the physical world, a meter measures the strength of the session’s Wi-Fi signal. Players also have the option of monitoring the health of others in their party as well as any breaking news disseminated by Fortnite producers. Multiliteracies are brought to life throughout this constant visual monitoring and multidirectional reading of the digital landscape, as players simultaneously communicate with teammates and adversaries alike via headsets and microphones (Kress, 2003).

The reading of these data, followed by the decision-making and multimodal movement dictated by its comprehension, is instantaneous. Gamers process complex chunks of information and respond to rapidly shifting contexts by making adaptive moves in the digital landscape (Howard-Jones et al., 2016). The multiple, simultaneous operations involving consumption of information and creation of content required of Fortnite players encompass interdisciplinary content area literacy practices (Marlatt, 2018; Howell et al., 2016). In addition to the linguistic components gamers employ to communicate, they can compute statistical analyses of remaining health using an energy calculator, establish real-time distance between themselves and landmarks by way of GPS, and determine proper attack methods based on damage assessments in their weapon inventory. In navigating Fortnite, effective gamers consistently demonstrate the thinking and moves of good students—they are attentive to detail and responsive to complex factors with robust skills and decision-making (Gee, 2007).

Discussion

Conceptualizing gamers as a community of practice affords researchers the potential to explore numerous Fortnite processes including its discourse system and unique set of literacy practices. From a sociocultural perspective, the Fortnite community offers numerous opportunities to understand how situated literacy operations contribute to a thriving digital community. Similar to how a group of first-year teachers might navigate the experiences of instructional design or technology implementation, gamers use a framework for collaborative progress. Framing Fortnite players as a communicative group operating in and around social contexts also affords researchers avenues for exploration that are tied closer to school-based settings. In literacy learning, the notion of Fortnite as an educational tool is promising, and finding ways to use digital literacies to investigate academic potential is worthy of exploration.

Through its multilayered, multimodal contexts, Fortnite encapsulates the new literacy practices we have come to associate with reading and meaning-making in the 21st century, where literacy mastery involves the simultaneous construction and manipulation of nonlinear, interactive texts through digital media. Learners perform these operations both in and out of school settings, blending competencies with media and texts in a seamless manner. While the literacy practices gamers engage in are similar to those exhibited by readers and writers in formal learning spaces, Fortnite currently operates outside of the boundaries (actual and imagined) of traditional literacy learning. The challenge for educators and NLS proponents going forward is to consider how opportunities for social literacy practices afforded by Fortnite can impact academic achievement in school settings, either directly or indirectly.

One possible lens through which to examine the potential role of Fortnite in schools is as a literacy community, wherein members acquire the values and practices needed to fully participate in activities such as reading and writing by engaging in social interaction with peers (Hiebert & Raphael, 1996). Rousculp and Maring (1992) define literacy communities as “dynamic classroom environments that are rich in social relationships, in partnerships, and in collaborations involving talking, reading, thinking, and writing” (p. 384). Through an assortment of possible assignments such as analytical writing, vocabulary immersion, descriptive prompts, and more, Fortnite’s environment offers an environment of high-energy, high-engagement collaboration centered on interests and multiliteracies of adolescents. As practitioners and scholars of literacy education continue to draw upon emerging social dimensions of teaching and learning to impact academic achievement (Turner & Kim, 2005), Fortnite’s rapidly growing popularity and social ubiquity is difficult and perhaps harmful to ignore.

While the importance of community in literacy achievement has been examined thoroughly over the past decade, Turner and Kim (2005) identified cultural discontinuity as a major dilemma impeding the cultivation and sustainment of successful communities of literacy. In literacy settings, some teachers, especially those from White European backgrounds, may lack cross-cultural references and competencies to interact with culturally or linguistically diverse students, especially those with technological savvy (Delpit, 1995). Barriers stemming from racial, cultural, or linguistic factors are difficult to overcome in classrooms. This analysis has shown that Fortnite affords players a common lexicon from which to build communal understanding. Unlike many interfaces that have come before it, Fortnite is a multicultural phenomenon, drawing avid players from all corners of the globe. While recent studies have suggested that current text selection in classrooms has become more multicultural (Corapi & Short, 2015), sustained effort is needed to ensure that students’ multiple literacy practices are accounted for in learning activities.

Standard 5.2 of the International Literacy Association (ILA) 2010 Standards for creating a literate environment that fosters reading and writing asserts that educators will “Design a social environment that is low risk and includes choice, motivation, and scaffolded support to optimize students’ opportunities for learning to read and write” (para. 6). ILA further defines a community of literacy as an entity that

involves the development of literacy and learning skills for any individual or group of individuals outside of the formal education system. It is learning that happens in the context of home and community and it happens as a collective approach. (para. 3)

Based on the multimodal, multidimensional literacy operations executed collaboratively by motivated gamers, especially those processes tied closely to reading comprehension and language usage, the Fortnite community of practice is an ideal literate environment from which educators can scaffold academic content for learners.

While future empirical cases may solidify Fortnite’s incorporation in standard curricula, the game may currently have a place in establishing extracurricular communities of literacy either sponsored by or associated with the school system. In their recent study of an urban district’s middle-school debate program, Mirra, Honoroff, Elgendy, and Pietrzak (2016) argued that community literacy initiatives “are valuable not only because they support academic literacy development in ways that appear on standardized assessments, but also because they offer community-connected experiences that school-based literacy opportunities alone cannot” (p. 15). Tapping into the gravitational pull that Fortnite commands over adolescents, either through direct classroom implementation or peripheral inclusion, marks an embrace of multiliteracies and reaffirms the commitment held by educators and scholars to ensure all adolescents have the opportunity to engage in socially situated literacy learning.

As with the analysis of any digital platform, especially one with such a grip on the attention span of adolescents, theoretical exploration of potential classroom integration is not without limitations. This article is unable to forecast any measurable links between Fortnite gaming and academic skills assessed on standardized tests, and it does not suggest that all learners will be positively impacted through the game’s presence in schools. Practical limitations with this analysis also abound. Although comprised of multiple modes beyond Battle Royale, many of which center on landscaping, construction, and geographical problem-solving containing little to no violent content, Fortnite is widely known as a shooting game. As a result, many school leaders are reluctant to allow experimentation with student learning to take place. Finally, this article does not aim to declare Fortnite implementation an assured success for learners or a significant contributor to academic success, though it does assert that schools have thus far not made any such attempt.

Another acknowledgment that must be made is this article’s usage of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of communities of practice instead of Gee’s (2004) framework of affinity spaces. In this still-early moment of its lifespan, Fortnite has yet to be integrated meaningfully in classrooms for a variety of reasons ranging from its depictions of violence, albeit cartoonish, to fears of interference with rigorous teaching and learning (Zhou, 2018). As the Fortnite universe is proliferating on the Internet and currently organizes its community of meaning-making outside of traditional institutions, such as schools, the game aligns with Gee’s (2004) definition of an affinity space, a location where “newbies and masters and everyone else” engage in informal, yet highly interactive learning (p. 85). As an “attractor” (p. 28) for players to commune around scoring “tags” and “knocks,” while “ressing” one another to avoid “buffed” “rushes,” the game offers a litany of 21st century literacy practices (Gee, 2017). And while Fortnite presents opportunities for team-building, it also offers competitive engagement within a multi-contextual site, where, “People can be cooperative within these spaces and communities, but they can also compete fiercely for status” (Gee & Hayes, 2012, p. 135).

As an affinity space, however, Fortnite remains largely untapped by researchers and practitioners who are positioned to leverage the game’s literacy practices toward academic achievement. Fortnite presents educators with numerous opportunities for students to strike connections between socially situated literacy practices and formalized learning of literacy and language occurring in classrooms. As a major objective of this article has been to conceptualize opportunities for school-based teaching and learning with Fortnite, the community of practice framework was chosen because of its persistent prevalence within educational institutions. Anchored in normalized school initiatives such as professional development cadres, professional learning communities, book clubs, after-school programs, and more, communities of practice are perhaps a more palatable conduit for schools leaders to consider implementations of Fortnite, not merely as a supplement for subject matter, but as a deep and reflective interdisciplinary tool.

Conclusion

Adolescent learning within Fortnite’s community of practice involves discourse processes and literacy practices that resemble traditional educational contexts found in formal school settings. Subject matter mastery is cultivated through meaningful, task-based repetition and structured interaction with and around textual operations, vocabulary usage, team-based problem-solving, and more. Similar to academic textual activity, the multiliteracies of Fortnight operate equally in cognitive and physical realms, where physical moves in corporeal and digital spaces are supported by applied conceptions of language and textual operations. As Fortnight offers a salient example of how contemporary notions of multiliteracies connect to constructivist teaching, it may in fact be the task of schools not to banish Fortnite from classrooms but help its connections to scholastic activities flourish for the benefit of student learning (McAlister, 2016). This analysis calls upon researchers, practitioners, and educational leaders to consider the ample opportunities we have to draw upon adolescents’ digital competencies with media and technology in ways that can impact achievement in language and literacy education.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rick Marlatt

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