The day before the island died I dropped into Fortnite to search for a trace of Wailing Woods. This was the area where I first landed, in my first ever game of Fortnite – a game that took place the week the team announced and then released their Battle Royale mode.
I can remember only the basics of that initial visit: I chose the woods because I was late and indecisive in jumping. Once there I’m not sure I even picked up a weapon. I think I wandered amongst the trees, waving my axe at things and jumping, trying to find out if I could go prone, and then being killed, no doubt, by someone I didn’t even see. If you’d told me at that point that over the next few years I would come to know this landscape so well that the whole place would cross over that strange icicle bridge separating waking life from sleep – if you’d told me I would eventually dream about these woods and this island – I would probably not have believed you.
Wailing Woods are gone now. Even before the island was swallowed by a black hole they were gone. They were replaced by a volcano, I think, and then the volcano was hollowed out to form a sort of hydroelectric dam that brings to mind GoldenEye, the game as much as the movie. Behind the dam, where I landed on the day before the island died, there was a sort of central American stepped temple, its exterior a brash orange and its insides wildly painted. Beyond that there were trees, where I wandered for a little while. Was this the remains of the Wailing Wood? I tried, unsuccessfully, to orient myself. Where had the hedge maze been? Where was the spot where you could often find a good mushroom or two? I’m not sure I even picked up a weapon. I wandered among the trees for a few odd minutes, and then I was killed by someone I didn’t even see. I would miss this place!
Fortnite increasingly makes me think of a book – Nan Shepherd’s classic study of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain. Shepherd knows the Cairngorms well, and in this short, transporting work, she approaches the mountains from every angle. More than that, she puts her finger on something that lies at the heart of my understanding of nature. The natural world is marked by this paradoxical thing about change and stasis. The natural world retains this never-changing feel, and yet it is constantly changing, constantly transforming itself.
For a few years Fortnite has been my own Living Island, if you fancy, as well as the Living Island for god knows how many other million players who drop from the battle bus every day. What are these people playing? A death match, essentially. But it rarely feels like that’s what’s actually going on. Fortnite’s greatness is multifaceted, but a big part of its success is down to the fact that you can play any number of unofficial sorts of games when you drop onto the island: nameless, wordless games that blend and shift and fragment around you as you move.