Gamer Girl

When I’m in conversation with people I don’t know that well I’m constantly fighting the urge to bring up Fortnite. This is an embarrassing first sentence— let me explain.

My life, I like to believe, is divided cleanly into two halves: the professional working half and the creative writing half. I like to believe that my choices— a master’s degree in education administration, a full time job in which emailing and checking application systems are my main duties— cater phenomenally to my creative life. It’s the creative half of my life that I really love, the one I believe needs to be tended to with adoration. When I think of my daily schedule, those weekdays full of reminder emails and empty half hour time slots before Zoom meetings, I can easily believe that the work is a perfect partner to the writing. That I can use those 30-minute chunks of time to write, and that in this way the two halves of my life will illuminate, play nice, make me whole.

But those 30-minute sections of my weekdays are perfect for a Fortnite Battle Royale. It’s enough time for me to fall to the map and goo-gun opponents, for me to do a silly little dance after headshotting someone dressed as a banana. The game is a sandbox game, a battle royal; the point is to survive until the end. There’s 100 people in each match, and within thirty minutes that total drops to 10. The map gets smaller as more people are eliminated, forcing you to get closer to the other survivors.

I’m shocked by my love for this stupid game. I love video games but I tend to be very particular in the types of games I play. I need a story, a well-written narrative that propels the game forward. I need characters to attach myself to and game play that feels like the turning of a page. This means I’ve avoided most MMO (massively multiplayer online) games, athletic games, etc. for the entirety of my life. I dislike turn based RPGS (role playing games) like Pokemon or Persona 5. My ideal video game is a Legend of Zelda game, full of heavy lore and story, puzzles in every corner. Zelda has been such a huge facet of my personality and my personal history for so long— I even recently published a personal essay on my love for Ocarina of Time (read it here).

Publishing this essay feels like crossing some kind of finish line. My dad and Ocarina of Time, my dad and his alcoholism, my dad and me, these things have been swirling in my creative spaces more than any other topic(s) have. In some ways this essay is the most personal I’ve ever written, the one that I think defines me more than any other piece of my writing has.

So why Fortnite? Fortnite is nothing like Zelda. I have no attachment to Fortnite lore or characters. I don’t dream of the world built inside of Fortnite as I often dream of the temples scattered throughout the Legend of Zelda series. There have been indie games the last couple of years that have blown me away: GRIS, Hollow Knight, Celeste. I’ve also gotten over my fear of horror and gore games in order to play Resident Evil. The game play in Resident Evil is some of the funnest to me; the puzzles and scavenger-like tasks feel challenging and demanding, and finding the answer to a riddle makes me elated. But again… Fortnite could never.

I’ve been thinking (as ever) about those two halves of my self I mentioned earlier, the professional self and the creative self. I think the goal, of course, for any writer is to combine the professional and the creative into one. For the creative to BE the professional. But I’ve got bills to pay while I grind and grind and grind on the writing submission front. I know all of this, logically, know that I want to be a writer, that I am a writer, and that being an ‘enrollment manager’ in my day job is a want that’s born of different motivations. And yet still I struggle to balance these two halves. This realm of my life is where my anxiety now lives, the fast-moving thoughts hard to chronicle: You’re not devoted enough to your day job, you need to be better at it, you need to be A+ so you get a stellar performance review, you need to spend more time organizing your Outlook calendar and less time brainstorming essays, do something productive with these empty hours. And then on the flip side: You need to let go of this perfectionist need to be the best, if you’re the best at your job you won’t have the mental energy to write, the end goal is the writing, you’re not writing enough, use these hours better, get a B on your review so it proves you’re doing enough with the writing.

I know my anxiety enough now to know that when these fast-paced, cruel thoughts arrive I need to slow down. I can feel the anxiety in my chest, a pulse that flutters. Which is why instead of listening to the thoughts I turn away from the computer screen and turn to Fortnite. I guess emoting a Cardi B dance in a book girl outfit is some kind of release. It feels good to be playful in the face of such dogged exhaustion and anxiety, this sense of never doing my life correctly, of doubting my devotion to both work and creativity.

So if we’re at a party or we’re at a potluck or we’re at a reading and I mention Fortnite to you, know I’m just wanting that same release for you, know that I’m advocating for play. Sometimes a narrative is overrated; sometimes dancing in a virtual world in an Ariana Grande outfit is what we need.