What’s with this Fortnite craze?

After a tough time trying to figure out what to do for our second project we finally settled on the idea of doing a story about the Fortnite craze that is sweeping the nation.

Our collective knowledge on the topic was minimal. “I didn’t understand the hype surrounding Fortnite until I learned more about it for this project.” Candice Kelchner said.

“I knew the game was popular but I didn’t realize the extent to just how popular it is.”

Kelchner was in charge of the word portion of her story so she had to really delve in to understand the game and the hype surrounding it. Even though it was unfamiliar territory, she still enjoyed the learning process.

“Writing the article portion of this project was fun as it introduced me to a world that I am not very familiar with.” Kelchner said.

Alejandra Garcia was in charge of the audio and video aspect of things. I think that a very unique part of this project is that it is very visually oriented so the video portion was very important to this project.

Garcia found the story to be challenging, mostly because it doesn’t involve typical video elements and pushed the boundaries quite a bit. “This story ended up being a little more difficult to put together than I thought it would be. However, it helped to have sources who were passionate and dedicated to the game.” Garcia said. ” I could capture their excitement and competitiveness through their words and watching them play Fortnite.”

From what I observed of her interviews, the guys she interviewed have almost like a club. They get together and compete for hours on end. Their living room is set up to cater to the game.

The multimedia aspect was explored by Jessica Frantzides. This portion was quite interesting because it explored a bit more into the way Fortnite has influenced pop culture.

Fortnite has some preprogrammed dances that the characters do to gloat or as celebrations. These dances originate from existing dance moves in pop culture and have take social media by storm.

This is an example of what inspired the multimedia portion of our project:

“Doing the man on the street to collect video clips of people mimicking the emotes from Fortnite was so fun.” Frantzides said. “Getting to interact with people and laughs with them as they react to our request for them to dance was the best part.”

As the person in charge of strategy and engagement I found it interesting that when I polled people on Instagram asking if they play Fortnite that only 30 percent of people actively play. What was even more interesting is that of that 30 percent, over 80 percent were Cal Poly students. I know my follower demographic is a bit skewed but I think that I have a pretty decent mix of followers.

We had a lot of great and willing sources, especially from the eSports club on campus.

“I think Fortnite did really well engaging on Twitter, because that’s where they have gotten most of their inspiration for most of their emotes. Just from people submitting clips… Just recently they had Snoop Dogs emote on there.” Ryan Blair, Cal Poly eSports president said. “It really engages their audience.”

All in all this project was a fantastic learning experience for all of us. More than that it provided us with insight into a new community that exists here at Cal Poly.